Final narrative shoot

After school Michael and I (Daniel) stayed behind to plan the shoot and ensure everything is in tip-top shape beforehand so that we can begin the shoot early at 9:30am. We have written up a shot list to account for shots that aren't in the prologue and will be narrative during the track. We have organised the room in advance and even took a few final shots to test for composition, however lighting can only be tested when all the extras are there. All in all, we feel as ready as we can be (well, a lot more ready than before!) and we looking forward to a successful shoot!

The Album Cover

To create the album cover we used Adobe Photoshop CS5 picture editing software. During the production the plan for it changed. The plan for a plain white front and back cover was scrapped and we used a black and white beauty shot of Charley instead with a lens flair. The text overlay for the back cover was changed to white and is the same font as the front cover.

The front cover was changed to give a brush stoke effect with a city highrise building overlay. Links were added to the back cover for the band and record label Madhouse. On the inside cover the stage names of the DJs were added so they could be quickly identified. All the parts of the album were formated and put within the guidlines to be sent off for printing and production.

Our !NFLUX website

To create a website for our artist !NFLUX we used 'Wix', a free online website designer. Based on our previous research we feel it is necessary that we take the 360 degree marketing angle to appeal and reach our mainstream audience. The website should be easy to navigate and have aesthetics which you would easily relate to the band. We will include links to the home, !NFLUX, gallery, video, competition/events and shop.

Upon entering the site's URL, you will first go to a page of simply an image of the band in action and looking incredible with just a link saying "ENTER SITE" and links to !NFLUX's pages on social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter. We chose these sites since we know that the majority of the core target audience use the sites. Since 80% of 16-24 year olds both male and female use social networking sites, it is a very cheap method of advertising and creating a huge online hype about the band.

We feel that fan interactivity with the band and the site is vital in attracting new audiences and so not only will there be a link to Facebook and Twitter on every page, but there will be the opportuinty to download the album, images, wallpapers, videos and purchase other merchandise surrounding the artist. There will be free samples of some items, however the audience will have to pay for everything else via website.

A significant part of our audience interactivity is our competition. We researched that Pendulum held a competition when releasing their latest album 'Immersion' where they allowed the audience to download the individual components of a track for free and use there own editing software to mix the track together and submit their mix. The best track was released in the album. We are going to provide a competition of similar nature to our audience via the website because this music is contemporary and largely produced at home. By using Web 2.0 to our advantage, we could attract audiences through the user generated content produced and submitted and the overall interactivity between the band and the fanbase.

Narrative Video Storyboard

In preparation of our second narrative shoot this friday 18th, we shot a video storyboard to allow us to be more efficient with camera set ups on the day and to give us an overall feel of the practicalities and possibilities with shooting at this new location, the media classroom.

We feel it went successfully with much experimentation, however when looking through the footage at times it didn't look as professional as we'd hoped (i.e. when the teacher enters the class the walk to the desk is too long). So, to avoid this an alternative might be to have the teacher already in the class with a few students and just show a few students entering the classroom. From ehre the teacher could then simply stand up, tell the students to "be quiet" or some equivalent, and then sit down and allow the following events of the video to unfold.

Having said this, if we are not going to have a prologue then this won't be as noticeable and we can film on the day as initially planned.

This is a roughly edited version of our narrative video storyboard.

Added editing method

In editing, we've found it difficult to browse through each clip at the full length to find specific shots which may only last for less than one second in the performance during the very fast paced editing. So I thought that to allow us to be more efficient in searching for the required shots I created a new sequence in our project on CS5 Adobe Premier Pro in which I have cut out all the clips that could be used in the final video, so that we can simply drag and drop the shot into the edit of our music video.

I selected shots from `Freehand Takes 1-3` and `Freehand Focus Changes Take 1`.

I made a `Screenshots` folder in our group 1 folder on the edit suite hard drive and in our group 1 folder on topics.

Thoughts in Preparation of the Second Performance Shoot

As a group, we understand that it is of the utmost importance to turn up to the shoot with more preparation than a few ideas of shots kept in our head. We need to pay closer attention to detail in composition of the framing.

As well as including the list of shots mentioned in a previous post `Rough Edit Reflections`, I have also noticed that we will need more controlled vibrations of the camera to fit in with the chaotic madness of the chorus `drop` of the song. In particular, I feel that using this vibration technique in corporation with close ups, high angles and tilted frames should be appropriate for the pace and atmosphere.

When we shoot, I think we should have already noted down exactly which type of shot will be the key feature of that particulr take so aren't solely relying on spontaneous camerawork from the cameraman. This method of filming on the day will also allow myself (Daniel) and Adam to have an increased role in directing, since we are the DJs and so have less chance of utilising roles behind the camera.

e.g. Take 1 - CU Vibrating
       Take 2 - HA Tilted Angle

Reflections on First Narrative Shoot

The shoot took place on Saturday 4th July from 8am until 1pm. Using Lauren Good as our teacher character we shot the planned narrative but ran out of time to shoot the complete plan due to school time restrictions. Looking at the footage that we shot, we agreed as a group, with our teacher and technician that it was not the right look we were going for.

Here are the reasons why:

• The footage had little varience in terms of types of shots.
• The dancing was too provocative and sexual where we wanted more of a loss of control and freestyle dance.
• There was little interaction with the classroom setting and with the lighting there was too much of a studio feel taking our character too far away from reality.
• Too similar to performance.
• Not right for the style of music

We therefore decided that we will need to reshoot, deciding on a different actor as our teacher, changing it to our lead singer Charley due to the fact that she was very professional and would help to further promote a debute album. The initial narrative idea has been tweeked slightly also. Instead of using a biology classroom which gave us many restrains we will use a media classroom as a detention room and have a 20 second prologue of the teacher entering the room and speaking to the detainese. She will then listen to the video with headphones and at the drop of the song a cheaky child will remove the headphone plug from the laptop causing the music to play out load causing the class to start dancing and the teacher gradually joins in with this comotion the DJs would come in and take her away.