Digipak Ideas

We had rough idea of using the different layers of the digipak to show they different layers of skin coming off. Like a zombie. Also, this could symbolise the different layers of a persons personality and how they are completely different people underneath all the 'make-up' (who they pretend to be). This idea was about the singer expressing her feelings and exposing who she really is.


Rosie came up with the idea taken from sacred hearts about barbed wire around a heart. It fits in with the rock genre and also it has a lot of meanings to it. It also suits our song choice and the video.  The barbed wire around the human heart is used to symbolise how Jess (the lead singer) tried to protect herself but ended up getting betrayed anyway. It could also show how the people in our narrative are trapped or must be restrained, like animals in a cage.

The Sacred Heart:
The sacred heart is a christian symbol representing Jesus' love and devotion to humanity. It is often depicted in art as Jesus holding his own heart in his hands, offering it to mankind.

I like the way this meaning and imagery can be used and in some ways contrasted with our concept. Anyone familiar with the sacred heart will understand how we have used the brutal image of a flaming and severed heart, wrapped in thorns that, as violent as the image is, symbolizes a love of humanity to question the idea of humanity itself. In our video we have shown the immoral people as zombies, however this could be interpreted as all humans have this animal inside of them, as our protagonist soon discovers. However we have also presented the idea that all humans are trapped (similar to the heart surrounded by thorns) and need help to be free, similar to the help religion provides, and perhaps we are all just lost and need to be found. The end of our video supports this as we imply that our protagonist commits suicide. She could be doing this to escape the her life and the fear and sadness she experiences every day or she could be going to the afterlife in the zombie Apocalypse that is taking place (similar to the Apocalypse in the bible, where the good descend to heaven).

I have based my design on the following images: 

In this image the thorns remind me of barbed wire, presenting a much more violent (and perhaps more modern and genre specific) image. It was this image that helped me define the thorns more as wire in my own, more styalised, sacred heart.  

This heart is similar to a tattoo design and appears much more feminine as the thorns are flowers and the overall image is much less aggressive, yet never the less striking. I like the idea of a tattoo design as tattoos are a common accessory of rock and many rock posters, albums and adverts are done by artists and inspired by tattoos. I have tried to make my heart like a tattoo drawing by simplifying it as only using the colours red, blue and black.

My Sacred Heart:
 I aimed to make my sacred heart less religious, more rock. I replaced the typical valentines day heart with a more accurate human organ, linking in with our themes of life, death, (undeath,) humanity and emotion. I then chose to replace the thorns with barbed wire to create a more striking image as barbed wire has many negative connotations such as war, death, imprisonment  confinement etc. This links in with our ideas about being trapped in a corrupted world or being trapped in yourself. Barbed wire is also a much more typical feature of both tattoos and rock.

We showed this logo to the target audience and got a very good response  people really liked the concept and said it reminded them of a tattoo degsine. Our audience said it was very striking and memorable so we have decided this will be the main feature of the digipack (and perhaps advert).

Narrative: School Scene

This was arguably the hardest footage to prepare and film as we depended on lots op people to cooperate and it took a lot to organise. We sent a message on facebook and texted people to ask if they wanted to do it (and what t shirt size they were, to buy them costumes)

I was pleased at how positive and enthusiastic people were, and even the people who couldn't make it expressed how sorry and disappointed they were in advance so we knew how many people we had and who would be coming.

We tryed to chose 

Filming this small scene took over two hours but our actors didn't seem to mind, they all co-operated and took direction well. I was pleasantly surprised at how eager people were to drench themselves in the ketchup/BBQ sauce concoction we had mixed up and Emily (our make up artist for Jess) even offered to paint brushes and scratches on peoples faces, adding more detailed mise en scene which was wonderful.
          I found filming this the most challenging as this scene (similar to the basketball scene) has a lot of fast editing involved and at points I found it hard to think of all the shots I needed and imagine how they would look in Premiere. All through this project i have used the motto 'rather too much that too little' and so filmed this scene over and over from lots of different angels, using lots of different techniques to insure i got the perfect shot.

It was important to get a variety of people to act in this scene so we could represent lots of different groups all becoming zombies. This shows a twisted sense of equality, suggesting that even though we all look different we are all the same breed of animal at heart.
          We took photographs of our cast being turned into zombies with the aid of face paint, make up and a lot of fake blood. Emily, our make up artist for our band (inperticular our lead singer) helped, not only by giving our actors cuts and bruises but also by acting for us as well.

                          

   

                          

                          

                          

As a warm up exersize we asked our zombies to show the camera their most undead face and give us the best zombie vibe they could before we began filming. This got our actors in the right mindset and helped us give direction and encouragement and i think they delivered when filming brilliantly.

Narrative: Ending

In our original plot (as shown in our animatic) we planned our protagonist to commit suicide by hanging herself. After a group destitution we decided that, because we are not permitted to show any illegal content, this would be too risky and we needed to become more clever about how we present our ending. It was important to keep our, somewhat depressing, ending as it is an important element of the message we are trying to get across.

An overdose of medication is much easier to film and avoids the cliched noose. We were never planning on showing the actual death of our character, not just because we cannot show violence and crime etc but because we couldn't ask an actor to

Narrative: Basketball Scene

This scene will probably be the most striking and memorable part of our video due to our use of special effects. We are using lots of fake blood and material cut in strips to act as insides. We chose to use close ups and a hands held camera to film the zombie parts of this scene as that is conventional of action in zombie media. In editing we plan to use a lot of fast editing, giving our audience a gimps of something grousume before changing to create tension and make it look more violent than it acualy was. This fast editing also works to our advantage as we didn't know how good/realistic our specile effects would be so the editing dosent give our viewers enough time to see what it actually is.

CASTING AND COSTUME:
We wanted the teenage boys in this scene to look normal and naturalistic so we dressed them in casual t shirts and hoodies. The plainer and more relateable they looked the more shocking it would be when they turned into zombies.
Hoodies were the key piece of clothing in this scene for two reasons: Hoodies are a youthful garment of clothing, often with negative connotations such as gang culture or a person having a negative image being called a 'hoodie'. It was also important to this scene as we wanted Josh to rip open Ben's hoodie to reveal the blood and guts underneath so that hopefully it would look like he was also ripping the skin and flesh  making this action perticulaely violent.



In this scene we took a bit of inspiration from The Verve's music video "Bittersweet Symphony". We got our protagonist to walk towards the camera in a lonely fashion with only one other person visible behind her at first, similar to the scene in "Bittersweet Symphony".

The differences between the two are that he walks with purpose, but she doesn't. This could be as a result of her age. Or because of her place in society, she feels like she is invisible and unimportant. Also, the roles are reversed. She gets pushed over and he pushes someone over. This could be shown as Emma having no power over her life and The Verve feeling like they have a sense of control over others.

However, in "Bittersweet Symphony" it seems that he is lost in thought and trying to figure out what he's doing in life which is what we are trying to achieve with our protagonist.

We have also used a close-up of her feet, like in The Verve's video, to show that she is walking a different path to everyone else. She feels alone and so does Richard Ashcroft in "Bittersweet Symphony", he feels like he is the only person seeing the world as it is. Whereas, Emma feels that she is seeing the people in the world as they really are (mean) and not who they pretend to be.

FAKE BLOOD!

Zombie Mise en Scene

From the early stages of production we have been very aware that the mise en scene of our music video would be one of the most important aspects of our project. Costume, hair and make-up, lighting, setting, body language and facial expression are all key to portraying the correct type of zombie for our video and we will have to plan and monitor all these features and more when filming both performance and narrative.

Inspiration can be taken from everywhere: films, TV shows, books, graphic novels, video games and of course the internet. Google offers over 500000000 results for 'Zombie' and an even more impressive 900000000 in Google Images.

         
























Zombie themed media is usually very dull, using mostly grey and murky colors  however i have noticed it is convetual that the occasional bright color is very exstreem, creating a creepy contrast. The stereotypicalcolours are red (representing blood) and green (representing contamination, illness and perhaps rotting flesh). 'The Walking Dead' advert we have included in this post is an interesting image as it is by far the most calm of the four pictures. However i have noticed that even a advert as eerie as this has a tint of grey in the mist. I think it is interesting how subliminaly colours are used in media to create the right atmosphere.

Filming the Performance....

For our performance, we chose our close friends; Jess (lead singer), Rory (bass) and Alex (lead guitar). We chose them because we knew that they would be willing to do it, they looked the part and the are very reliable. It was important for us that we chose people who were not only munitions who would be comfortable with instruments (and who could actually learn the song) but also people who enjoy rock so that they would already have a knowledge on how they should preform and would be enthusiastic with our project. We also knew that if we didn't think they looked right in the video, they would be very understanding.

We had a bit of trouble finding a drummer who fit the part. A friend had agreed to do it but we found out that he had too much work and couldn't do both. We had a back-up drummer but he didn't quite look like a rock drummer so we asked another friend and she told us she knew a drummer that was willing to help us. Ben was up for anything and he looked like he was part of the band. He was easy to work with and he was very focused. Although, we had to get him to come from another school and so our time was limited as other members of our band had to leave at a certain time.

Our first performance didn't go quite as planned. There was a lot of things we needed to change to make the set look better. Such as, adding red material to make the set look more Gothic and rock. We needed it to look less like a school play and more like an actual rock band performance. Also, I think that if we use the platforms in the drama studio and have a lot of different levels then we would be able to see each of the musicians and also I think it would look more professional.

Also, we think that if we had a light coming from behind the actors we would be able to see them against the black curtains because before we couldn't really see them as they were wearing black clothes against the black cloth. We were thinking that we could have the lights straight on rather than from the side as it highlighted the bass guitarist and made the lead guitarist look darker.

I think the positioning of the actors was off, too. The drummer was not visible as much as we wanted him to be. When the bassist moved it covered some of the drummers face and so I think that next time we need to rethink the positioning and check how it looks on the camera a lot more so that everybody is visible.

We also need to rethink our drummers costume as we had the problem of him ‘disappearing’ into the background.

However, we did get a variety of good camera angles and shots. We got a lot of close-ups of the Jess' face so that the audience could clearly see her pain and anger. We also got close-ups of each of the guitars and the neck of the lead guitar and an over the shoulder shot of the drums.










We got an art student to do the make-up for Jess which made her look like she was missing part of her skin which fit in well with our genre and our song. Also, it made the performance in our video memorable and it stands out against most other videos.

 

We chose a cold blue light and a warm yellow to contrast with each other in our performance. I think this worked well but next time we need to think about the positioning of our band considering lighting and other colours in the shot as sometimes people were in complete shadow or very over exposed. Even when considering this I still believe this lighting worked as the cold white light (mimicking moonlight) on our lead singers face is in keeping with the supernatural and creepy element of our video. The yellow light looks like sunlight showing how our singer had turned her back on her normal life and all that is pure in becoming a zombie. The two types of lighting works together to create the idea of the undead (being alive and dead, just as the lights show both day and night together). This is similar to our narrative as it explores the idea of good/bad, right/wrong, pure/contaminated and what it is that stops us from being mere animals (represented by the animistic zombies in our video).

Story board and Animatic

We got a good response from out anamatic and were a little releved that people understood our narrative and key themes. Even though it gets the message across I do not think it does any of our ideas and plans justice as we struggled to draw detailed frames as there were only two of us and we have planed to use a lot of very fast editing and a variety of shots. It was more important to draw everything and finish than draw a few frames very detailed. 

Overall we drew over 300 frames, colour coding each one; blue for narrative, red for performance. We accompanied each frame with a lyric or time and a description of the shot/movement etc and sometimes a small description of what was happening in the shot.    

Band Name

We had a little trouble with our band name. We came up with some ideas for names such as, Obsession, Rising Chaos and Mindless Chaos. We took inspiration from the band Halestorm, which also has a female lead singer but quite a dark/ angry name, rather than our original band name, The Pretty Reckless because we thought that it would be more individual if we did. Also, we wanted our band to be taken seriously and so we eventually decided on the name, Rising Chaos. However, after doing some audience research, we discovered that they didn't like it. They thought that the name was too masculine and "hard core".

We thought that our name should somehow link with our music video and the protagonist in our video is wearing Doc Martins with roses on it. So we thought it would be a good idea to somehow include roses in our band name. We researched rose meanings and didn't find anything that would be suitable to our genre. We then thought that maybe we should research the origin of the rose and found out that the rose was originally used to symbolise two communities 'fighting for control'.

Therefore, we decided it would be a good idea to include control in our name. One reason for choosing this specific word is because we thought fighting was too masculine. Also, it links in with the song well as the zombies are experiencing loss of control and it shows society have control over an individual. Furthermore, our lead singer is female and so it could be seen that she is 'fighting for control' in a male dominated genre.

We also thought it would be a good idea to include Christianity and Jewish mythology in our name as rock bands are often related to the darker side of religion.

We thought about the important people in Christianity and found that Lilith was Adam's first wife, she was made from the earth at the same time as Adam. This makes it seem like she is independent and strong because she is contrasted strongly with Eve who was made from one of Adam's ribs. However, she did not want to be controlled by Adam and so she left the Garden of Eden. She was believed to be immortal, a demon.

We thought Lilith would be a good name for our band as it has a feeling of power. It is also easy to remember and quite catchy. It also fits in with the rock genre as it has some religious aspects but is closely related to the darker side of religion. It also gives the impression of control which links in with the idea of using the rose in our logo. We will explore this further, asking our target audience before we finalise our ideas.

Our Pitch