Genre Conventions/Characteristics

To update and ease the need for our group. We've decided to make a list of typical conventions used for the genre of music we made our animation for.

• Shows the artist/band through out the video
• Some special effects utilized
• Usually a calm setting, but gradually develops into something bigger when music's rhythm kicks in
• Black and white filter may be used
• Tends to have a narrative
• Close ups of the artists/band are often incorporated.
• Live show performances.

Example groups include:

• Snow Patrol
• Jamie T
• Kings of Leon
  
• The Fray
  
  
  
  
  

Digi-pak DVD / Magazine Advert FINAL Product

Digipack & Magazine Advert Progress

For the deadline, we've split into two groups to complete both products. We've played around with a few filters to make our magazine advert eye-catching and appealing. One of these main effects is the grainy filter which we used to make foreground look artistic with creates a smudge like effect to blur out the holder of the two characters. In the end, we resorted to the black & white filter as we had trouble trying to fix the lightning affecting the holders face. The next step was to select the characters dresses via the magnetic tool so we could later highlight them in a rich orange colour.

For the digipak we collected a few images from google so we could include the visual conventions of a DVD cover (as mentioned below).

Design of the Magazine Advert

We discussed as a group which one of Ollie's design would suit the Magazine. Moreover, we got our teacher to evaluate the rough drawings to help us envision how it would appeal to the audience.

The decision was to have the cover of an imaginary person holding the cut out characters from the music video as it presents the most innovative dreamy content that represents our product.


Associate Website - www.myspace.com/thehushsounds


Example Bar Code

Record Labels


BBFC Rating

Digipack Idea / Schedule

As the deadline is this coming friday. We've decided to devote our time to finishing the magazine advert first as this requires little effort then our plan to mold a 3-fold CD cover.

*UPDATE* 26/11/09
Because of the short time before the final deadline. We've decided to the design a standard DVD cover as attempting a gatefold would be time consuming despite the fact we've been provided a template. It's also because our group memebers are amateurs with photoshop so we didn't want to waste too much time learning to use the software.

Group Evaluation of the Project

As a group we feel that the project has gone quite well and we are proud of the product we produced. The planning didn't go as well as we would like because we underestimated how long it would take. We have decided that we should have done some tests before we started to experiment with timings and lighting as these were the two things we struggled with. The project turned out well and we feel that if given the choice to do it again, the only thing we would have changed is to plan it more efficiently and to make sure when filming, we were more careful with shadows. We have used quite alot of intertextuality.

For example, the cloud scene where the characters are jumping down the cloud reminds us a scene in Mary Poppins where the characters walk up the cloud stairway and float back down the smoke to the floor. We also put in space invaders from the space invaders game and the idea for the piano scene came from a toy/gadget shown in the picture below:

Beths choice for digipack still

I think this picture is a good idea for the digipack because it has both main characters and the tangerine man. I think having the tangerine man on the digipack is important because he represents the lyrics well and is iconic to our music video. If we were to use this image I think we should edit the background so it stands out a little bit and so it relates to the video but isn't cut directly from it. I also think we should edit both the dress and the tangerine man so that they don't have reflective spots in the colour. This will make them stand out more also.

Analysis of Digipack

Analysis of 3-fold digipack:




How is the artist represented?
The artist is represented with a primary colour scheme. The layout of the digipack is primarily in one colour which is a plain plum colour. Once the digipack is open this colour contrasts with a pea green colour which makes it more visually exciting. This makes the artist appear abstract through the bold use of colour. The images for example, the paper cut out of a person on white paper, in reference to the artist could make him appear as plain or even slightly dull.

Is there a visual relationship between the digipack and any other product?
There is a analogy that can be associated with the Mary Poppins movie. One of the scenes that contain a similar visual style is where the men are dancing on the chimney tops. Despite the grainy colors, the whole concept of having a choreographed regime matches our dreamy sequence of Sweet Tangerine.

Does it follow the conventions?
The digipack we are analysing follows many of the typical conventions found on a digipack. for example, it has a clear track list displayed on the back cover, it has the album title and the name of the artist written on the front cover. Also on the back cover is a barcode and a production company logo. It also has a link to the bands website and other sites related to the production of the digipack. However, there isn't any obvious bonus tracks or additional features.

What is the special content?
The 3-cover digipak contains a bonus soundtrack disc containing the behind the scene production videos and extended interviews of the band. There was also a small manual book which contains the lyrics for a few of their favorite songs.

Does it have a strong mise on scene?
I believe that the mise-en-scene presented is genuinely strong and rich. Despite the monotone colour scheme utilized. A few abstract logos are incorporated with the trendy patterns used on the interior of the digipak. The urban patterns give a strong impression of the genre of the band's music. It indicates that this band is likely to have rough industrialized persona with the quality of their music.

How does it attract the audience?
The main attraction is the contrast use of colours between the interior and exterior design of the digipak. There is a limited amount of choices used for the exterior which makes the appeal seem simplistically bland but interesting to look at with the abstract artwork logos.

How can you tell who the audience is?
I think that a young audience ranged between 13-18 year old's would be attracted to this product.
The reason being is mainly due to the combined colours used to appeal to a accessible audience. You have the light shades of white surrounding the artwork on the exterior with a plain smooth purple background. The interior also serves an artistic pattern combining purple stripes and a diluted green cover. These visual contrasts also aid in making the band seem iconic to a general teen audience.

Digipack Details

We've listed

Collectors item:

- Greatest hits
- Limited Edition
- Posters
- Lyrics Manual
- B-sides
- Interviews and band footage
- Behind the scenes (Filming, Studio Production, Band Tours)
- Documentary
- Live performance
- Bonus tracks
- Higher RRP (Recommended Retail Price)

Conventions:

- Track list
- Websites
- Album title
- Visual link to video
- Production company logo
- Reviews
- Bar code
- Ratings Information e.g. PG, Explicit Content/Lyrics
- Running time
- Band artwork
- Band members/links
- Customer/Newspaper Star Ratings & Testimonials

Magazine Advert

Function:

- Promote the artist
- Sell the song
- Eye-catching (visually striking)

Conventions:

- Song/Album title
- Visual links to the video (intertextuality)
- Reviews by newspapers, music magazines, celebs e.g DJs, Radio Hosts
- Condensed info/content
- Release date
- Artist name
- Where its available
- Record label logo
- Websites e.g. myspace

VIncent's choice for digipak still

I chose this still because the mise-en-scene composed in this scene has an effective climax. It contains the mascot, the tangerine man as well as a radiantly coloured track title. We also recycled all the decor/props from the bedroom to create a stack which makes up for the continuity of the bedroom interior scattering all at once. The choice of having these props together with the mascot and title also gives the audience the curiosity of their purpose. I also found that the quantity of the props within the shot compliments the viewers focus on the Tangerine man.

This suggests that the music video should appeal rather playful and childish due to the basic concept of the decor present. Furthermore, the composition of this shot has a variety of colours involved that will allow the audience be aware of the dark backdrop. The utilization of this background indicates that there's no obvious setting shown within the narrative of the music video. This helps enforce viewers to believe this is the ending sequence of the song. I find these visual features to be particularly engaging for buyers as it contains the tangerine man that boosts the intertextuality of the products.

The song also has the constant loop of repeating the words "Sweet Tangerine". So it was by our instinct that we continued the literal relationship between the song/visuals and grab peers attention with the actual object of the tangerine man explicitly shown.

Nicola's choice for digipack still

I chose this image as i felt that it is the best representational image of our music video. The image is from one of the longest shots in our music video and is i feel the most highly technical sequence from our music video. This picture depicts our two main characters which is an essential component of any DVD case or magazine advert. This image if used on either the DVD case or magazine advert would be both eye catching and enticing to anyone who views it.

Ollie's choice for digipack still

I chose this image for the digipack design and for the poster advertising because i felt that it represents in the most effective way the ideas behind our project, i also felt that this image would be the most enticing to the general public who would be the audience for our music video.


I felt that image would be the best representation for out advertisement because the images stand out well against the stark black background. The moon is colored in a silver gel pen; this is the reason why the moon appears to glint in this still, this effect catches the eye and invites a more in depth study of the image.

On the moon are the two main characters from our music video and the audience would guess this as they are the most central image in the still, some members of the public on viewing this image may feel a small connection with the main characters as they could either be married or in a relationship.

The moon is central to many peoples fantasy dream sequences and this is another way in which the audience could relate to this image and wish to find out more about our music video. This is an example of dream iconography.

Ancillary Products Planning

Digipak Preparation:

To continue with our digipak, we started designing a new template design that is of DVD size.
Originally, we planned to do a 3 fold CD template as we agreed that this would be more appealing. We believed that the overall content and style of design for this template would require more effort to gain the attraction because of the extended artwork of the exterior and interior cover.

We took a few examples of a DVD cover, 3-fold CD cover and a magazine advert for us to analyse.

Front of DVD

Back of DVD

Front of 3-fold











Interior of first fold










Full interior of 3-fold










Full exterior of 3-fold










Magazine Advert Example

Pictures

These pictures show just how many props we used throughout the project! It consists of about 153 individual items. The heart that breaks, once cut up, ended up being 33 little pieces. The space invaders scene included 18 ammo & shots, also there was 29 stars. Although there are not all of the images we drew for our project here this helps to demonstrate the amount of work we had to undertake.

Final Cut

This is our final music video enjoy!

Post-Production Finale

At the moment we're fixing the lighting of a few scenes. Due to the numerous days we filmed, the color correction isn't consistent through out. So we've decided to fiddle around with the "saturation" and "color corrector" filters to adjust the brightness and color quality.

One of the noticeable scenes was the where filmed the piano background on 2 different days. The white balance didn't appear to be even when the jump cut enters, so we needed to fix this so it wouldn't make our editing look sloppy.

Ollie's Evaluation

From the start of the music video project i have felt that doing an animation was the best way to go in order to maximize our marks, i also felt that an animation would be the best way to display the talents of our group with each individual contributing their own style and ideas to the overall finished product.

From the start we had known that an animation would be a challenge but it wasn't until we had started to film that we realized what we were undertaking. Our song of choice is Sweet Tangerine by a band called The Hush Sound and this song is roughly 3 minutes long, each picture taken for our animation in final cut is one tenth of a second or 0.1 of a second, this means that we would have to take around 1800 individual stills pictures in order to complete our finished product. The amount of stills we needed to take coupled with the fact that after each still we would need to make minute movements to the character involved built in to a huge workload. So far i feel that we have coped well with this workload and the time constraints put upon us however i feel that with better planning and more efficient camera and prop work that we would have been better organized and at a more complete stage than we are at now.

The filming i feel has gone well with the exception of a few minor problems such as hands being caught in the stills shots and the constant lighting changes. We have been working on a few pieces of discarded footage in final cut to see if we could rectify these problems and have found that the lighting can be adjusted easily and to a good standard using different filter and editing options.

We found the first lesson of filming difficult as even though we had a storyboard dictating where all the props should go we were unfamiliar with using i stop motion. We have used it previoulsy in our AS course at Long road but we had only be experimenting and had not yet fully utilized it to its full potential. However we found that after a short amount of playing around with i stop motion and the props we had made that we soon became better at using it. The first lessons filming went slowly however after this filming became faster and we started to make real headway in to our project.

One of the biggest problems we have faced through out the project is getting the continuity right with the footage matching the beat of the music and the song lyrics. We found that with only minor editing adjustments and constant referral to our timings sheet that the footage did in fact fit with the music in both beat and lyrics, an example of this is 'crept through the curtains' at which point the main male character flies though the curtains (this occurs during the main body of the filming in his dream sequence), another example is 'slowly explore the room where you sleep' at which point the female character enters and begins to explore the lead male characters room and kicks a pair of discarded shorts out of her way and out of shot.

We have only recently finished all of the filming necessary to complete our project and have begun to edit this film in to the correct order and match it with the appropriate timings, overall looking at what is very close to the finished piece and comparing this to other groups both past and present who have done animation i feel that we have achieved a very good piece of work.

The tasks for us still to do are editing the shades on final cut and trimming the shots not in length (time) but in the sizes of the shots in the frame as in some of the shots there have been incidents where the table had been showing around the edges of the paper we have been filming on.

Extended Filming

At the moment we have 7 seconds of footage gap to fill. To fix this we've decided to add in close up shots from the previous footage we shot. However we did encounter some issues while analysing the drawbacks from this decision. If we insert clips at different intervals our sequence, this may ruin the lyrical/visual relationship. In other words, we'll have to reiterate the lyrics from the song and listen to the track so we can find out which parts of our sequence can be edited.

For now we've decided to improvise another idea involving the black sky with scattered stars. This is because our scene before the gap starts from the sky. This will keep the continuity in flow while filling up the time line of the entire song. In any case of running out of lesson time. We've been given the opportunity to book an editing evening this week. We've chosen Thursday as the entire college have a day off so we'll keep this session booked in case we don't manage to finish by Wednesday.





*UPDATE*

We managed to fill the gap entirely with out including the close ups. Even though we neglected the feedback mentioned by our peers. We were able to get every scene to match with the song's lyrics. Our priority now is to fix the lighting by tampering with the available filters. Another advisable move would be to ask our teacher for some feedback before final submission as we still have the spare evening slot and Wednesdays lesson.

Final Cut Filming

We checked with our teacher to confirm whether the Space Invaders scene would be relevant. Eventually we came up with the idea to use the Bed where the couple slot into as a space transport. This would allow the continuity to stay on track as the couple fly back up into the sky before our gap arrives. As a complimentary add on, we decided to give the double bed some rocket packs to propel it. However we need to take continuity into account as it would seem odd if some extra props suddenly entered the frame.

We also experimented with the coloring filters in Final Cut to test whether we could digitally grade previous scenes that had inconsistent color quality. We decided to implement this test for the Space Invaders scene as it required us to turn off a portion of the classroom lights which would result in a mild disruption to the other groups filming. Another helpful tip suggested by our teacher was that we could take copies of our previous footage and do close up zooms on the selected clips. This would make our editing process more efficient rather then having to set up the whole background and props altogether.

Plans for Final Cut

We've edited our animation sequence so the visuals are in conjunction to the lyrics. However due to this muddle up, we ended up creating a continuity error where the couple drop to the ground from the sky but don't interact afterwords. To fix this we thought of several ideas during half term where we would incorporate the 'Space Invader' format as a scene. We thought this concept would be convenient as one of the following sequences is set in the dark sky. This idea would also provide our animation extra intertextuality with the reference of a classic retro game.

Our other small filling is around 9 seconds long. For this we decided to improvise a new idea to follow up the sequence where the couple fall from the sky. As a side interval, we thought of creating a 'Love Heart' character. This feature would suit the imaginative role as a dream object for our main protagonist. As such, even though the lyrics do not mention love specifically, the lyrics do suggest that the narrative should involve romance themes. An example includes "Sweet tangerine, will you please come back to me" implies that the tangerine man is like a love icon to the protagonist. The direction is to have the heart suddenly shatter into pieces while in addition to include the Tangerine man to participate as it would allow us to keep our animation within the lyrical flow of the song.

Response to feedback

The majority of our feedback was pretty useful as generally we received mixed comments.
One of the main factors that our viewers enjoyed was the effective use of props and decor we used for our backgrounds. These helped in making our song's lyrics have literal adaptation to the visuals. Most of the decorative features we included were playful and child like objects such as clothes, clouds, curtains and the tangerine man.

A big improvement for us would be to include more different shots so we can smooth the flow of our editing. This would also keep the audiences attention by including different perspectives of the scene as well as elevate the lyrical relationship with the visuals. Another issue to fix is the missing gap we have between midway point and the climax scene. For this we'll need to make additional props and plan a new sequence as well as following the continuity to an accurate degree.

Moreover, we were suggested by our teacher to use some digital filters to fix the lighting as some of our scenes had inconsistent color quality. So in our spare time we'll need to experiment with Final Cut's effects to determine which filters should aid in fixing this issue.

Teacher Rough Cut Feedback

Feedback on Representation of Artist:
It is difficult to comment on this as your artist is in theory a cartoon man. In which case there could be more close-ups on your drawn man.
Perhaps you could incorporate more of the 'sweet tangerine' man and those sequences.


General Feedback:

I really like your video, I think the child-like aesthetic really works. The ending is great.
Obviously it isn't in the correct order and I'm sure once it is it will be even stronger.
you do need to add some filters to some sections where the lighting becomes inconsistent.
Also you may wish to explore the use of transitions between your scenes.

Excellent work so far - keep going!

Peer Feedback

Q1-12 - Intertextuality
-When we watched this video it reminded us of a video that we have seen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWi7Vfc3Sxw
- We think this is excellent constructed and edited.

Peer Feedback

Lyrics and Visuals(Mr A Winter and Mr T Halkyard)

There was a good link between lyrics and visuals with the continued use of the colour orange throughout the music video. Other links were with the lyrics, 'clouds', 'curtains', 'sleep', 'dreams'. for example the clouds were mentioned a few times and the visuals showed clouds a few times as the characters in the animations hopped and flew through them.

Peer Feedback

Group 10:

General Feedback:
Generally a well composed animatic although at times repetitive which can lose the attention of the viewer. To viewer would be more engaged to the animatic if there was a variety of shot types, angles and transitions.

Genre Characteristics:
The genre of the song does not compliment the animations because the tempo of the song is very fast and upbeat which contrasts the flow of the animations.

Group 8

Music And Visuals:

Overall we feel the visuals linked well with the song itself and some of the individual lyrics. The song is quite random which is linked well with the video also being quite random with random objects used. It's obvious that the lyrics were thought about carefully which helped when it came to props such as the piano. The story could of been made a little more obvious, as it left us unaware of what the lyrics were trying to outline. We were impressed with the details of the animations used.