General Info,

What type of production are you proposing?

.The product in which Sam and I are proposing is a music video. This idea stood out to us, as opposed to either a Newspaper or a short film; as we both have a great passion for music.

If you are making a music video, which song will you be using? What will be the main sections of the video be about? Will you use performance/narrative?

.As previously stated we intend to make a music video, the song choice being Ocean & Atlantic performed by Mayday Parade. The main sections of the video will be about girl that is being sung about, to create a narrative, hence why in our music video we will be using narrative to create a contrasting persona; as we are also using performance, whereby Sam & friends will be filmed playing the featured instruments.

If you are making a music video, can you identify influences? Are there other music videos/music performers you will be looking at as influences?

.The first given influence when incorporating editing techniques & different range of shots is Mayday Parade itself, we watched a number of Mayday Parade music videos; noting down edits/shots which we liked and believed we could pull off in our own video. Other influences include Yellow Card & Alexandra’s Final Episode, as they conform to the genre of our music choice & because they use a good range of shots which caught our attention, whereby it connotes narrative which is what we’d like to incorporate into our video.

By Jack Pollock

Test Shots

Photo settings:

Just off Victoria street, Bristol, heart industrial shots

Middle of abandoned house, Failand, band shots

Brean Down Beach, Dad shots and running shots

Further down beach, dramatic shots of protagonist

Downs pathway, Bristol, photo memories shot

Downs bench, Bristol, for sleeping in city shot

Behind Bristol General Hospital, for paper hearts shot

Inside drama studio, for cutting up paper hearts shot

Living room of abandoned house, for all band shots

By Sam Austin

Final Digipak

These are the three pages of the digipak, the first being the middle page, the second being the back page and the third being the front page. We decided to have the protagonist in the digipak since she is central to the narrative of the music video, which is very narrative orientated. We also continued the theme of sunsets and beaches since some of our most common shots were of sunsets, so it is more likely to stick in the consumer's mind. As well the beaches conform to the convention of indie music since Mayday Parade do have an indie sounding influence. We used photoshop on this as well as using it for the poster due to the technical adaptability of the program to do almost anything possible with photo-manipulation. I had to invert the photo so the flower was on the other side of Emma's head, since otherwise there would be a void where the flower is and it helps with her characterisation. I also had to darken her skin, since the photo is very dark so otherwise she would look too bright in comparison.We had to take many examples from other CDs and digipaks on how to structure our digipak such as Mayday Parade's original album cover of the EP Valdosta. The use of the girl with a similar complexion shows how we applied the conventions of the band with album cover. We could have used the same drawing style, however we have more expertise using photoshop and none in art. This carries the same dark colour scheme and I used and a similar cursive font which I instead used for Mayday Parade's name, since I think their font is very unoriginal and bland and doesn't show off the band's character very well. By Sam Austin


By Sam Austin

Final Poster

This is our final poster. It correlates far more with the sunset theme of our digipak which we received feedback that it was too different from the themes of our music video and especially the digipak, since people would recognise the poster was selling that particular CD. It was also far easier to place the sunset behind Emma and make it look like one picture since the mosaic pixelates the pictures. We also forgot to put the links on the bottom of the page which is a standard convention of posters.

By Sam Austin

First Draft Poster

This is the first draft of our poster, using the mosaic effect of the actual pictures as smaller pixels of the actual picture to portray inner conflict the protagonist faces in the narrative of the story. I then imported the same fonts from the digipak to make sure there is correlation between the item going on sale and the poster promoting it. We put emma into the poster since the song and music video are very narrative based, so it made sense to have the protagonist in the poster.

By Sam Austin

7th October filming

For this shoot, we went to Barrow Down beach, which was a fair drive away since most of the beaches in the area are stone beaches that cannot be driven on. We chose this beach because you can drive on it and it has a good mixture of rocks going into the sea, sandy beaches and old staircases to use that are needed for various shots. The reason we wanted a beach we could drive on is that we needed to use tracking shots using the car and having jack sitting in the open boot with a camera while I drive slowly.
We needed Emma again for this one and we asked her to dress in the same casual and carefree manner, but she would need clothes and shoes she would be comfortable running with.
A few problems we were faced with is the fact that there were a few clouds and we needed sunshine for many of our shots, so we had to wait for a few minutes between shots to get the sunshine. Furthermore we got the glare from the sun in the camera so we had to angle our shots so we didn't get any lines down our shots or effect we didn't want. During the tracking shot of Emma running it was also quite difficult to keep the camera steady with all of the bump in the beach, so we took the shot multiple times and chose the steadiest.
By Sam Austin

29th and 30th September filming

For this shoot, we did our filming in certain locations in Bristol for the 'town settings' needed. We filmed specifically on a road just off Victoria Street and on the Downs. We needed Emma Smith to attend and had to get her to wear clothes with a similar 'indie' or carefree theme which we planned would fit the persona of the character. We decided to multiple shots of the same few second to make sure that we got plenty of different angles on the action and keep to at least the one shot per three seconds.

The props that we needed were the cut-out paper hearts which we used both in the cutting out shots and in the industrial shot of them falling from Emma. The other props we needed were the cut out photos of Emma during he scene where the camera pans through the photos of her to her sitting on an outcropping of rocks.
One of the problems we faced is we again faced the fast fading daylight, so had to rush with our filming. Furthermore we had a problem with finding an industrial looking location that didn't have too many people walking back and forth so we could get a shot with only Emma in it. We faced the same problem in the shots at the downs since it is frequented by dog walkers and joggers so we had to time our shoots well.
Another problem we faced is placing the pieces of paper on the ground and making them stay there since it was a windy day. We solved this by putting small rocks on the pieces of paper so they were barely visible from the camera unless you looked for them.
A final problem we had is the fact that many of our shots were very static, so we used the Ken Burn tool in the editing stage to make the shots more dynamic and interesting for the audience.
By Samuel Austin