Website Update

In this update we added our own custom arctic monkeys logo that we created in Photoshop by warping individual letters, this made the logo look like a real Arctic monkeys logo giving the site more authenticity.
We added a screen shot of our own music video into the website over the YouTube window so that we could know how the color would look in a black and white website, we feel that it will fit as when the video is playing all attention will be on the video and not on the site and the reverse when the video is not playing.

final digipak and website

For the final website we tried to make everything line up, this was to get uniformity to the site it would also be more user friendly and aesthetically pleasing, we also made the the band profiles into a gallery so that they would be linked and have a roll over, this will make it easier for the audience to use. finally we made our custom arctic monkeys logo centered and to a suitable size so that it makes an impact but doesn't distract the audience from the main page. The web address is as follows:
http://ryancoryaaron.wix.com/balaclava

We have decided to make the bar code more realistic and made more lines with varying thickness to make it look more realistic for the audience. We also added in the record labels logo and some details of the coppyright, year and PO box, this was made to make the album look much more realistic and familiar to the audience.  We also added a  parental advisory warning on as some of  the tracks has explicit language in them.

Evaluation Question 1 - Aaron,Ryan,Corey

By the same artist

The camerawork in Fluorescent Adolescent is constantly moving around to keep to the fast pace of the video i decided that this would be something good to use as stationary shots would be boring and hard to match to the music. The video uses lots of Long shots, Mid shots and Closeups these where all used well, the long shots where to show the scene and multiple characters, the mid shots allowed for character interaction and the closeups where all focused on characters faces, we decided to use this when we made our music video so that it had the Arctic Monkeys "feel".

The editing was extremely fast with the average shot lasting approximately 1 second and some shots only lasting a few frames, this creates a fast and fluid feel to the video and matches the music in speed but also beet editing, the beet editing changes from time to time from the drum hits to bass picking but is seamless and works well without the average audience noticing, we wanted to have small amounts of beet editing as we wanted to focus the editing around the narrative, but we used beet editing to link between hard cuts.


There is also a small section that is lip synced perfectly, this was something that we wanted to incorporate into our video, but keep a good balance between lip sync  performance and narrative. The colour grading in this video gave it a moody grey and yellow look, we wanted to use this in our video to make it seam darker and moodier  like a typical arctic monkeys music video

The Mise-en-scene gave us some inspiration for our video, The location wasn't something we wanted to use but the very low budget seeming location influenced our use of the streets in our own video, it has a British feel because of the industrial location they have used, we couldn't find somewhere like that so we tried to use something that would have the same feel, this is where the streets idea came from. The moody weather and moody colour gave us an idea about the colour we wanted, we wanted to have a similar look from the weather but the weather was un-reliable for when we shot so this will be fixed in post production.

The narrative of this Arctic Monkeys video was not something that had a significant impact on our narrative, we wanted to have something that had some dark humor like in Fluorescent Adolescent, but we found this hard to do as we wanted to keep it realistic but we have some clips that might come across as funny but we will have to wait for feedback. 

Same Genre

The camerawork in Don broco's Priorities uses allot of mid shots to allow for all four members of the band to be all in frame at one point, this influenced the section of our video with all four band members behind a wall, it was good framing and didn't look out of place. We also took inspiration from the panning around and moving camera, i found this allot more interesting than music videos with stationary shots.

The editing in this is slower than in Fluorescent Adolescent and our video, this is because the song is slower but this video is mainly done to beet editing to the bass drum hits, this makes it run smoothly, this was a helpful video to understand beet editing but the editing didn't inspire our video but did help us understand beet editing.

The Mise-en-scene in this video in terms of location is a very big hanger  this is a good location in terms of space for the band, equipment and crew but wouldn't have been suitable for the look and feel of our video. the costume for this video is very casual, we used this as it was a convention of indie rock videos but was also featured in this video, the masks used in this video also inspired us as it was a disguise for a robbery  we decided to use masks but not the masks used in this video as it wouldn't have worked in terms of narrative.

Some aspects of this video inspired our narrative as it was all to do with a robbery, we decided to use some aspects because the narrative of the song "Balaclava" linked in nicely, we tried to use some ideas from the chase scenes especially the slow motion clips.

We took idea's and inspiration for the sections of the video from many music videos but mainly the don broco- priorities video, this look and style we wanted to achieve is featured in many indie/rock videos. This convention of closeups and long shots makes all the videos it is featured in faster in pace and much more interesting than videos without the interesting.

This look was not inspired by any particular  music  video but was inspired by TV shows like Top Gear, I sat in the back of a car holding a steady cam rig, we went at a speed slightly faster than the subject, this was an indie film-maker technique that i have picked up from Top Gear and other TV shows.

Close up's are a very common  convention in  indie/rock music videos, we wanted to follow this convention as it would make the audience see it as familiar but we wanted it it to stand out from every other music video, to do this we had the camera at canted and "odd" angles, this made it look very different from other music videos but not make the  audience feel too odd about what they are viewing 

 This shot is a 180 degree pan around out lead Singer, this made the shot look much more active and interesting than if we did the shot still on a tripod, this is not a common convention in indie rock videos, i have not seen this in any indie/rock videos that i have researched.

This  shot is a close up lip sync is something that is very common in indie/rock music videos, this will be very familiar for audiences but will not be the same as everything as the singer is in a balaclava and not normal  

Digipak edit 14/12/12

Since the last post we feel we have done the remaining editing effects needed to make our digipak that you could find in the shops. On the front cover we have replace the Arctic monkeys title with the logo we made ourselves, based on the original monkey's logo, and also after looking at the back cover we decided to darken the shadows with gives the front cover a more of an moody, edgy look. We also moved the balaclava so the top of the l's and b are on eye level with the two pictures.

On the spine we wanted to keep it simple so we made the back of if black and used the same font as the  one used for balaclava on the front and wrote the album and band name.

The back cover we used the idea of it being at the police station and having the 'balaclava case' as a top secret file, we kept to the theme of the digipak and website and made it black and white and on the cover of the file we added the song tittles that would appear on the C.D.

On the inside we kept with the black and white theme and used portrait shots and used the same effect on these as we did with the front cover and then merged them together and softened  the edges to stop them cutting each other out.

We just placed a black strip where the spine would be as we feel that it would be too tedious to try to put anything there and also no one looks at the inside of the spine, so we went for simplicity.

For the actual CD we wanted this to be also simple but easily recognisable too witch is why we decided to have the CD black with the album and band name wrote on, we used ideas from existing CD's and digipaks by having the text not fully fitting and cuts at the edge of the CD. We decided to keep the back ground around the CD simple and a light grey to make the CD stand out more.

We feel that with some minor adjustments this will be our final digipak.

Website Final Design

we shrunk the logo at the top of the page so that it looked better and wasn't drawing attention away from the rest of the page, we also made  better use of the space on the page, we made the size of the video and the the bar above it smaller so that we could get more into the page without making it look crammed. We also made the band images into a gallery so they would stay at a uniform distance apart, then labeled them bellow, this saved allot of space and makes the page more compact and look alot better.

We replaced the CD in the Merch store with the album we have created, this felt more fitting and allow us to link our products together, we also made the twitter feed longer and brought it up inline with the merch store so that it all looks uniform.

Now that the whole website is done it looks allot better than every iteration before, this is because of the changes we have made to make it look similar and link it all together with the black and white crime theme and having the cops and robbers theme.

Progress Report 30/11/12

Up to this point we have:

. Almost completed the website
. Started Digipak editing
. Shot and Edited in the performance part of the video
. Organised second shoot
. Completed planning
. Planned all ideas for shoots and album cover

Creating the police office costume

To create the police officer uniform I tried to replicate the image in the middle, Firstly i took the police tape we took a picture of and removed the white background, we made one A4 sized one to go on the back and scaled down version for the front. To replicate the checkered image i crated 1cm by 1cm squares and alternated between blue and white, this image is made of 51 layers.

We cut these images out and stuck  the images on the reflective jacket

Website Banners

We have decided to change the side banners on the website from the white and blue police tape (right) to black and white to match the rest of the website. We have two versions of  the banner so far, the left one had a Black and white effect in photoshop then dropped all the blues and greens and raised the yellows and pinks and kept the reds neutral as they where not present in the photo, doing this made the banners look more natural in black and white but the the white was too dark and grainy. The second banner had the same effect applied but then a curves effect applied, i bumped up the whites to make the white look brighter, this looks better and brighter but very un-natural.

To find out which one is better we will have to make a poll and get audience feedback.

Second day of shooting

Today (1/12/12) was our second day of shooting, we decided to film all of the narrative today as we didn't need all the musical equipment,  we also decided to do this during the hours of 1 and 4 pm so that we would get the most sunlight during winter time.

We firstly re shot one of the items being stolen due to the continuity error in the first shoot, we found a location in the house that hadn't appeared in the shoot before so that there was no errors

then we decided to shoot the opening scenes, we asked my next door neighbour for permission to jump over the hedge that connects our gardens, he agreed so we filmed as quickly as we could so that we didn't disturb him too much. we needed to keep the band in the order that they came into the house to keep with continuity.

Once we had shot the opening we shot everything else after the beginning instrumental, we shot the band escaping the house we firstly filmed this and made the band run past the right of the camera, but we realised that the remainder of the shoot would get allot of glare from the setting sun at the end of the street, so we re shot them running to the left, this created another problem because there was allot of cars on that  part of the street, we decided to add a new shot, i sat in the back of Corey's car boot so that we could get a steady shot of the band running towards the camera, we decided to do this shot even though it was not planed because this has been a common way to shoot a running to camera scene.

The last scene was slightly difficult to film because of timing, for this scene I was operating the camera, Ryan was directing the actors for timing purposes and Corey was working with Matt (lead singer) for musical timing and lip syncing. For the first few takes Paula (Police officer) was going too fast for me to keep up with and sometimes covering the camera with the balaclavas. 

 One of the difficulty's with removing one balaclava and revealing one underneath was that the underneath balaclava would sometimes come off or move over Matt's face and ruin the ability to lip sync, we firstly tired to pin the lower balaclava to his t-shirt but i realized that  this could ruin the t-shirt if Paula pulled too hard, so we used a hair bobble to tie the balaclava tight and tuck it under so that it wouldn't pull off.

Overall we believe that we have filmed everything now, so all we need to do is eddit.