Lesson 20th December 2011

In the lesson today our main aim is to finalize our filming idea's for over the holidays. We have picked up the equipment for filming and plan to arrive in lesson next term with a new tape full of film ready to edit, which will eventually amount to the final film material that we will use in our final video production

CD disc

This is the CD in progress for the background I have used to colours for the gradients i took the colour from the rust of the wall on the back cover and I also took the wall colour(grey). when designing the CD itself i chose a picture of a house that was old and had broken windows. i cut this out with the circle and smudged it in to match the background.

16th december work in class

Today i have started editing the music video. The first thing i had to do was the import the song so i could start matching up the clips to the song. While editing i have come across problems, some i have resolved but some i can't so we will have to re shoot.

Linking Up Our Blog To The Website

On our web-page we also decided to add a link to our advanced portfolio production blog. This will allow the audience to see how the video was made and the planning that was done to make the video a success.

Making Active Links On Our Website

On our website we have included active links to make our site more interactive and appealing to the target audience. This will also make our website more like existing websites for other music artists and keep our work up to a competitive standard.

Tour Dates On The Website

After researching other band websites we found that a conventional feature is that of upcoming tour dates. This could help with the bands merchandising and fan base growth as they will be advertised through the music and media industry. We felt that we should add this in to our work to make our website live up the a higher standard.

Website Development

Yesterday, in the final few hours before the deadline we decided to change the design of the website dramatically as the old layout wasn't working as well as we planned. We decided to make the features of the website more structured in to the design and change the background colour to black to make it more conventional to the genre and image of The Jam. 

Last Minute Portrait

Before we decided to make a collage of stills from the footage we shot, I took a picture of a friend's brother and we were considering using this.
He was wearing a shirt and we thought as a backup it would work well considering the circumstances.
Here is a picture of the back-up:

Finished Website Design

This is our final website design, we added a YouTube video and linked all of the pages to the correct web pages. We thought that this fitted in well with our theme and so we stuck with it. The pictures were taken by Matt in our group and we thought that it would go really well in our website and CD designs and it looks fine in the end. 
I have checked all of the links and they all work fine, which we were a bit worried about before we did them but it all works fine. It's a great end product.

Finished Inside Cover

This is a picture of our final inside of the CD cover. We thought having a collage would look good and fit in with the theme of the estate due to the backgrounds in the picture.
The CD itself looks very good especially having the building with the broken windows as the main feature on it.

Pictures on CD cover

As our actor didn't contact us with the pictures we asked him to send, I have decided to so a collage of stills from our filming day on the inside of the cover. 
This is the collage so far:

 Although this is a last minute idea, I think that it will look good once it's done. 

Back of the cd cover

Here is the back of the cd cover. This photo i took when shooting our music video and i was going to use it to put on the website but we came up with the idea of using it for the back cover and put the writing on the wall under the spray paint. To make the writing look like it has been wrote on the wall i had to us the arc feature when writing . This was tricky to get it right as it wasn't in perspective.

Finished front cover

This is the final version of the cd cover. We have changed it quiet a lot since the last post. first off i have changed the font as we had some feed back from some viewers saying they couldn't really see the font very well. Secondly i have changed the background colour as it didn't suit the photographs we are going to use. thirdly we made the descision to change the photographs as we thought they were more appropriate. Finally i've put the text on the wall so it looks like it's sprayed on.

idear for the back of the cd

This photo i took when shooting to orignally put on the website but, i came up with the idear of using it for the back of the cd cover. The aim is to put the songs and extra information on the wall under the graffiti so it looks like its been sprayed on.

Disc cover

Here is a photo of an abandoned house near where we shot, we are going to use this photo as our disc cover. I am going to cut a circle out of the main house, which will be a bit smaller than the cd itself, then i will lay it on top of the disc template and use the smudge tool so blend in the sides, so it looks like it is disapering. we have chosen to use this photo as it is part of the irony of the music video by saying Malice is a nice place.

Website change Tuesday 13th

Change in website font

Upon showing our album cover and website design to other students they mentioned that the font is hard to read in some situations. Because of this we are changing the font to a similar design, that is a bit clearer to read than the last. This will hopefully improve the quality and standard of our coursework, hopefully boosting our grade.

New photo of location we shot at.

This is a photo i took this week, of where shot our music video. We are currently thinking of using it for the CD cover or website.

Style Of Photography Research

After researching a few styles of photography I think that a black and white style of photography would be more suitable for our CD cover and website design. It will help make our coursework relevant to the genre that The Jam belong too and will add the the look of an 80's travel brochure.

Today

We're continuing to edit our CD and Website designs, I am looking at backs of CD covers so that I can see what the back of a CD cover generally looks like. 


Here is an album back that I found, This shows me that it had a barcode and the record label's logo. It also has the track listings but for our song we wanted it to be a single so there is no need for a track listing. 


I sorted out the background of the Polydor symbol on the CD back, as the background was white and it didn't look good.


Here is a screen grab of the changed CD cover parts:

Friday 9th December

Due to Matt's absence in todays lesson we can not advance any further with our website or CD cover and design without further research in what aspects need to be included in the production in both pieces of coursework. Today I will research a style of images that will be suitable in our web page and design so I know what to do when I go and take the images myself.

Keeping A Theme In Our Work

This is our website design so far, we have chosen to follow the design of the travel brochure as it is relevant to the theme of our music video, CD cover as well as the web site. Keeping the theme consistent throughout. The colour scheme will also be consistent throughout the three area's of our coursework, keeping the work relevant to the band and conventions and genre.

The editing has started

Today i have upload the my music video that we filmed last weekend. At the moment me and Ryan are editing the video

Making our music video, band and website integrated into social networking

 To make our website more integrated into modern advertising and marketing we are going to have links on our website to The Jam's facebook and twitter's official pages.

This will make the website more personal to the audience as they will be able to interact with the artist through the internet if they choose they want to. Adding a modern aspect to our website that was not around when the record was released.

80's travel brochure inspiration

Inspiration for our website design has come from travel brochure's from the 1980's. The design for the travel brochure is very similar to our website design and is similar to what we want our final website to look like. However, it has a lot of empty space that needs to be filled with aspects such as active links, video's tour dates and images of the band and surrounding area in which the video is filmed in. This will allow for our website to look interesting and a lot more interesting than the image above.

Progress of the CD Cover

This is our CD cover in progress of what i have designed so far. I have so far put the name of the band, song name, bar code their and record company. We are designing the CD cover as a 70s postcard/ holiday poster. I only have to put some picture of where we are shooting/setting of the music video(Malice) and it shell be finished.

The Specials

This is another band from the genre we're doing our music video for, I like this video because of the shots of the buildings at the start which goes with a couple of shots that we have filmed. I think that it fits into the genre quite well due to the video with the music - and of course the music.


The costume in the video seems to go with typical conventions for the genre, which again we have tried to stick by in our filming, which should project through into our final piece. 

Inspiration for text

The font that the word 'Blackpool' is in really inspired us to use a text slightly like it for the theme that came from seeing this postcard. We would like an old sort of seaside theme with text shown in the previous blog eg. 'welcome to malice'. I really like the idea and think it would work really well when finished.

It's a bit hard to picture at the minute as we don't have the pictures to put onto the website and so it looks a bit too plain.

Filming update!

We filmed on sunday with all of the actors and we shot all of the footage we think we need, we haven't had a chance to look through our footage yet but it seemed to go very smoothly. for each shot we repeated it to assure that we had enough footage to pick and choose from. 


I am happy with the overall day of filming, we got it all done when I was expecting to have to initially come back again. Although we may have to re-film, we have something for all parts of the video and hopefully it will look good when importing it.

Developing The Website

For the design of our website we have decided to continue with editing it in photoshop. It allows us to be a lot more creative with what we do and make the design a lot more individual. By allowing us to do this it made our design a lot more relevant to our video so there is now a flowing theme of a mock travel brochure through all 3 elements of our work.

We have made the colour scheme match the CD colour scheme, this means that each aspect about the video is staying the same and looks more professional. In the coloured rectangles we will have different pictures which we took of the location that we filmed in. The pictures will then link to different pages of the website, such as the photo album.

We will continue to progress on the development of the website. Hopefully it'll turn out well!

Starting the website

We have started to create the website using iWeb, we have discussed the colour scheme and feel that the colors would look best being white, black, blue and red. This is because they are the colours on The Jam's logo and we would like to keep that aspect of the band going on throughout our website.


We have added the navigation bar at the top so that we can fit the rest of the page around it to make it look professional. It will also mean that we have a structure to follow. This is what we have so far:

Looking at Postmodern Aspects in Our Music Video

Generic Hybridisation
Our music video coveys the idea generic hybridisation as our initial idea is a mix of bothe imitating a tourism video and music video. Proving that in new media texts we can't create anything new or original with taking aspects from other media's. Our media idea has taken idea's from The's Jam's music videos seen here. We then we got the idea of a tourism idea from the birmingham bullring advertisment, previously mentioned earlier on in the blog and also seen below:

Self Reflectivity

Self reflectivity will also be present in our production. In certain shots of our music video we will have intentional mistakes such as the clipboard being in shot or the microphone dropping onto the screen. This will show that the text knows it is a media production.

Analysing Previous Work

This is some notes we made about other peoples work. We did this to find examples and inspiration for our music video.

Written Storyboard

This is our written storyboard for A Town Called Malice. It is important to storyboard our ideas, so that we have a plan to follow when filming. So that we aren't spending all of our time discussing what shot/angles to do.

Suitable Font For Our Album Cover

These are our chosen text fonts that we decided are suitable to use on our album cover and possibly on our website.  Out of the seven fonts in question the last was the most popular, receiving six out of a possible twenty five votes. We chose the fonts for our album cover and blog as they are converntional to The Jam's genre and confoms to the conventions of the bands look.

Target Audience

This is a target audience sheet i have done. The sheet helped us to focus and look at our target audience so we create our music video, website and CD cover to match the audience.

Digipak CD cover

 This is our first go at designing our digipak for our band. The front cover is of a jam pot with the name of the band (The Jam) split in jam above. the title of the album is on the jam pot. The whole cover is full of irony. The back cover has a spoon with jam on it  and the titles of the songs above. the cd is a big dollop of jam and the in side its a picture of the band walking down an estate which suits the target audience. unfortunately the design of CD cover above isn't really suitable for our target audience, so we are currently re-designing it.

This is our test shoot, as you maybe able to see, we are going for a 70s costume. we are doing this because its suits our style of a promotional video. the actor will be wearing a black suit and jazz tie like this one, they will also have combed over hair and a mustache to suit a 70s look. The presenter will also be holding a microphone and a old leather sholder bag.

we have desicded as a group to change the actor because we want an older person to present/sing the song, so it keeps in with the style of the theme plus all prsenters are adults not teenages.

this is our recee sheet showing where we will film our video.

This is our permission sheet featuring the signatures of the cast that will appear in our video.

Advanced Portfolio Research - Textual Analysis The Jam

For my textual analysis research I chose to analyse the already existing video for The Jam's A Town Called Malice. It's a performance based video that is conventional to the genre and has little advanced editing techniques. Because the video is of a basic filming standard there wasn't a lot to look at in detail, however it became present that is relevant to the style of the band style and their look.

Using Postmodernism in Our Music Video

Because our music video is mimicking that of a tourist advert, postmodernism is going to have to be used for the audience to understand what is happening. By following conventions of an 80's television presenters appearance we are going to be able to show what we are mimicing in just a few shots.

For example, in the shot of our desired present for the video to the left, we have tried our best to mimic the clothes worn by a television presenter from the nineteen eighties: a patterned tie and shorter, clean hair cut. Another example of postmodernism that we have planned to use is the clipper board at the start of the video. This has been seen numerous times in other media texts.