Research & Planning: Prop List

I've quickly put together a prop list of the key items needed in the video. Thankfully most are easy to get hold of, the only one we were having difficulty was the rope which luckily Jess looks to have sourced from a friend free of charge. However it's come to light now that we also need to find a chair after being unable to get one from home ourselves and so I've sent out a group email to my friends to see if they have one they could lend.

The props we will need are:

A rope - This will hopefully be supplied by a friend of Jess'
A ladder - Jess has sourced this from home.
Chocolate - This can easily be bought cheaply.
A car - For the home video scene to be shot inside, hopefully supplied and driven by Jess' mum.
A bike - I've found a friend who is keen to be a part of the video and is willing to supply his bike.
Makeup - The actors playing dead people will need a bit of makeup under the eyes which I can provide.

Jess and I have also come up with a way for the rope to be safely constructed yet still believable and Jess has drawn a diagram to show this:

Finished Advert

Finished Digipak

Research & Planning: Audience Print Production Feedback

I posted images of my unfinished print production onto Facebook and tagged the people I thought were most like my target audience. This was to make sure it was appealing and relevant to my audience and the genre. With regards to my advert the response was very positive with comments such as:

Josh Taylor - "I think it's very good, the colours work and everything"

Emma Harrison - "I really like it! I think you need to move the "CD out now" slighly to the left"

Leah Dennison - "Love the photo, but I agree the text needs to move slightly"


And these were some of the responses to my digipak:

Emma Harrison - "I like it but I think you could change the font for the title"

Josh Taylor - "Not such a fan of the back cover, maybe you could make it more textured?"

Milly Morris - "I think it's really good! I agree with the others about the changes though"


From this feedback I will now go on to make the changes needed to my print production.

Research & Planning: Deadline Time Plan

The deadline for our print production is on friday so I will be spending a lot of time on Photoshop over the next few days to finish both my advert and digipak. Today I was told that it was possible to download a 30 day free trial of Photoshop which I will do later when I get home so I can spend some extra time editing.

Research & Planning: Digipak Inside Images

I've chosen these images I took in the woods as the inside images of my digipak. I chose to include woody, scenic pictures to cohere to other folk digipaks, as I'd chosen to do something quite different for my front cover.

However in their original condition they didn't match the warm saturated tones of the image on the front colour and so I had to do a bit of editing. I stripped the images of their colour by using the desaturate option, I then added an orangey yellow colour filter, changing the opacity to my preference. Finally I added the grain effect to match the front cover but put it on a very low opacity to make it more subtle.

Below are the final edited images for the inside covers of my digipak. Originally I had planned to put text across the images, either lyrics or thankyous, however after some experimentation I decided it didn't look right and left it out.

Research & Planning: Work In Progress

Today I began editing the image I intend to use for my magazine advert. Using the tips from this website I started to edit the photograph to have a vintage effect.

Research & Planning: The Animatic

After storyboarding most of our video, we chose to photograph each shot and upload the images onto Adobe Premiere Pro so we could produce an animatic. After importing all the shots each needed to be resized to fit the screen, matched to the audio and some had movement added to them using the 'scale' and 'position' animation options. This produced pan shots and camera zooms, mimicing shots we imagine to be in the video.

Research & Planning: Digipak Images

A few weekends ago I went to Chichester with my family to visit my grandma, whilst there we went to the beach and I took a few photos of my cousin playing on the beach. Where previously I had intended to use shots of landscapes and illustrations for my print production I know thought these images would be perfect to use and extremely fitting to the song title "This Young Boy."

These are the my two favourite shots of those taken, and I intend to use one for my advert and one for my digipak after they have been edited.

                                                                                    

The parents of the child photographed have consented to its use.

Research & Planning: Digital Technology Conclusion

This week I set myself three targets, however I have only been able to achieve one of them. This is because it took longer than I thought to recreate the split screen effect. After looking a tutorial up on Youtube, my partner and I went outside to experiment with the video cameras.        
                                                                                                            
   To achieve the split screen, you need to film a scene  
  with something in it, then the scene again with the 
  object or person moved, however it is vital that the  
  camera is kept still otherwise the shot will look 
  disjointed. This is something we could have improved 
  on as we didn't know how to attach the camera to the 
  stand and so the final shot has turned out a bit shaky.
  We will need to learn how to attach the camera to the
  stand before final filming.

After getting the shots we edited separately so we were both able to improve our skills. I imported the videos into Adobe Premiere and lay them over each other after cropping one of them to the right. Something I found difficult was matching the objects in the picture e.g. the lamp post, but this was quickly resolved through changing the sizes of the shots.


This is a montage of the videos I created showing my experimentation with split screen and focus pulls.

Research & Planning: Location Shots

This week Jess and I went into Nunnery Wood in order to take some location shots. Although there are more attractive woods local to Worcester, we've chosen Nunnery Wood as it is right by our college therefore being the most convenient for filming as well as being a pleasant wood.

When we ventured deeper into the wood we discovered somewhere perfect for one of the last scenes of the video where the boy enters a clearing and is surrounded by the dead people he saved.  

After taking all the pictures needed for the location, I then had time to take a few shots for my print production. I particularly liked skyward shots of trees like that of Bon Iver's albums and so tried to recreate my own.

Obviously they need editing, but I plan to use these images for the inside covers of my digipak.