Editing...

Today I spent some time independently editing the Birdy video Radhika and I made. This was edited on final cut pro. Our teacher had organised a lesson on final cut pro, at a local college by one of the teachers. Radhika and I, went along for the day, and we found this such a help with editing. Although I still encountered a slight complication, when using the program, this is mostly because during AS, I had used iMovie. I realised it’s harder than I thought to convert a shot filmed in day light, to night time, as well as keeping her body still light enough to see. Clearly Birdy had good lighting on her when filming and we don’t have them resources. : (. In the end I managed to produce a really nice piece.

Shooting Birdy's Shelter Video

This is a short blog post on how I spent my February half term…

My fellow media coursework member Radhika and I decided to recreate the incredible song Shelter, by Birdy. We both really like this artist, so we thought it would be good to do something we were enthusiastic about. I really wanted to get behind the camera, seen as I was constantly being filmed for the Blue Skies video. Therefore Radhika was the actor, which she really enjoyed doing. We aimed to take shot for shot, of the first minuet of the song, and as precisely as we could. Radhika was great in taking direction and she also was great help in suggesting other shots we could use. It was a long process but we managed to find a perfect location in the end. It was hard, due to the fact we were filming in a cold month, which meant there were no leaves on the trees, and in Birdy’s video her forest is full of foliage. This made it extremely hard to find the right sort of background location for us to film. However a positive is the type of overcast day it was, which fit with Birdy's weather in her video. The lighting worked very well, and in some places we had to edit the scene darker.
We managed to pull off quite a challenging long day and in my opinion I think the music and the scenes we took works well in establishing similar themes and conventions to Birdys origional video.

We took quite a few shots of heer singing the song, so that we could sync her lips in time with the music later in editing. We used Radhika's phone to get the song from YouTube so that she was in time.

Overall it was a great experience to learn from. The main things I will take away from this would be to, plan, plan, plan and also make sure to take lots and lots of shots, so that you always have a back-up if a particular shot doesn’t look right once you’re editing in post-production.

Indie album artwork

This is a collection of different indie band album designs that I thought were particularly eye catching. 

I found that some designs focus around animals and wildlife, without the band being the focus. The images are artistic and non-conventional, often playing on strong editing, conjoining many images into one. 

This gives me an idea of how far we can use editing many images together for the front cover.

Firstly of Montreal's album cover above conveys wildlife, with flowers and if you look closely the bigger monkey within the image, you will find it is holding a cocktail class, it looks like a spirit drink of some sort, which is quite ironic for a monkey to be holding it in this way. The colour scheme is bright and interesting because the closer you look at the image the more weird creatures you find; in my opinion the flowers look a little bit like monsters with large teeth. This album artwork looks so good because it makes you look closer and interpret it how you will, rather than seeing pop artwork which simply displays the artist, usually in a provocative manner, if they are a female.

Next up is the 20 Minute Loop album cover, this is a very strange piece of artwork, and it has incorporated Japanese art, in an animation form, along with giant human dressed bunnies. This image is dream like because of the strange elements that have been incorporated. I'm not quite sure what the message is, but the bunny looks mischievous and a little sinister in my opinion. As for the colour scheme, pale colours dominate the artwork along with the title standing out in this album, unlike the of Montreal cover, which is hard to interpret.

The Drums album is so classic and simple, the blue curtain, which leaves me with an image of the band getting ready to jump on the stage and start performing. The white block letters work so well, because they are the main focus and it gets straight to the point of who the band are. This also shows me which kind of genre the band are in, because it's not a name of an artist, such as Katy Perry, or Alex Clare, or David Guetta like in pop. Indie artists have cool band names.   

The above image is the album 'Meet Me on the Left Coast' by the band, The Summer Set. To be honest I had to research this one, because I had no clue who this band were, and the writing isn't the clearest. I like the polar bear, this particularly represents my ideas about indie bands using animals and nature in their artwork. It reminds me of Ben + Jerry's Baked Alaska ice cream, probably just because of the polar bear and the similar colourings. I like the design, but yet again this tells me nothing about the band. The fonts are grey, pale yellow and pale grey, the album title is meet me on the left coast, so I guess this relates to the polar bear in some way. Maybe polar bears are found on the left coast. : / Overall I like the font, but it's a little hard to read.

Foals Antidotes album cover is interesting because of the sort of Banksy distortion of the boys face. It's interesting to see the pale cream background, with the main focus being the mouth, which is bright and the most intriguing thing to look at. His eyes seem blank, this could represented the fact he can't speak in some way and his views are not heard because of this focus on his mouth. Also this is interesting because there is no real image of the boy, it's a sketch; this might not even be someone in the band.

I've found that Indie album artwork, doesn't have to include the band, it allows the creativity to flow and the more artistic and creative you are the more interesting the album looks and some people like walking into a shop and seeing a crazy looking CD; they might buy it because of this aspect. Pale colours and abstract images seem to be a common theme running through all of these albums, apart from maybe The Drums image.

Digipak

This is a detailed plan of how the digipak will look. (Bear in mind this in an indie artist)

Firstly I have included a plan of what I expect to be on a digipak; this is useful as I can always look back at this, and see if I have missed out anything vital. 

I also have a structure plan of how the digipak will be pieced together and what the panels will have on them. 

In addition I have sketched out the front and back of the digipak, although the images are not on the pages as they will be displayed in the right hand column of this post.

This will be the digipak's front cover.

This may be inserted inside the digipak.

This will be on the back of the digipack, and it will be placed in the middle of the square with the track titles around it.