Directors commentary editing lesson 3

Today we finished Inserting all the clips we had into the commentary. We couldn't put all of the in clips in because some of them disappeared. Also we had to put in our images  of the dolly and the camera in again cos they had been deleted.
We had even more problems with our time to edit because the rendering for it took TOO LONG!
We also made the green screen bits see through and edited the music so the viewer can listen to it during the bits where there is no commentary.
We didn't have time to edit the music in so we just uploaded it without the music.

Directors commentary editing lesson 2

We continued editing our commentary with a few new ideas in mind. One of ideas was to put in some key frames to create moving images and make the commentary more interesting to watch. Also we decided to import some images of our ancillary to remind the audience what it looked like while it is being commented about. Other images we imported into the commentary of the video included: A picture of the HD camera and a camera dolly. TO make the clips of us not look like they appear out of nowhere we made sure they faded in.

While editing we encountered many problems for example all our clips moved around :( This gave us less time to finish our commentary :(. We also lost a couple of clips that we were going to use to comment on the video. Also we spent half the lesson watching our clips render.

Directors commentary editing lesson 1

We started off by copying our final project file and then we imported all the commentary clips into it. Once we had done this we started to overlay the commentary clips onto the music video -as we have the green screen background we have a number of option as to how we position and use our commentary. We could either simply overlay the clips onto the music video without cropping them or re-positioning them and getting rid of the green screen so that the video is playing in the background. Or we could alternatively overlay the commentary clips over the video and resize them, reposition them, and crop them so that they only take up a small proportion of the screen as well as changing the green screen so that it is invisible for the music video to be able to play in the background.

We have decided that we will either get rid of the music video audio completely or just have it quite quiet so that the commentary is the audiences main focus.

As we all only have fairly limited skills in FinalCut so working out the approach we are going to take to create our director's commentary took us a while.

Directors commentary example: Chris Phillips video for Lady Sovereign - A Little Bt of Shh

Director's Commentary: 

Today's Lesson [Friday 2nd December]

In our lesson today we will be filming our directors commentary from our script, but we can't read directly from it as it ruins the flow of the footage. We are filming in the green room which gives us the opportunity to edit the music video into the background of our directors commentary, even though we haven't planned to and will be experimental. This is an advantage as the other groups are filming in white and black rooms which doesn't give the opportunity as white and black colours are more common than green.

In our script we divided it up equally between all 3 speakers by going through each one as:
Jake: ...........
Stacey: ............
Ruri: ............

Jake: ............

This allows the audience to not be bored and stay engaged with the directors commentary.

Tuesday's Lesson

During our lesson we worked on our directors commentary and made notes that will help us prepare the final script.

script for director's commentary

Script for director’s commentary

Introduction:
Jake: Hi, I’m Jake, and my role was editor/camera-man
Ruri: Hi, I’m Ruri, and my role was editor/Producer
Stacey: Hi, I’m Stacey, and my role was editor and Adele.

Ruri: This is our Music Video, Adele – Melt my heart to stone

Jake: First of all you can notice the footage is in black and white for the opening this is as a result of our initial feedback as the footage was originally in colour and wasn’t fitting to the backing track and style of the song and artist. As in her other music videos such as Someone Like You the editor has used a de-saturation effect on the footage.

Stacey: The split screen was fairly difficult to edit, as we hadn’t used this technique before. It uses some of the conventions of real media products, such as soul-pop music videos uses these editing techniques, such as Beyonce music video, ‘Countdown’.

 

Ruri: As you can see the close-ups of the gravestone represent sorrow and a mellow atmosphere towards Adele, this is effective because it combines with our ancillary texts, due to them being dark and relating to death as the font colours are red and the background is black, which represents sad feelings and will relate to our target audience aged 18 to 25years old females, and most have been through tough relationships, therefore it relates.

 

Stacey: By wearing popular clothing it is relatable to our audience as it isn’t out of the ordinary and is accessible to all in the audience, however our feedback from rough cut thought we should of worn more flamboyant clothing as Adele wears dresses in some of her music videos. But as producers we wanted our music video to relate to the audience and connect with them.

 

Jake: The footage in our music video is of very high quality as we used new technology to construct an experimental music video, this is as a result of using the HD camera. However we received feedback from our peers that the footage was too shake but we couldn’t use the new technology such as the dolly to track Adele, because it wouldn’t have worked on the un-even ground.

 

Ruri: In this section we used the new technology from the new software FinalCut of overlays that were in colour, to make the footage more interesting. We did this because our rough cut feedback commented that the footage was “boring”. We are certain that we have fixed this problem, with the overlays we used and the addition of colour.

 

Jake: In this section, you can really notice how we cut on the beat of the music, this emphasises the backing track instead of the vocals, which is important, as this is a convention used in Adele’s music videos. Also it creates a fluid flow and makes its un-messy.

 

Stacey: By using panning it allows us to include a wider shot and a wider angle, this also adds more variety of shots. Also we used the new technology of tripods to create a steady pan. The locations we used for the panning was reflective and a great addition to our music video as they created an ambient feeling.

 

Ruri: We use the amazing new technology of FinalCut which allowed us to cut precisely to the nearest millisecond, to create a powerful transition between the two artists in our music video.

Jake: Due to Kanye West being really enthusiastic and animated we decided to emphasize this through the editing and create several split screens. By doing this we made the video itself more interesting for the audience.

Stacey: The costume for Kanye West was quite stereotypical to what a rapper wears, but at the same time it is something that the audience will wear so it makes the video more relatable to the audience.

Ruri: By using overlays and pans of the city landscape we are able to create an interesting section of the video whilst there are no vocals for the audience to listen to.

Jake: The ending of the music video is visualised by the music, this is because Kanye West ends up walking away on the scene where he raps which gives a signal to the audience that it's the closing of the song or near the end.

Stacey: Also the trend of cutting on the beat happens at the last beat of the music video where it suddenly stops on the loud beat which signals the end of the song.

Ruri: Thats all from us, thank you for watching and listening.

Directors commentary notes:

1. 0 to 9 secs in

• First of all you can see a close up of Adele wearing regular clothes which makes most people relate with her. Q1
• Its filmed in black and white which gives it an old fashioned style which is very fitting with the mood of the song, uses features of someone like you. Q1, Q3 (feedback said it was
• Lip syncing good for quick start.
• Split screen makes footage more interesting and experimental.
• Location makes the scene interesting
• Overlay makes it interesting 
• to colour- sun spot- contrasting, introduces rappers location 
• cutting on the spot

evaluation questions for directors commentary

1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenege forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product uses the convention sof real media products, as it uses some of Goodwin's points. The music links in with the visuals, such as the cutting on the beat, and cutting more often on th ebeat during the rap scene. Another link between visuals and music is the fading scenes panning which represnts the mellow scene.
The genre of our song is indie-rock but we had a rap scene which clashes with the rap scene. Howeveer we did follwo the Genre conventions ofr Indie-rock. Scnes with Adele used genre conventions to create the use of mellow settings to represent Adele's feelings and emotions. But we didn't for the rap scenes, except the editing techniques of cutting fast, and on the beat.
When we analysed Ade'es song 'somone like you' we got inspiration for some of the music video, such as the walking and lip-syncing scenes, the black and white (desaturation) filter effect, and also the panning of mellow secenes which all featuered in Adele's music video we analysed, which influenced some of our editing and creation techniques.
But when we analysed one of Kanye West's music videos we didnt get much inspiration as he uses flsahing lights too often in most of his music videos. However Kanye West does cut on the beat while walking and rapping and rap actions fluently. Which we took into consideration in our planning and ended up using in our rap scene.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The combination of the music video, DVD cover and magazine advert createes an effective promotional package, due to the advert and the DVD cover representing Adele in a mellow look, which follows Adele's trend of sadness and simple covers.
The music video works well combined as the song relates to death and broken hearts. Which the red font represents on the cover and the Advert, so the video promotes that with a sad feeling to the music video of mellow scenes etc. Therefore the combination is succesful.
The target audience is young female adults aged around 18 to 30years old, where the song may relate to them and their relationship experience. As the cover and advert represents Adele as heartbroken, which will attract the target audience therefore the combination of ancillary texts and the main product is succesful together, moreover the music represents the visuals in a sad atmosphere and apperance, which is very effective. But Adele is not in black and white on the ancillary texts, which is different to the main product which doesn't portray her as sad as strong in the music video.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?From our audience feedback, on the initial pitched everyone liked our idea as we followed Adele's stereotypicl convetions and her other music videos which are major hits world wide e.g. ' somone like you '. But they gave us some extra ideas to use lightning that are appropiate, and needed to create a succesful music video of our genre. Moreover the feedback on our rough cut was varied. I learnt that the actress who plaid as Adele needed to have more appropiate costumes that represent Adele more succesful then we did. Also the facial expressions and attitude needs to look more enthusiastic as Adele always moving her arms and has alto of facil expressions, which us used to create a succesful music video, even if it's a mellow song.
Also the lip-syncing is vital to create the succesful music video, as there was a contrast of amazing actign by actor, and poor by actress, and some parts had good lip-syncing but some were bad, which affected our music videos overall perofmrance in our rough cut. From our Final Cut adience feedback I learnt that it's vital to have good editing techniques such as our fading to create an effective music video. It's also important to have a variety of acmera angels as it helps promote the artist, whichi  learnt from our audience feedback

4. How did you use new technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The new media technology we used for resaerch and planning was 'blogger'. We used then by creating posts, where we embedded pictures, youtube videos and our own uploaded videos. This helped us progress our ideas for our music video and look back over the ideas with easy navigation to change ideas and keep using them.
Another new technology is FinalCut which allowed us to edit our footage as it has many effects available, which also had easy techniques of editing. This easiness allowed layers to be created and locked, which alloed us to do safe but fast editing and be succesful then other editing program like windows movie maker.  This allowed our product to be succesful at the end of our music video in our 'final cut'. Another tool we used in FinalCut was the fading tool which allowed us to create our effective mellow scenes which panned and faded throughout. We also used FinalCut in our evaluation to edit our clips, it allowed easy editing of sound and video clips, but we didnt use quicktime of the music video we used the layers therefore we didn't have enough time to put the music in which will lose us marks. But it had a easier feature then other editing programs like Adobe, due to us using the 'chromakeyer' which allowed us to get rid of our background.
Moreover a new media technology we used in the construction of our ancillary texts is Adobe Photoschop which is more advanced compared to programs such as 'paint' and 'GIMP', due to being able to use the same font as Adele and alot of editing techniques, filters and tools. As we used the tool ' Refine Edges' which created our ancillary texts image of Adele and made it megre into the light and black background, therefore this media technology allowed us to create a succesful product.
An important new technology we used to construct the whole music video was the HD camera, it allowed us to focus on still objects, as well as keeping focus on moving objects. There was a downside of this camera we used, as you can notice the shakiness more then a non-hd camera during it to be in 1080pixels isntead of 360/480pixels. But we could crop images and zoom into certain parts while editing but keeping a high resolution still, which can be seen in our high quality version of the music video.
Overall the new techologies we used to construct, research/planning and evaluating our music video project, were of very high quality and gave us alot of different opportunities we could experiment with. Which in result created a very high quality music video in return of these great tools of technology.

directors commentary homework

A director's commentary is a audio commentary by the director on the CD or DVD as a bonus feature. Normally the commentary consists of more than on production member where they watch the watch the film and give a lecture or comment, which sometimes plays in-time with the video/film.
They sometimes add a different type of commentating by being serious or entertaining by nature, however the commentary sometimes gives information that wouldn't be disclosed to the audience. Sometimes during the commentary they commentate certain scenes and show how the scenes were made, this is sometimes done by step-by-step stages which are commentated on.

DVD cover

Digipack

Front cover:
For the front cover we put in picture of Adele we took especially for our digipack. The picture shows a close-up of Adele's face with a dark background  and a bright light behind her. The picture follows artists media conventions as the song in the Digipack is quite a sad song and the picture goes with that mood. It also goes with the mood of the music video and the conventions Adele uses for her album and single covers.
On the front we also included the artist's name in white letters and the title of the digipack in red being 'melt my heart to stone' . We chose to only write these on the front cover to make the digipack a lot more simplistic whit makes it look more prestigious and sophisticated.
The simplicity of the front cover will make shoppers interested and want to know a lot more. 

The spine: On the Spine we wrote the Artists name and the digipack name in the same style as the album cover. We chose to write them the same style in the same bold font to stop it from looking out of place and to make it fit in with the rest of the design.

Back cover:
For the back cover we decided to add a lot more than the front cover.

Magazine Advert

The frame didn't cut out the edges so it looks a bit rough in some places.

digipack examples from previous years

Music Video Promo Package Examples

Some of the slides in this slideshare have really good examples of digipacks such as on slide 14 they managed to create posters/bonus cd's/photographs extra for their digipack which would create bonus points. Moreover from this the dvd cover is really effective the images have been smoothed onto the background so it looks like it just hasn't been placed their and out of place with the use of lighting and shadowing of layers and images.

This adele poster/magazine advert has some of the features in our magazine advert such as the same font style, and the album/single name in different colou, so we have the same font styleaswell as adeles face emerging from the black with a contrast.

22/11/2011 digipack editing/creating

In todays lesson we did 50% of the album/dvd cover, where we had to fix the render edges as the tool was playing up so we applied it to the current layer and copied it onto a new layer to apply the affect which we had to do twice to make the affect show.

Lastly we did the magazine advert and used the same style as the dvd cover but we nearly finished the madgazine advert.

Digipack photoshoot. 21 11 11

In today's lesson we when to the dark room to take some pictures for our digipack cover. Our main Idea was to take some close ups of Adele's face with a dark background. To make our picture more interesting we experimented with some flash lights. The use of flashlights till create an effect such as the imge below

however in our digipack we will have adeles face emerging from the black on the front and kanye west's face emerging from the black on the back of the dvd cover, it'll take quite alot of editing and effects to merge the iamge in but it will create an effect cover and follows Adele's style of covers.

Digipack Analisis

We looked at J to tha L-O the remixes album.

On the front you can see a collection of images of Jennifer Lopez in all her different music videos. All the images go with each other despite the fact that they're all images from different music videos. They go with each other because they all portray Jennifer Lopez in a sexual way through the use of voyeurism. The way they use voyeurism is very clever; All the images have small numbers, letters and a play and pause symbols next to them, which make the images look like they've been taken from a photo reel. The image on the top right of the album cover shows in huge diamond letters Jennifer Lopez's nickname : 'J-LO' This image like all the other images is taken from one of her music videos. There is no Album name on the front cover probably because the album cover is very symmetrical and adding a name on the front would ruin the simplicity of the cover. Also the front doesn't need an album name on the front as it is a greatest hits album and the biggest J-LO fans would be able to recognise this as all you can see is her nickname on the top right and stills from most of her music videos. This implies that this is Jennifer Lopez's life's work all in one and need no title. The front also includes a parental advisory logo because of the explicit content in the album and is there for legal reasons. It also has a small sign on the bottom right that says 'will not play on PC/MAC' this is self explanatory and warns people that it won't work on Pc or MAC.The background behind all the images is black and this background trend continues with the spine and back of the album.

On the spine of the album you can see the title of the album written in a bold simple font: 'J TO THA L-O! THE REMIXES' With black and white font highlighted with some light green in a black background. On the edges of the spine you can see in small white letters the record label 'epic' and CD number.

On the back of the album. you can see the recurring black background tacking over most of the frame. You can also see some still frames of some of Jennifer Lopez's music videos next to each other. Much like the images on the front cover they're all very revealing and use voyeurism. You can also see all the album track names

research/ideas for digipack

After doing some research the 2 magazine adverts Adele have which are shown in this blog, they promote her as a artist and not her songs. This has given us an idea to produce an dvd cover such of the sort which is shown below.

This album cover '21' gave us the idea of using shading and creating the image of Adele and Kanye west with this desaturated effect with their heads merging out from the black.
Another idea for our DVD cover is to have adele on the front of the cover with a black background, and maybe wearing a veil, with the same effect as the single cover below, this is because the black fading into the image looks really effective and amplifies the sadness and would suit our music video. Then on the side we can make it black which will follow onto the back with the same sort of image but with our Kanye West who will look mellow but with a black ground instead of the pink background shown below the adele - set fire to the rain cover.

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What should be included on a magazine advert and our digipack

 J To Tha L-O - album cover

digi pack:
- Dvd-video logo on the front and back of the DVD cover.
- the record company logo on the front or back of DVD cover
- bar code on the back of the dvd cover
- synopsis of the DVD on the back of the DVD cover
- what's included in the dvd on the back of the dvd cover
- where you get the the DVD from e.g. amazon.com or HMV.
- website on the back of the DVD cover
- extra footage
- can include extra photographs/slideshow for the buyers
- maybe a bonus cd
- posters for people who buy the album
- pegi rating on the dvd cover
- same theme and image for the promoting artists throughout the digipack

magazine advert:
- where you can buy the single
- ratings from magazines/newspapers
- possibly price
- record company
- when it's released
- image of artist(s)/same theme to the dvd cover
- same theme and image for the promoting artists throughout the magazine advert

feedback - review

s1-27 feedback review:I thought the feedback given by this group was fairly done, with accurate obersevations e.g. the trousers breaking the continuity. But i do have to disagree to an extent with the camera works as we did many shots, with many different types of shot's but we didn't do any high/low angles which i agree with there.

s1-26 feedback review:
I agree with this groups feedback on the costumes and the relation between them but we didn't have enough time to change the clothes as we had to work around certain times. But i completely disagree with the camera angles i thought that was unfair feedback as we did alot of close-ups which they said we didn't. Also i agree with the promoting artist feature again.

s1-25 feedback review:I think this feedback was fair and wel lthought out except the last part because they're saying that the promotion of artist wasn't done well because the song had a upbeat part and a sad part when we can't change the song. So i thought that was unfair feedback

s1-30 feedback review:
I thought most of this feedback was well done and fair except the part about saying the male actor was too confident and too cocky because we had a media teacher say he was perfect because you rarely get somone who puts out as good as he does. But i thought most of the feedback from this group was fair

s1-28 feedback review:I thought this group's feedback was fair and the criticism was more constructive than the other groups even though they suggested a feature that they used on their music video.

Overall I felt that the music video was succesfull and got good reviews.