Today we have spent the lesson planning when we are going to film next and organising everything we will need. We have decided to film our petal location as we have ordered the petals off of Ebay and they should have arrived by then. The forecast also tells us that there are chances of snow, which we are excited about as this would be a great oppertunity to get some great footage.

Here is a Youtube clip of the rose petal dream from American Beauty as this also inspired our idea..

Over the past few months I've been watching Super Natural, an American television series which debuted on September 13, 2005 and I absolutely love it. I'm currently working my way through the box set. It Stars Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester and Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester, the series follows the brothers as they hunt demons and other figures of the supernatural. The series is produced by Warner Bros. 


I've noticed that they use lots of creative camera angles and shots which I've found really adds to the drama and excitement of it all. For example at one point Sam and Dean are examining a body in a morgue. At the end of the scene Dean pushes the body back into the freezer, however the camera is in the place of the body so as the door slides back into the freezer the camera goes in with it. The gap between inside the freezer and outside the freezer gets smaller as the door closes until the camera is in complete darkness. I really liked this shot as I thought it was an effective way to transit between the two scenes. It was quite a chilling moment as it puts us, the viewers, in place of the dead body.


Below is a clip from YouTube showing highlights from different episodes from season 2, showing the funny love hate relationship between the two brothers Sam and Dean.

Digipak annotation..

The Front cover..
I decided that I wanted to have me and Beste on the front cover of my digipak as I liked the idea of featuring the artists on the front, so that people can identify who we are in our music video. I used Adobe Photoshop to enhance the contrast of the photo so that we could stand out more. I then opened up our logo in a separate tab, selected all, copied and then pasted it on top of our photo. Our logo obviously had a white background which I removed using the magic eraser tool, a very lengthy process, having so many separate bits to our logo. This then allowed the logo to sit nicely on top of our photo without a white background separating it. Finally I added in the album name which I chose to be our main song  'The Potential Breakup Song' as I noticed this is something many artists do, eg Lady Gaga with her album name 'Born This Way' which is one of her songs. I decided to use the font Lucida Calligraphy as it's quite a feminine font and went well with our fancy twirly logo.

The Back Cover..
I quite liked the idea of having both outer covers of my digipak similar, and so I used another image from our photo shoot to feature us again on the back. I needed however to find a picture showing quite a large area of background so that I would be able to include our track list. After carefully selecting an image where we were positioned in such a way to have room for the songs, I again enhanced the contrast of the image to match the front image. I then wrote out our final track list on Microsoft word, in the same Lucida Calligraphy font and copied and pasted it onto our image. I again used the Magic eraser tool to rid of the white background making the text sit on top of the image. I then moved on to making my bar code which I made using software such as Photoshop and Microsoft Word. I found an image on clip art which I used as a template to help me make my own. I used the line tool on Photoshop to create different sized lines and carefully placed them together. I then looked at a selection of different bar codes on Cd's I had at home and discovered that they all had 13 numbers. I therefore decided to also include 13 numbers when making my own.

Here is my bar code..

Below is the text displayed underneath my bar code. From looking at other Cd's I noticed that I had to include executive producers (us), a copyright symbol (made on Microsoft word), a distribution company name which I chose to be called 'Ivory Keys' (inspired from white keys on a piano), as well as a message about violation of the laws. I included this in order to make my work look more professional. I also made sure that I used the same Lucida Calligraphy font so that my digipak remained consistent throughout.

Inside Left

I wanted to make the inside fairly different to the outside, and so I picked a colourful more quirky image. We both really liked the idea of writing messages on balloons, so we decided to experiment with this idea and took some pictures. I feel that it reflects our youthful ditzy characters as artists. On Photoshop I enhanced the contrast making the balloons appear brighter in order to stand out more. I also used the clone stamp to cover the drain in the background with grass so that it didn't distract from the balloons which are the focus.

Inside Right

I found this particular side of my digipak the hardest. I decided to incorporate the idea of our animation into the CD design and so using the paint tool on Photoshop I created my own picture using ideas I'd gathered from Google. I tried many different background designs to go behind the CD however I felt that the colours didn't particularly go with the inside left. Each time I tried a new background I had to use the eraser tool to erase the CD section, carefully keeping within its outline. After many attempts of this I finally found a picture of some daisies which I took on holiday, as the green colour went well with the picture on the inside left design. I used the fading eraser tool and with a brush size of 300 I carefully erased the CD section. However half way through I noticed that the faded effect looked quite effective and inspired the idea of having the CD piecing together with the background so that when it's put in its case the background image matches with it.

Here are some of the other designs I had made which were slightly more simple as I was still in the process of getting used to Photoshop..

I quite liked this design however i felt that it looked slightly plain and so I wanted to experiment more with using a picture rather than just a colour.

This Background image above was a replica of the image on the left hand side of my digipak however I felt that this would have looked fairly repetitive and boring having it on both sides.

 This is the background image in the design above, the disc would have sat on top However the colour on the outside edge did not appear to go well with the inside left design.

Here's a reminder of my final design. I asked some members of my family for advise and they said that I needed to enlarge the logo as they were unable to see what it said. I took their advise and enlarged it and I agree that it looks much better.

Spine

In order to make the spine of my CD design I decided to use the logo which I made when me and Beste were working on our final design. It's basically a simpler version of our actual logo, the title of our band in a twirly font, minus all the other bits around it, as these wouldn't all fit on the spine. I again used the cupids and hearts as these are an on going theme throughout our work.

In order to come up with our track list me and best each came up with a list of 12 songs and from these we picked our favourites..

Here was Beste's list..

Live Laugh Love
Dear karma
Keep on wondering
Like the rest
Those were yesterdays feelings
Today's your day
What we love
Just wanna have fun
Only a matter of  time
We're young, wild & free
I'm done, have fun
Dream big
Nothing to lose
Come alive in the night time
Born to love


And here is our final list displayed on our digipak..


The Potential Breakup Song
Smile For Me
Stay Away Cupid
That was Yesterday
Dear Karma
Young Wild & Free
You're the Sun on a Cloudy Day
Live Laugh Love
Green Eye Envy
Watched Me Walk Away
Cross Your Heart
Born to Love

Here are my final digipak deigns..

Front

Back

Inside Left

Inside Right (CD)

Spine

Here is my list of song ideas, Beste is going to post some of her ideas up too so that we can pick our favourite

The Potential Breakup Song

Smile For Me

Stay Away Cupid

You Promised

You’re the Sun on a Cloudy Day

Take My Hand

Butter Wouldn’t’ Melt

It Was You

Green Eye Envy

Watched Me Walk Away

Cross your heart

Done and Dusted

Today me and Beste spent the lesson in the photography room setting up and taking pictures for our digipaks. We tried many different poses and had lots fun taking the pictures. We set up a white back ground and the photography lighting equipment so that we could get clear and professional looking photos. Having previously planned our outfits made everything flow smoothly and we managed to eventually get some good pictures. I have already started planning my digipak, coming up with a list of song titles which will be placed on the back,  as well as planning where certain images will appear (which will be posted at a later date). Here is the template which is going to help me create my design..

On Wednesday during my free period I decided to try and attempt at making an animation by drawing. At first I tried drawing the stick people again and again on separate pieces of paper but noticed that in each drawing the people looked different. I therefore decided to make photocopies of the first drawing which I could then add the hearts and the speech bubbles to. This was a very lengthy process which took a lot care in order to make sure the hearts and letters were all in the exact same places. However with the hearts I changed their positioning each time moving them up slightly then down slightly to try and give the effect that they were beating. I also carefully planned for the mouth on the male stick man to open and close in time with what he was saying rather than just having it open and close randomly.

During today's lesson we decided to film the animation. We had to line the paper up very carefully and make sure that with each shot the placing of the stick people stayed the same so that it wouldn't move around when we edited them all together. We inserted our animation shots between the logo shot and the shot of me on the steps and made sure that we had cut them down enough to fit in time with the music. Once we were happy with our animation and the timing, we continued editing the footage in which we had previously filmed. We made sure that all the lip syncing was precise, as this is very important in order to achieve a professional looking music video.

Here is what we have put together so far..



As you can see we have decided to change the video effect on imovie of the shots where I am staring at the clocks. We did this to show that it is in the past, which is also shown by the fact that I am not singing. At the moment we know that it looks slightly random but hopefully once we add in more of these shots, with this effect, it will become more obvious to the audience.

Today me and beste have been working very hard on our music video. We managed to edit some footage on imovie for the opening of our music video. We also managed to film some footage of the phone which we see when the lyrics say 'for you to call back'. We wanted to make this shot a bit more interesting and so we decided to zoom out beginning the shot very close on the phone creating a blurry effect which was intentional.

We have also managed to schedule one more days to film and also take pictures for our digipaks. We are hoping to do this on Friday the 13th. Unlucky for some hopefully not us!

Here is a small video put together showing you our work..

Monday was a very long day of preperation and filming. We spent the morning shopping for all our props such as the clocks, a birthday cake, glitter, bubbles, petals etc. We then went back to my house to begin filming. We started off with the introduction to our music video. We tried a couple of different ideas for this, suchas having bubbles float and then pop on our logo but then I suggested that we should try covering our logo in glitter then blowing it away left to reveal our name..'The Capulets'. We really liked the outcome of this one inparticular. We used silver, pink and purple glitter as we wanted to stick to our girly bright colour scheme. I then blew the glitter away using a hairdryer which worked effectively and we tried this a couple of times just in case we found something wrong with it when editing. This took us a while to set up as we discovered a number of problems. We couldn't adjust the camera to fit the logo onto the screen without it cutting bits off so I printed a smaller copy which allowed us to work around this problem.

After spending lots of time cleaning up the glitter we moved onto another rather messy piece of footage where we have a shot of a birthday cake smashing. This goes with the lyrics 'Except for the fact it was my birthday', where she is angry that her boyfriend has forgotten her birthday. We went to a number of shops to try and find a suitable cake, with lots of cream so that it could splatter, however when we finally found one it was the last left. This meant that we could do one one take, and so there was quite abit of pressure to get it right the first time round. Luckily after carefully adjusting the camera and positioning ourselves correctly, Beste pressed record and I dropped the cake!

Here is before picture of the cake..

And here it is after..



We then moved on to the clock scene where we are introduced to the first artist, in this case me. Originally we wanted to hang the clocks on the wall however the wall in which we had planned to do this was not wide enough to fit me and the clocks in the shot. We still wanted to keep the idea so we tried to think of other places we could do this for example lying on the floor with the clocks surrounding me however we already have an over head shot when we use our petal location. We then put the clocks on the stairs instead as we felt this was quite a funky idea. We tried a variety of different shots including a low-angle shot which has the camera looking up at the subject, who then appears important, powerful, or domineering, exactly the effect we were hoping for.

Here are some pictures showing you my costume and our location taken during filming..

Here is our final logo which we have chosen. We decided to use Beste's one as we both liked it best. However I did want to have some input so we decided to incorporate my idea of the cupids as they are a representation of love. We liked the fact that it is quite a busy logo as it reflects the fun creative style we are hoping to bring to our music video.

Tomorrow me and Beste have arranged to get together and film. We want to try and film our animation and so have both designed a logo so that we can then choose which we like best. This will obviously be the logo which we will use on our digipaks. I really like Beste's logo which she made on photo shop, it suits our electo pop genre and youthful feminine style in which we are hoping to achieve in our music video. As I do not have Photoshop my logo is quite simple, having used Microsoft word, however I decided that I should still try to make something so that we can have the choice. I went with the whole love story theme by using the small silhouettes of cupid as well as the small entwined red love hearts. Its very basic, here it is..

This one below is Beste's design which I really like..