DVD Cover/Magazine Designs

For the ancillary tasks, we have to individually create a DVD cover for the release of an album along with a magazine advert promoting the release of the DVD. As a design feature, we had to watch our videos again to get ideas that we could incorporate into our designs. After watching our video, I decided that much of the effects and lighting we used was of a deep red colour, therefore I decided to use a firey design on the outer DVD cover and Magazine advert, creating a marketing link between the two products. The tracklisting in the inside DVD cover I have designed in a scrawly, almost grafitti like style, reflecting the almost angry tone of our genre.

I have also thought about audience, and generally bands in the drum n'bass genre are usually quite explicit with their videos and/or lyrics - therefore, I have decided to "certify" my DVD release as available to those only over 15 years of age, a clue to the audience I am trying to reach.

Refilming - 4th November 2009

Today, we were able to refilm the band segment to our Music Video - I felt this filming session was much more successful than the previous one, as we had enough actors for a full band along with a male singer who looked more of a singer in the genre.

Again, we were able to get many interesting shots of all band members - I was in charge of using the Fig Rig to film the segment which included the guitarist. I feel some successful shots came out of this, as I was able to capture some interesting close ups and tracking shots into the guitar, which is an improvement on the mise en scene from our last filming session.

Now, we need to upload the footage onto Final Cut Express and review it, to ensure it's good enough to use in our final music video.

Refilming Band Sequence

As a group, we have decided (along with the deadline coming up for the music video) to refilm the live band sequence sometime this week. Although from a cinematography point of view the last session was fine, the mise en scene of the footage was a problem.

Therefore, I feel it will benefit us as a group to plan out props and costume - this will mean having to think about our genre a lot, and will mean having to use authentic props to give the final produt a sense of realism.

Initial Editing

Now, we were able to being to edit sequences within our Music Video - the software now worked which obviously worked to our group's advantage. As I knew the basics of how Final Cut Express worked, I was able to give a quick tutorial to my group as to how to use it. This included describing the process of 'in' and 'out' points for footage and using the blade tool to cut up pieces of footage on the timeline.

As a start, I put some of the band footage on the timeline in time with the music to show the simplicity to the group of how to edit. John decided to put together some of the narration footage which made a good introduction to the film - the shots had quite a fast pace and some of the shots which were added in were interesting to watch.

Refilming DHM/Decks

In the lesson on Friday 16th October, the room in which the decks were kept was free, so we decided to refilm the decks sequence for our music video. This time, we ensured that the lighting was correct as we found that was a major problem the last time we filmed (such as seeing the lights on the vinyl records). We therefore was able to change the lighting which added more atmosphere and looked good on screen.

This filming session was more successful as we were able to get much more interesting shots with interesting angles. These included close up shots of the decks as the records were spinning, which gave some interesting shots when we uploaded the footage to Final Cut the lesson after.

Editing

Today, our group done two things - we had to upload some more footage which had been sadly lost, but this gave us the opportunity to experiment with some of the effects that Final Cut had to offer us.

We found some interesting effects, one I particularly liked was called "Indent" - it gave the video almost a serious cartoon look, and made the frames darker which would fit in with the style of our song.

As I have used Final Cut before, I began to see if some of the performance segment we filmed would fit in with our track - I done this by setting an 'in' and 'out' point from the footage we needed which fit the mp3 version of the song - this seemed to be successful, but as we have decicded to reshoot some of this segment, the footage was not the final version.

Uploading Footage 2

In today's lesson, due to some technical difficulties the lesson before, we re-imported our narrative section of our Music Video. For now, we did not re-import all of our footage, meaning we could analyse what we filmed for the narrative section.

I feel the footage we filmed was successful - we were able to get interesting shots using parts of the location to our advantage, such as allowing the camera to look through the trees, as if something is hidden to create a sense of unease for the audience.

We also achieved other things in today's lesson. I was able to find an MP3 version of our song which I imported into the timeline of our Final Cut project, and used the select tool to move the track to the beginning of the timeline where our clips would line up. In this lesson, Georgina also redrafted one of our storyboard sheets to fit in with the new footage we'd filmed for the narrative, but also due to the group decision to abandon the 'rave' idea - we thought it was impractical, especially getting the right number of people to take part in the segment.