23/01/2012 - 27/01/2012: Week Post

During this week it was essential that all of us finished our video as our deadline had been extended for our music video, digipak and poster. Our final audience feedback was due on Monday but due to all of us not had finished so our deadline was extended. During this entire week we were all present but Junior was absent on Thursday as he had his last exam. We wanted to insure that by the end of this week we had finished the main body of thee video and all the little changes were added the following Monday.


Pre-final Audience feedback
On Monday we received audience feedback which consisted of both positive and negative comments all of which varied. The primary concern of all our peers and teachers was that obviously the video wasn't finished but that it seemed like our conceptual video wasn't going to get filled. It was necessary that we filmed something that remained consistent within the video but still visually interesting. This was the point at which we decided to watch some of Pendulum's videos and watched 'Witchcraft'. From watching it we decided to incorporate elements of performance but it was also necessary that we worked on the criticism from the feedback.


8th shoot
We used a friend called Sam Mitchell to be our guitarist and would be the prime focus of our performance based scenes that we wanted to incorporate. We filmed him in a small dingy room and removed all forms of light and used a smaller controllable light source in order to keep up the flashing effect used consistently throughout our video. The details of this shoot are already blogged.

After Effects
At this point Scott began to use the Adobe After Effects in order to try and add the text as well find some other potential effects that could be incorporated at certain point within the video. We tried a variety of different effects that could essentially be applied ranging from a 'Blob', 'Poly pixilation' etc. When it came to the actual text we had insure that the font suited the style that remained consist in order to retain the sense of continuity. In addition we wanted to try and potentially attempt to keep the themes from both of our ancillary tasks consistent to try and potentially represent them within our actually video. However due to technological difficulties this proved to be harder than expected and we weren't capable of incorporating this within the video.

9th shoot
This shoot was based around using the Mission Impossible App and we experimeted with various effects that were able to reinforce the dramatic scale of our initial ideas and potentially add a consistent thread that would be found within the music video.

8th Shoot (FX Mission Impossible App)

This shoot wasn't exactly planned because of the fact that we felt that our initial idea which seemed really dramatic and aggressive is something we felt that we should go back to. Therefore we felt that as we were doing a conceptual video it needed that extra push in order to really present our themes through a plethora of different motifs. We tried looking at attempting our building destruction idea but due to the lack of Cinema 4D it didn't prove to be possible. Therefore in order expand our use of technology Scott had this 'FX Mission Impossible' App which was capable of generating various destructive back drops scenes varying from boulders, flying cars, missiles, crashing helicopters etc. We thought that it would prove to be a brilliant idea as it not only acted as a motif for our themes but portrayed them on a far more epic scale. Below are a variety of different practice takes using some of various backdrops ranging from missiles, car crashes and some boulders.

7th Shoot (Sam's performance)

During this shoot we were required to film some guitar performance in a small dingy room that was total pitch black. Whilst we wanted to incorporate some performance elements we wanted to still make it visually interesting for the audience. We used an iPhone to act as our small controlled flashing light source in order to maintain the consistent theme of flashing throughout the video. In addition we felt that performance would play a vital role and we wanted to stick the generic stereotypes of what a performer within this genre would dress and look like. We got a guitar from our friend Melissa Tehrani who is also playing a role within our video and it was an electric one. We tried to get him playing the guitar from a variety of different angles varying from high angles, low angles, close ups, canted shots etc. This therefore insured that it creates a variation of shots in order to present the our guitarist in a stylistic manner. Below are pictures depicting our progression throughout the shoot:

Here is some video footage that was taken during the shoot and was indeed incorporated within our video:

Pre-final Audience Feedback

On Monday we had a group feedback sessions for what we had  edited so far and unfortunately at this point we hadn't yet finished our actual video which proved to be highly detrimental to our feedback as it mainly consisted of us not finishing it. However our feedback varied from both the good and bad. In addition

Positive feedback:

- Edited to the pace of the video

- Great use of lighting to create professional look

- Retains audience interest due to the varying use of props e.g. glitter, drums, lights

- Good representation of intended themes through motifs, such as the fire representing the anger and passion

- Beginning to work its way towards being a very good example of a conceptual video

Negative feedback:

- Sloppy footage that doesn't keep theme consistent

- Certain clips were to long

- Actually finish the editing the rest of the song

- Film some more footage that would prove to be the main basis of the entire video that could potential give the video more depth

- Attempt to get some small pieces of performance in there to give it repeatability

- Attempt to link the scenes together in more of a stylistic manner in order to try and incorporate those conceptual conventions

- Fix the random walking scenes with the character wearing a white shirt as it seems far to out of place

- Genre isn't yet immediately identifiable to the audience and tends to be more of a guess rather

Improvements we intend on making:

- Actually finish the entire video

- Attempt to film some more performance elements in order to try and avoid it being far to boring

- Reduce certain clips by adding relevant clips between them in order to cut them down without moving the overall structure

- Create a more conceptual effect by adding some bright vibrant bloc-like text just like that present in Kanye West's 'All of the lights' music video

- Rearrange certain clip, as the events taking place don't seem to actually fit the pace of music at those points

- Encouraging this idea of performance by having some lip syncing present with female character

Overall we seem to have more negatives and the main one seemed to be that it not being finished hindered the entire project and therefore our main aim is to finish absolutely everything. This may include refilming, adding any essential effects in Adobe after Effects etc.

15/01/12 - 20/01/12: Week Post

During the past week it was vital for our group to get extra footage for our music video as we recently noticed we did not have enough footage to successively finish our music video. We only had almost a minute and 10 secs of our music video and we were in need to fill our music video until it reached the end of the song which is 2:30 seconds. Also there was an even more greater pressure for us as our main editor, Junior was in the midst of his January exams which meant he had to go away for a week to proceed with his exams. However Jubel had to step up to fulfill the groups expectations to proceed with the music video independently as our SFX creator was also off due to illness during this week too.

So on Monday, Jubel started his independent role on attempting to finish the music video by continuing from where Junior had to stop because of his exams. The point where Junior stopped was where the music gradually builds up which was in need of fast transitions and clips. Through our selections of footage there was some footage that could be used at this part of the music video therefore Jubel used the footage of Zenneth's fire scenes to help add to the build up of the song. Jubel used this part and fastened the temp so the viewer can see a glimpse of it which adds to that certain conceptional feel. Also to help build the tension we used the boxing scene where we see Jubel, as our boxer get punched in the face in slow motion which was embedded in the video to help reach  the climax of the fast scenes. Overall with the editing on Jubel's behalf there was new footage edited to fit into our music video however it still did not fill up to 2:30 second gap.

On the next media lesson which was a Wednesday, as a group without Scott we came to a conclusion that we were in need of more footage, so as a group we jotted down our ideas and Junior came up with an idea using a I Stop motion effect like the one used in the Plan B video to create a visage of headphones to slowly reach Jubel's ears from below his body which we felt was a idea that would help to build up to the conception feel to our music video. However again Junior had exams that day and could not help with the idea, but again Jubel had to work independently with the help of handy Ibrahim to help film. We decided to use a green screen as we wanted to add a range of colors as the background. We wanted to use dark colors to help mirror the same mood of our music video. We needed a white plain t-shirt to help exceed the effect the green screen gives so Jubel had to travel to Primark to purchase the white t shirt. We used a HD camera to record and pause every action the black headphones done by traveling up Jubel's body. After the I Stop effect we finally uploaded our footage to final cut but we needed to edit the footage to speed up every frame to make the effect work and eventually we reached our final product.

On Thursday, again Jubel was alone and Scott was still ill however Jubel knew what his objective of the day was, which was to finish off the editing and to find the perfect place to put our I Stop effect into our music video. Also we still needed more footage so Jubel thought to use random ethnic people to lip sync our track "Fire in your eyes"  to help fill the massive gap in our music video. However is was easier said than done as the people Jubel asked were either shy to do it or busy but eventually we found two people that wanted to do it. They were Micheal and Stefan, Jubel filmed them in a bright room and zoomed up on their lips whilst reading the lyrics.

03/01/12 - 13/01/12 Week post

New Year
We returned after the Christmas holidays and assumed we had to finish the editing and digipac and poster. However over the two weeks various problems had cropped up and realised that the digipac and poster hadn't really been attempted. In addition we had to continue addressing the other issues with our video which would be harder as we all had various exams throughout this week especially me hence why this week post is over the past two weeks.

Poster feedback
During the holidays Jubel had been working on the poster and went through a whole host of various images and effects to try and project the themes of our genre but since drum and bass has so many other genre intertwined into it there's no one right way of portraying that to the audience. However we thought the best way he would see what suited best was by having various types of text for the title of our poster to see what worked best and get audience feedback from it.

Evaluation of idea
We had hit a problem because of the fact that since we were doing a conceptual video we needed to make sure that we had a lot going on but due to the length of our song which was bordering on five minutes we didn't think it was a practical to try and fill it all up. This was because there was a fear that people would lose interest and the fact that we feared that we didn't have enough footage became an issue.

Solving the issue
We then decided to cut the song down but stupidly cut it down to two minutes and as everything was in sync with i didn't want to move anything because it took far to long. Therefore we thought of way to get some more unique footage and decided to add some performance to the video as well as vibrant text that would appear as they sang the lyrics. This then allowed us to think of having an introduction and constantly relate back to it and use it as a link into other shots. Which addresses the comments concerning the making the video flow more like most conceptual videos.

Lost Shoot
On the 11th we filmed part of the performance text idea which required the character picking up the camera and putting it down then walking away. This was done as its role was to try and link together the drastically different scenes together which are usuall present within conceptual videos. *Updated* - However due to technical difficulty we were unable to retrieve the clip after removing due to negative feedback.

Poster V1

This was our first design of our poster which we used from our images we took during our drum shoot. We decided to use this image as we felt that the drums were a significant part of our conceptual music video as it is shown throughout the video. We opened the image with Photoshop and added the flare effect to achieve a very futuristic studio sense. The use of the flare helps intensifies the drum and the drum sticks. Additionally we set the contrast to a very dark tone to help emphasize every little element in the picture such as the glitter on the drum which also adds texture to the drum. The font "Embrace" we used the block distraught effect to help add to our punk theme hence why we used the colour green. However despite these effects this design did not seem much like a poster and therefore we felt that it required some altering in order to remain consistent.

Audience Feedback:
- Strays to far from the themes present within the current digipak and genre.
- Seems rushed
- Random light effect makes it seem like a pop album poster rather than our genre
- Good focus on instruments relating to our genres conventions