The brief we chose was the promotional package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with two of the following three options:
- a website homepage for the band;
- a cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package);
- a magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package).
I decided to go into a group with Sarah again this year, following our success in the last project. We felt we work best together as we have they same creative ideas from studying art and photography. I also joined with Jas, as again, she is a photography student was has a lot of technical photography knowledge. As a group we decided on making a music video along with a CD cover and an advertisement poster. All of us are particularly interested in music so we found this project the most appealing. This brief seemed exciting because there could be many ways of producing it but very early on we had the idea of creating a stop motion. We felt this would benefit us greatly because we are all photographers, using cameras and photoshop confidently. Personally, I felt more confident making an advertisement poster and CD cover because I have experience from last years coursework after making a magazine cover and double page spread. This meant I had good knowledge of photoshop and the understandings of the conventions and constructions when making my product. Stop motion is something I have never attempted before but when we spoke of the idea to make a video this way, I was intrigued and wanted the challenge of trying something new to develop my skills both in photography and film making.
After we chose our project we got straight into planning our video. We used SMART TARGETS (Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic, Time based) to plan our productions from the week we got back to college after summer break till the end of our production. This helped us plan our time management throughout the making of our production. Initially, we just had the idea of making a stop motion video. So from this idea we started to research into other stop motion videos on the internet, mainly looking at the site Youtube. I found Youtube was valuable site to use for research as video content ranged from home-made amateur videos to TV commercials. This gave us a wider view of the types of stop motion that could be created and the level of quality that could be achieved with patience. In October we presented some of our ideas to the class. Initially we came up with the idea of using people and objects in our stop motion. The idea would be that an actor/actress would be sitting on a bed playing an acoustic guitar while the lyrics of the song would tell a story on the wall behind her. The story on the wall behind would be made up from props such as household objects, writing and pictures. In the end we decided this would be too difficult to make as it would be hard to keep continuity correct and the space and props would be hard to get hold of. Also using an actor/actress would mean our filming time would be limited to when the actor/actress was free. Our second idea that we presented was a stop motion video using play dough. We would use a scene to create a story with play dough, an idea was having someone leave the room then all the things coming to life. As a group we spoke about our influences from videos such as Prodigy’s ‘Warriors Dance’. Most of the stop motion videos we looked at on Youtube contained small toys or everyday objects. These videos were obviously easier to create as the objects would be simple to work with and easily accessible. So in the end, we decided to simplify it down to just using toys and objects. In the next few weeks we created some mini stop motion videos using play dough and a rubber duck. Even though these videos were only around 20 seconds I feel we learnt a lot about creating stop motions from doing these test videos. This gave us an opportunity to see how many frames per second we needed to make our video seamless. In the industry they use 12 or 24 frames per second to create stop motion. From making our videos we found that 12 frames per second worked better. Our longest video was 40 seconds, consisting of a focus pull and pan.
When choosing the song for our video we searched through many different types of music genres but decided on using an indie/rock/pop song because this is the currently a very popular genre that appeals to a large number of people, especially in our target audience of 14-25 year old. Eventually I found the song ‘Have I Been A Fool?’ by Jack Penate and suggested this to the group. They both liked the song and we all decided it would be suitable as it was a lively, upbeat song with catchy, repetitive lyrics. This song has a strong theme of love and relationships. The lyrics speak of a good relationship going bad, and the repetitive lyric ‘Have I Been A Fool?’ is a constant reminder of uncertainty between the relationship. Using this song meant we had to get permission from the artist. We first contacted the CD company XL recordings asking for permission to use their song for our media project. When we received an email back asking us to fill in a request form and to email another member of the company. After we replied, we didn’t hear back from them. This is where our search stopped. We used the song anyway, but everywhere the video is seen we will make sure the song is credited to Jack Penate and state that this is not our song. Discovering this song was a big push creatively as it gave us a starting point for our video. Once the song was chosen, we could start our storyboard. Our storyboard was then recorded on 5 sheets containing 6 boxes on each page. Every significant change or scene was drawn and explained briefly. We worked out how long each shot would last for and where abouts in the song it will fit. Our plan was to shoot around 12 frames per second but in some parts of the video we will shoot them faster or slower to accommodate for the differences in timing and speed.
We decided to locate our filming in the classroom LG1 end room. This was only a small room but was big enough for our scene. Also it meant we were out the way and wouldn’t be disturbed often. Making a stop motion video would be time consuming in itself as it would be very detailed, so this is why we wanted to keep the location minimal. The scene we set up was a simple desk set up as if someone was working at it. While filming our stop motion we incounted many problems along the way. We were behind on schedule some weeks which slowed our production down. We did not realise how long it would take, so filming ran into the last week of the deadline. We decided to shoot the beginning and end of the video because these scenes where the bulk of the video that used this desk scene, this meant we could now take apart our set to film for the other scenes. Filming our video footage didn’t come till the every end as a result of us being behind. After each shoot, we uploaded the images and turned them into individual Quicktime movies. We did this so we’d know if we lost our production on Final Cut Pro then it could easily be put back together. We found this process challenging at first as none of us had any previous knowledge of Final Cut Pro. But each time we used the program and from experimenting with it then started to understand the basic workings of the program.
We individually researched different types of artwork on CD covers. I chose to look at covers from a range of decades and of different complexities. Initially we discussed what media we would use and decided on incorporating both photography and drawing. We also liked the idea of using stills from our video on the cover as it would show a link between the CD and the video. Individually our designs for our CD cover where draw on paper. We each drew a few designs after agreeing on using certain images within the designs. These images would be stills from the video, pictures from the stop motion and a polariod picture. Again, researching for the advertisement poster consisted of the whole group individually searching for existing design on the internet or in magazines. We then all drew up designs based on the CD cover design and then had a discussion of what we liked best. I particularly like the Florence and The Machine advert as it relates to the designs of her CD cover. This relation between the CD cover and poster is what we wanted to achieve to add continuity to our work.
Overall I feel pleased with the media package as a whole. I feel we worked efficiently together and produced a project that was favourable to us.We tried to make this as professional as we could, including as many technical elements as we could achieve. The main theme of the video was love and relationships, and I feel this theme is apparent throughout. The choice of song massively influenced our theme, and we were quickly able to come up with a story based around the lyrics. The use of the objects is to highlight the emotions and feelings relating to the relationship of the couple. The story follows a couples journey through love but also the objects. Using this song allowed the lyrics tell the story of love and relationships while we directed in relation to these words. This idea of relating the objects to humans was heavily influenced by Kate Nash’s song ‘Foundations’ where everyday objects draw into couples when the love begins, but separate again once the relationship is over. We have taken this a step further and gave our objects faces and expressions so the audience would be able to relate not only to the humans body language and expressions but also the objects. When we were creating the idea of making objects life-like, I was influence by Disney Pixar films and how they create objects or toys to make the audience believe they are real. I wanted to bring this into our film by making the objects look cute so the audience would be emotionally attracted to them and can relate to the objects. I feel that making a strong, detailed storyboard was certainly beneficial to our planning and creation of the video. I feel that planning played a key role in us understanding as a group what need to be done. Even though we were behind, looking back at the storyboard meant we could easily change parts to fit in with our time management. For example, as the deadline was approaching we had a lot of the song to fill. We didn’t believe we would have enough time to film it all so we took out the bridge. This was the best way as it allowed us to focus on the more important parts of the video. I think the main reason for us having gaps in the video was because we aimed to do 12 frame per sec, more or less depending on the speed of the scene but this got very confusing and ended up having parts of the songs longer or shorter than intended. Shooting this video was very tedious and I think we all got inpatient at times, resulting in parts of the stop motion being jumpy. Overall, we didn’t make a significant amount of changes and I think we stuck to the storyboard as well as we could. As well as the video, I am pleased with how the CD cover and advertisement poster turned out. In the end we chose a mixture of images from all of our designs and based the two products on a cork board background while things were stuck on with sellotape. The effect we wanted to achieve with this look was as if it had been home-made, just like the scrap-book and the use of household objects. We used stills from our film and a picture of ‘Tom’ to link the products to the video. The use of the polariods throughout the video and on the CD cover and advertisement poster was to highlight the fact that we are looking at a snap shot of their relationship, something that was instantly recorded. I feel both of these products don’t particularly fit the conventions and constructions of the design other than having the artist’s name, title of album and dates of release. We took careful consideration when choosing the font which would feature on both the CD cover and the advertisement poster as a font can have a huge effect on how a reputation is built. We wanted to choose something fun and quirky that would be distinctive. I feel this was a good font to choose as it is quite unusual and doesn’t seem to be common. Comparing my film to an existing media product is hard because stop motion doesn’t seem to be particularly popular with music videos, although we did find a few, it seems much more popular in short commercial adverts and videos creating art. When we researched stop motion, we were directed to user generated videos (thanks to the invention of web 2.0), those that were more amateur. I feel like our video fits with the song as well as existing music videos do, even more obvious in some cases. From the reaction of 17-19 year olds in our class, through focus groups and viewing our finished products, we received positive comments and our desire effect of people ‘awwwing’ at the characters was defiantly achieved. I believe that using a teenage couple in the video defiantly represented the view of teenage relationships, how young love can awkward, funny and painful. Our audience would defiantly be aimed at men and women, mostly teenagers because our video has a younger vibe. Younger people would be more attracted to the characters and appreciate the ‘cute’ view we are trying to display, and also the fact that it is about teenage love. Although we may be restricting our video to a younger audience, there is nothing to say older people wouldn’t understand the comical points in our video and appreciate the more technical elements within the video.
I feel I contributed an equal amount into this project as I made mocks for the CD cover, advertisement poster, filmed and assisted with the creation and moving of the set. I certainly enjoyed making this project, as I had never made a video before. Although we are all happy with the end result, we probably could have made it better if our time management was stronger and we took into account how long it would take to decently shoot each stop motion scene. I feel I now have a good amount of knowledge about Final Cut Pro and how to create a decent stop motion video. I have learnt a great deal more from this project and feel I have developed my skills of different technologies well.
