Main Task - Music Video (Final Finished Version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq4WKsH8GR8 Here is the video for Frame Of Mind's single, from their new Digipak we are working on, Windows. I am excessively proud of how the music video turned out and will be going into great detail in other posts to see how I can improve and how I may make future edits to the video. But this is my final version to complement my ancillary tasks.


Enjoy.

Auxillary Task 1 - Digipak CD designs Major Version.

(PLEASE NOTE : These are versions made post evaluation questions, therefore I have made changes after evaluating myself, in order to finish my full process that I wished to achieve)

Auxillary Task 2 - Magazine Inlet Poster - Major Version.

(PLEASE NOTE : These are versions made post evaluation questions, therefore I have made changes after evaluating myself, in order to finish my full process that I wished to achieve)

Question 1 - Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My media products were built together off a singular branding and so I feel that I had a stronger bond with each product. However the styles used within them are challenging regular statements made by the usual product manufacturers.

My products consist of a Music Video developed to fit an original song for the band Frame Of Mind. A digipak to fit there newest set of song releases, in the form of an EP, including the song with the music video. A poster and set of banners to use for social advertising. And a new logo/rebranding for the group.

To start here are the final branding images which include a full shot of the front, back and logo cover pieces.

Overall one thing that I found really strange which is something I'd never considered in my own mind with these new cardboard and vinyl cut packs is that they're not actually completely square. This meant that three pieces I had made had to be resized and changed accordingly to suit the pack.

I tried my best to work in line with criteria, though we hadn't been set any other than the specific products, I wanted to gain a criteria from the band. So I began to work with the ideas they had.

The terms they gave me that they wanted to fit their album covers were "rustic", "Handwritten" and "tree like" designs. So I still had a graphic set and idea to appease to, I found that this actually helped my work a lot! However I still tried many different image styles and brought the designs to the band to find out which way they wanted the album cover art to develop towards.

 All of these designs had a floral feel to them, some more than others, however the image to the right and above were too coloured for the bands liking, and too 'future' for the style of music.

So the band is now using the logo to the right for their social media, and above for the disc packaging.

When I brought this back cover design back to the band it seemed a bit silly since they hadn't chose their track titles yet! however I wanted to keep the 'handwritten' theme and try and continue the rustic feel of the front cover, whilst making the track  titles more visually interesting.

I kept the table and floral design from the front because I loved the idea of having an almost running theme with the packaging.

I also worked on incorporating the 'FOM' watermark and the production companies watermark branding. The band said they were fine with this,

The final cover actually went through a good few different stages, a lot of props within the photo were way too big, stood out too much and weren't really aiding the minimal aestheticism. when I brought the first cover version to the them they asked if they could see the title piece a bit more clearly, so I decided to add some additional glow and shadow effects, with abstract paint splashes. each using different lighting effects. However I thought it may be a bit too 'future' again, but it was the exact opposite... They loved the style and asked me to import it into the other designs. (you can see it in the design above the front cover).

The ways in which my digipak challenges your typical digipak conventions is by the way in which I've placed a lot of the items (you can see it in the full template above).

A lot of my style models that I wanted to use as reference had not really tried the style of art that I was going for. So I had to go out on a limb by using it. however a lot of the packs I sought to reference that I own were three piece packs (as seen to the right) that contained multiple booklets.
And the disc design was different from the artwork everytime.

After searching through my CD collection I managed to find one that was a perfect digipak type and art style. Where the art is continuos through the piece and the CD.

My digipak challenges the conventions of the Linkin Park digipak because of how it uses the same picture for a cd design and because rather than having a inlet booklet, mine only has a sheet with social media links for the fans, and the band information is within the actual packaging artwork.

For a large in depth overview of all the graphics that I have made and it goes into more detail and assesment of the items I produced, so do have a quick watch of this presentation you can find on a previous post here. http://oa2mediajasonsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/graphics-evaluation-prezi.html

Question 1 (Continued) - Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

In many ways I can actually say that the themes of my music video actually came across well in relation to the Digipak that I developed, though I think it's definitely something I could've branded on further in the video. 

I thought to make my blog a little more collective I'll post my most recently finished version of the music video. Then list the references for the video underneath and explain the links and ways that it challenges the references.

Here's the two different reference videos as well as my close to final edition.

The conventions from each music video listed below are really easy to spot in my video and how I use these as general design and shoot influences.

In terms of techniques that the videos use that I challenge, it'd mainly be placement techniques in terms of shots. How I've chosen to use my shots, I've used a lot more stabilised things, rather than moving shots, and I haven't used as many 'rehearsal' black & white shots.

I tried to lay off the effects and such for the video editing, I just wanted the shots to fall together into place without any post effects. This was just because, with the lighting I'd chosen, I felt that it would be too much to add layers of saturation to an already brightly lit and coloured shot. 

The second music video (this also relates to a lot of conventional music videos with the band in them) stays completely set in one place and uses a lot more shots of the set pieces as a way to establish the setting.


I didn't want to do too much that developed where we were because to be honest, I think you can tell it's just a little rehearsal space, I almost like the fact that there is casual bits of paper and noticed boards dotted around the room.

In the third video, another thing that seems common of these conventional "let's video the band!" kind of videos is this idea that footage from absolutely everywhere will work.

With that being true, I still wanted stuff that was more fitted than this, I wanted some shots that showed a very personal and full on interaction with the song. hence the room shots (we ended up running the song more than four times to compile enough working video footage) and a bit of rehearsal and live footage, but it was all of the relevant song, this made editing a lot easier. And overall I think my video became way more coherent. 

The first video used completely one colour lighting, and I feel it was there was too many sets of the same lights. To develop this idea I wanted to use a lot of different lights with more colour and then only use lights to brighten the areas that needed it (we did this by adding small block lights behind each member to make them more visible to the camera).

I wanted to have small essences of my second reference video in my video so I just tried out simple phone videos (since my phone is decent quality on the camera) and it turned out the shots worked really well, so in a way I didn't develop the shots too much, though I continued to try and crop different areas of these shots and use balance focus' to make the shots more prominent on different members.

One thing that I wanted my video to feel more consistent with is the idea of being visually interesting with live performance, I asked for no audience shots and hardly any friends in the video, sounding rather harsh, but I wanted the video to be completely personal and so I tried making sure that all the shots were developed more with this in mind.

Things I would like to change for the final version

I would like to alter the visual at some points because it turns out the over excessive lights have actually caused a slight saturation complication to the footage, a simple over dub in Adobe After Effects will completely remove the problem and will make the shots more professional.

I'd like to create some simple social links as outro pieces, maybe to dub over other rehearsal footage. And I'd like to create an introduction the video that could add more value, I'm thinking maybe a quote from someone that means a lot to the band members, then the title of the song performed in the video.

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Personally over all at this stage, everything else that I could be doing is just extra design influences by public feedback. But I loved how this version of the video turned out overall and I actually adore the visual quality, all the shots came out personal because it was clear the song was being performed, each different shot had an element of us enjoying ourselves while playing the track. I'm in love with how well the lighting actually added to the atmosphere of the shots and I think it shows in a way how small and intimate the areas were where we performed. I'm super glad with this version and I think from here on out everything else is just going to be changes based on other personal and professional post-production opinions.

For a major assesment which fully shows all of my reference style models in a way that shows how well/not well I managed to achieve my aims that I set out to achieve in the first place. Which helped me assess how well I worked creating this video, go to this previous blog link where you can find a full presentation with comparison shots. http://oa2mediajasonsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/idea-stems.html

Question 2 - Evaluation

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think when you see the whole package as a development next to one another it's really useful. It opens up gateways for new designs as well, and other music videos that are perhaps more influenced by the art and aestethic of the digipak and poster features.

The band said that they didn't want themselves to ever be taken too seriously, there still needed to be a hint of plainness about them. So the text under the band members names has small, funny descriptions and the images of them in the banner photo are simple lighting effected live photos.

I would've liked my video to be a bit more intertwined with the design of the digipak and branding, but that being said, I think the glow lighting and shadow styles actually flow into the idea that the music video presents. As I said earlier about developing some social media ideas into the products, I would use the same font styles as the digipak and probably open the video with the F.O.M logo. The circular logo would be very fitting to transition in the intro and outro of the video as a transparent .png file.

The idea of just having instruments lying around ties in with the idea of having very few instruments with the band. The presentation of lots of lighting with little amount of props is something deliberate.

I would've liked to attach more floral designs from the album cover into the video but with the amount of lighting I think it probably would've caused too much distraction. However the combination of the more modern aestethic with the colourful lighting makes a nice warm contrast that fits in with the idea of the branding that is memorable to the band. Also I think it's effective the way the lighting is used to spotlight the features of the band, the same way I use the lighting in the banner photo to excentuate the points I need to.

I think it would've been more effective if I'd have continued a colour scheme throughout the artwork and the music video however overall I'm happy with how each indvidual products turned out.

Question 3 - Evaluation

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
I actually found it really useful compared to my AS feedback, the social audience and group around the band were really helpful and direct with what they think should be done!

I even got really great feedback from the bands photographer and the bands event promoters in ways to alter each task piece during the work in progress stages and make a close to perfect final piece (aside from the changes I spoke about earlier).

The feedback from the band themselves was to stop being so over the top with lighting effects, things needed to be simpler, and have close to no images of them or none at all. They wanted the music to be represented by an image slate so people will go and listen to the music.

Personal quotes that really helped shaped my work were from close friends and event promoters overall. Purely because the promoters know what work best inside that industry of acoustic rock music and developing show posters for similar kind of bands. Other than that I think my close friends knew more about myself and the bands kind of music that helped to shape the direction of the graphic work.

This is the work I sent over to one of my friends and posted the same images across my social networks (facebook to the left).

Here are some comments that I found particulary useful (I screenshotted them just for re-affirming)...

You can easily see from the first version of the image (Seen on the left here) how we came to arrive at the final version (shown below). I drew the conclusion of changing the image colour because my friend Sean who is also one of the band members wanted a more plain visual that didn't hint towards other musical genres. Over complexity like in the image to the left tends to imply the likes of electronic music and dance music.

Even with the extra floral designs it didn't help towards the design since it was still juxtaposed by the blue coloured shapes with transparent gradients.





After we changed the colours, I then spoke again with the whole band and we decided that the over the top floral designs had to be removed but we still needed the complexity that was there before, we achieved this 'professional' outlook by forcing a darker drop shadow on the logo and the inner circle to make a stronger image. Lastly we decided to re-apply the floral design but with a new lighting layer that allowed the green and pink colours of the flower to show through.

You can see in the above version of the logo how I altered it after gaining feedback from our our promoter about what would be a more professional overlook of the whole digipak and what would make for a more prominent poster.

We both agreed that working a darker atmosphere into the digipak artwork would add for more complexity to the full logo and still allow room for the general design of props and the lighting designs. After changing the first logo design I kind of had an inkling of where to go with all the future pieces for the digipak and the only thing I actually ended up changing was the lighting design and placement of the lighting shards on the tracklist (back cover).