Discordia Logo: Further Development

While experimenting with effects on Photoshop (while working on our advert) we altered our band name logo so that the bold, solid underlining faded out and became transparent at the bottom. We really like this effect as we think this logo better communicates the band. The font and design reflect the hardcore, masculine genre but the now softened line reflect the female front-woman adding a slightly more feminine feel to a previously manly logo.

Before

After

Final Cut

We are really proud of our final cut! We feel we have developed all of our ideas fully now and have come so far from our rough cut. The changes we made in the school scene, by replacing what we had by graphic matches, sets a very high standard at the beginning of our video which hopefully is continued throughout. I think we have produced a meaningful, entertaining and professional looking product.

Overall we think our video runs very smoothly and is filmed and edited in a way apropreate to our genre. There are lots of similarities between our video and those we analysed at the very beginning of our project. We are very happy with the way it turned out and everyone we have shown it to have responded with positive and supportive feedback. The most satisfying outcome thing to come from our video is the responses we get from our our audience, as people seem genuanly entertained and fascinated when watching it.

Ending: Suggested Suicide

After we'd filmed the suicide scene again, our teacher pointed out that suicide was illegal. We thought that we would have to change the ending just a couple of days away from the deadline as we are unable to show anything illegal or inappropriate. However, after some research, we found out that actually suicide was illegal until the Suicide Act in 1961 where it was decided that those who did not succeed in the attempt would no longer be prosecuted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Act_1961

We were overjoyed by this discovery as it meant we could keep our current ending which means that we have more time to concentrate on the other scenes that need attention.

Band Name Logo

We had a basic idea of what we wanted our band name logo to look like (from the already existing band logos we looked at) but we soon found out that finalising our own was a lot more complicated! 

1st Draft

We liked the bold, dark colours, conventional of rock, and knew we needed to incorporated a third colour to add a more impact to our title so it looks a little less 2D. We didn't think the red quite captured the look we were going fore and the overall effect looks very flat.

2nd Draft

For the next draft we took away the red, keeping it simple. We added a slight grainy effect to the grey to give the effect of shadow or perhaps even dirt. We liked this as we feel it reflects the dark and sometimes scruffy conventions of rock. Although we liked this we still felt we needed to neaten it up.

3rd Draft

We also decided to take away the colour from the moon shaped 'C'. The letter 'C' in our title is in the middle of the word and already has attention drawn to it due to its shape. Something we have learnt thorough out this project is not to do anything half-heartedly so we dicided to make it stand out even more  In our advert and digipak we are considering the idea of making the moon transparent to add that little extra something to our logo.

Final Draft

Re-filming Narrative - School Scene (2)

We felt the school scene was the weakest scene in our video and so tried to think of ways to stylize it to make it look more professional. After an in depth discussion including peers and teachers we came up with the idea of a series of graphic matches (or graphic graphic matches as our teachers came to call them), in which a student is doing something completely normal but the shot then cuts to them doing something violent or gory as a zombie.
I drew up a quick story board to help us visualise what we are doing:

The filming itself went very well. We worked out a system where we would film one or two students at a time around the desk in a way that allowed us to keep the actors with their zombie make up done already out of the shot. Our two mane conserns while filming were:

1 - actors move as little as possible while there makeup is being done

2 - DON'T MOVE THE CAMERA! 

This was possibly the most challenging thing we have done, not only in this project, but in the whole of our media course to date. It was essential that we got everything right first time as we only had one chance to do it. We were sure to brief our actors beforehand, telling them what we were doing and why and trying to explain what it would look like after it had been edited. It was essential for our actors to understand this so they had a better understanding of what we were trying to achieve and what we were asking of them.

I think the filming went very well and we are really pleased with how similar the shots turned out:

We linked each graphic match with an extreme close up of Emma's eyes so we could edit this footage like a series of eye line matches, this will help our audience see the world through our protagonists eyes. 

Overall this scene went very well and a little part of me cant believe we actually pulled it off! this scene really challenged are organisational skills, attention to detail (like meis en scene and the slightest camera movements), special effects skills and editing skills. We are really pleased we took this last minuet risk as it really pays off and makes our video look so much more proffetional (as well as helping it make a lot more scene).

Re-filming - Performance

I feel this shoot went really well as we had considered the fine details such as lighting and set design as well as the more obvious like camera angles and movements and basic mise en scene.
Because our last shoot was overexposed (which made our video look very unprofessional and became an issue when editing) Catherine was taught by David, our lights technician, how to use the lighting equipment in the drama hall so we could get it perfect. This worked out much better for us as we had a much clearer idea what sort of lighting we wanted than David did.

We added much more decoration to our performance, partly due to having a clearer idea of what our target audience wants, and partly because we have developed our project ideas dramatically in the past couple of weeks. We decided to add a logo on the drum kit, a convention of band performance of every genre. By putting a heart on the drums we played with the idea of a 'beating heart' suggesting that even though the drums are always in the background they are a vital element of a band and are the heart of this bands dynamic.


We also found perfect blood red leaves which we scatted at the feet of our band, as leaves and autumn are a recurring feature of our video, representing the decay of nature similar to the decay of the human body and mind.






Although we had included the conventional close ups on our lead singer we decided to include closeups on our bands faces, to give the other band members a more active role in there music video. This makes the video more realistic as although the lead singer of a rock band is always the center of attention they would be nothing without the music, including the people playing them - in our new cut we made an effort to reflect this in the video.
We tried to include them early on in the video to act almost as an establishing shot of each band member.

Because our last set was so plain we added a simple background to add a but more depth to the proformance. We built up the rostra in the drama hall and draped red ribbon and fabric across it to represent blood. we have tried to make this rather violent concept quite feminine by using soft imagery. In some ways the industrial rostra represents the men in the band and the fabric represents our female lead who, even though she is outnumbered is still the center of attention.

Ideas for Advert...

After looking at a variety of adverts from our genre we had already decided that the simplistic compositions looked the best. We want to use mostly black and white images, including some colour to emphasis certain aspects of our band image/album theme.
We have thought about a simple black and white image of our lead singer (similar to the Halestorm advert) but with Jess in the center of the photograph, holding our sacred heart in the same place as her own heart. To see what this image would look like I drew up a quick sketch:

We like this image and think the black and white vs colour makes our image stand out (and hopefully it would make a very noticeable advert) the religious imagery would help our advert become more memorable  I like the idea of using religion as a theme in our project as it is a common theme in most rock music. We also want to advertise that our music is so good/intense that you will want to follow it like a religion.