Andrea and I have been discussing when we are available to go out and do the main part of our filmimg which will be located at southend. We both came to the agreement that sundays are good for us to spend the whole day on filming as this will allow us to get more footage because we'll both be free and won't need to rush. We have arranged to meet up next sunday in order to get some more footage to start editing as we have practically finished our introduction and first verse. We will also be arranging days and times we are both available to stay behind after school to do some editing once we have got further footage.

Presenting Our Digipaks

In Friday's lesson we all had to present our digipaks to the class and talk about how we created it and how everything linked in with our music video. After presenting my digipak to the class i got some audience feedback from my class mates to see what they thought of it. One of my class mates pointed out the fact that i used 'Aly&Aj' in my links rather than 'The Capulets'. I'm glad that she pointed this out because I had not noticed this myself. Apart from that everything else seemed to be fine.

I had a close look at my previous digipak and decided that i wasn't so sure about whether i was happy with it so i created a new one from scratch using PhotoShop. I'm happy with how it looks and prefer it better to my previous design as i think my new one looks more professional and fits in better with our theme.

For my front cover I decided to use more laid back photos that we had taken on our days/nights out which fits in with our natural look. My previous digipak had photos of us which we had taken in the studio we had set up which didn't really go with our music video and the way we wanted to represent ourselves. I believe that this digipak design works better than the previous one because it's bold, more colourful

I decided to put our studio photos on the back cover and added a film strip effect with a gradient colour over them to make it look more quirky and fun. I didn't want to put these photos on the front cover of my digipak because they are more staged and not very natural looking compared to the ones on my front cover.

I've kept the same production company logo as before and have added fan page links for Facebook, Myspace and our music website all named TheCapulets. I've also used a girly font for our song titles in keeping with our feminine theme.

I decided to keep the CD design i previously made for my first digipak as I believe that it fits in well with my final digipak design and follows the same colour scheme.

For the inside left of my digipak I decided to include a 'book of lyrics & photos' section which would be a little book that you'd pull out with the lyrics of the songs on our CD and some photos of the artists. I chose to do this to make it more personal and because I have come across lyric books in digipaks before which i quite like. I tried to keep my digipak consistent with it's black and pink themed background. I added the same airbrush effect to the background by creating a messy zig zaggy look. I then added the photo of me that was taken whilst I was setting up the studio for our photoshoot. I was actually holding the blank board when the photo was taken, I did not add that in myself. I added a semi circle to the top of the board to make it look like a slot and also added the text on the front using a feminine font.

Finished Digipak

Here is my completed digipak

The top half of my digipak design is everything that will be seen on the outside when unfolded and the bottom row is what the inside of my digipak looks like. Starting from the top left image which is the front cover of my digipak, i decided to go against the normal idea of having a photo of the artists on the front cover because most artists seem to do that in order to be recongnised by their face and to become more familiar with audiences. However, I didn't want to do what is already really common and expected as most girl groups always tend to have a photo of themselves on the front cover, so do the artists we're looking at 'Aly&Aj'.

As you can see all I've put on my front cover is our band name/logo as this is what I would like everyone to recognise us by. Another reason to why I decided to keep my front cover logo based is because our logo is quite colourful and bold so i didn't want anything to take the attention away from that and didn't want it to look extremely busy. I also wrote 'Deluxe Edition' on the front to make it look and feel more professional and official.

This was my first digipak template and a rough idea of the look i was going for. But after i went back on it several times i came up with new ideas and decided to change/add different things to it. Below you will see the step by step development and changes of my digipak ideas.

List Of Song Ideas

Here are my list of song ideas for my didgipak, Andrea also came up with some ideas that are on her blog. We both want to use the same song titles to make it look more professional and make it feel like a real digipak. We will be having a discussion about both our ideas and will pick our favourites.

Live Laugh Love
Dear karma
Keep on wondering
Like the rest
Those were yesterdays feelings
Todays 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

Below are the ones we came to the decision of using after collecting some audience feedback from students in our media class:

The Potential Breakup Song
Smile For Me
Stay Away Cupid
Those WereYesterday's Feelings
Dear Karma
We're 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

Digipak Photos

Andrea and I spent Monday's lesson taking photos for our digipaks. I asked my photography teacher if he'd give us permission to use the room to set up the studio and take some photos for our media and thankfully he did. So we set up the white roll background, got out the lights, tripod and we used my camera. As we both needed to be in the photos together one of our friends kindly took some photos for us.

The whole purpose of these photos were to look professional and done in a studio and i think we managed to achieve this look. The theme for the day was black and white, I wanted to use black and white themed photos for my digipak because I want the colourful elements such as our logo etc to stand out.

Below is a sneak peak!

Digipak Wordle

Rather than writing a plain list of ideas i created a wordle to make it more interesting and fun to look at and read. I've used specific colours to represent the main colours you will find on my digipak.

Music Video so far

Here is our music video so far, we added in our animation in today's lesson and also done some more editing. I think we've nearly finished editing our opening but we may have to go back over it when we add in new footage. Andrea and I are both very proud of what we have put together so far and we are hoping to meet up on monday to take some studio photos for our digipaks and also meet up next sunday to go up to Southend to do some more filming for our chorus'
How the animation was made:
Andrea and I both done research together to find some examples of stop animations and to have an idea of what an animation needs to include. We then came up with the idea of having an image that represents the concept of our music video. On Wednesday we decided to prepare our animation. Andrea drew the images over and over again then realised that the pictures won't all look the same so she drew one and when we were happy with it we got it photocopied about 20 times. She then added on the speech bubbles, letters and hearts. We then took some photos on her camera in order to practice and have an idea of what it might look like in the video. We both really liked the idea and the way it looked so in todays lesson Andrea brought along the pictures, we set up the camera and then I filmed it as Andrea changed the sheets. I filmed each sheet for about 4 seconds and paused in between each shot. We then had plenty of time to upload our footage to our mac and start editing!
I think it looks really cute and fits in well with the message in our chosen song. I made some of my family members watch our music video so far and everyone seems to really like what we've managed to put together. Everyone also pointed out the animation and think it looks really good which must mean so far so good!

I've listened to this song before but I had never watched or seen the music video to it until it came up on a music channel that I was watching on TV. I deciced to upload the video to my blog as it is from the electropop genre and so is the song we have chosen to produce a music video to. I think that it represents the electropop genre well through the style of dress, make-up, patterns, colour, graphics and editing techniques.

The Woman In Black

I recently saw the trailer to The Woman In Black appear on TV and since then I have been wanting to go and watch it at the cinema. I have been following cinema film times closely and release dates. I'm hoping the film doesn't let me down because by the looks of the trailer it looks like a really good film. One thing that I think is a little strange is the viewing age of the film, it has been classified as a 12 but looks far more scarier, I was expecting it to at least be classified as a 15. I'm hopefully going to go and watch it soon and if so I will post up an analysis of it to tell you what I think.

Below is the trailer:

Music Video...

Today Andrea and I have had a very eventful day, we not only managed to edit the opening of our music video we also did some more filming for our clock scene. We've had a lot of fun working on our music video so far and I think we're keeping on track well. Furthermore we have also added a date to our schedule of when we will next be meeting up which will be on Friday 13th to take some studio photos for our digipaks.

Below is the footage from our music video, enjoy...

Popular Music

Music is part of our everyday lives, whether its from film music, music in shopping centres, poluphonic ringtones on your mobile phone, MP3 players, ipods, video games, we are actually surrounded by music all day. The music industry and the media in general constantly improves and changes in order to achieve new goals such as to maintain and develop audiences. Marketing is another element that needs to work towards improvement as music artists, especially in the recent years have realised that they must move from 'band to brand' in order to survive cause thats what audiences tend to go for.

Development of pop music

Music and technology have always been closely linked. I found out that historically, music was all live performance by the musicians or singers. I also found out in my research that as silent films took off there'd be a pianist playing live in the cinema to create mood and atmosphere for the audience. With the invention of the mass-produced record came pop music, the most significant thing about this was the invention of the 'teenager'. The 'teenager' was a cultural label created to define a particular kind of adolescent rebellion. the identity of the teenager was defined first by the fact that they listened to pop music and secondly by the clothes they wore to show that they belonged to this music culture. To me this sounds like a stereotypical explanataion.
Subcultural groups developed as pop music became more popular. Each group were subdivided by style of music and also style of dress. Hence the pitched battles between Mods and Rockers in the 1960s. Today the 'music scene' is considerably broader and there are countless amounts of ways of recieving and accessing music from various different sources.

New technologies and pop music

Technological development continues to influence the ways in which music is recieved and therefore affects the cultural structures around this consumption, e.g.
Technological developments have enabled far more artists to reach a wider audience. Whereas once, recording studios were not as developed as today, now artists and many other people have top quality recordinbg studois to work in even in their homes. Easy and quick access allows artists to produce their own music. In many cases they are also able to ditribute it without needing recording companies at all.

A paticular web page called Napster raised many debartes about the morality of sharing music on the internet for others to download. When Napster was first operating it was the first network that allowed people to download files for free. Napster was soon stopped as they were accused by the record comapnies who said that Napster was losing them money, insisting that it was depriving them of audiences who might buy the music. I understand  and agree with the record companies because it does make sense and its true that a large amount of audiences won't buy the music mainly because it costs and its much easier to just download music off the internet and the fact that it was free was an advantage.

As a result of realising the popularity of downloading music from the internet, many of the record companies now have this facility and some artists allow some of their music to be downloaded for free as they think this will gain them more audiences.

In today's lesson we manged to upload everything onto our mac. We had a look through most of our footage and everything looks good so far. We are hoping to spend Monday on editing what we've already got and the same afternoon we are meeting up in our free period to take some studio photos for our digipaks.

Digipak's in our genre

ELECTROPOP!

 Below are some digipak's in the genre of our chosen song for our music video.

 This is Katy Perry's 'Teenage Dream' album digipak. I really like this one in particular because not only does it have the colour pink in it (my favourite colour) it really works well with the whole album and gives off a very girly feel. The choice of pastel colours work well together and the photos of her are vital as she is the main singer throughout the whole album. The colours, design and everything else goes a lot with our theme too so my own digipak may use similar elements such as the photos, girly colours etc.

Filming

Yesterday Andrea and I met up and went to Enfield Town to buy everything we needed for the parts we were going to film and went halves on it all. Once we finished buying all the things we needed we went back to hers to start organising. We bought six clocks for our clock scene which is going to be at the beginning of our music video, glitter, diamante heart stickers which we placed on the logo, balloons and a cake. I brought along my camera, tripod, clothes and petals.

We decided to use the logo i made for our 'band name' because we thought it worked best with our theme and also Andrea and others really liked it too. However, we incorporated Andreas idea of the cupids and added them onto the logo i made in order to have her idea and input in it too. We're really proud of our logo!

We wasted no time and started setting everything up. I set up the camera and done all the camera work mainly because i do photography which helps quite a lot and am quite good at filming. We started off with our intro which is where our logo is going to appear. We printed it out, stuck diamonte pink stickers on top of the pink hearts in order to make them stand out more and poured a mixture of pink, silver and purple glitter on top of it until the logo was covered and then Andrea blew it all off with a hairdryer. We done this a couple times just incase but we're both really happy with the outcomes. However, the process was not easy at all! We had to reposition the camera and logo several times until we got it to look perfect, plus we has a lot of cleaning up to do because the glitter went everywhere!

 I took photos of what we were doing throughout so i can upload them on my blog and give you an idea of what everything looks like.
This is what our logo looked like when we stuck the diamonte heart stickers over the original hearts to make them stand out. And the two cupids on the end of the swirls of my design is Andreas incorporated idea.
Overall i'm really happy with the way it turned out. I might upoload a little clip of our introduction where we reveal our band name but if not you're going to have to see it in our draft or final music video!

Once we finished filming our 12 second introduction we moved on to our cake scene which involved smashing a cake. This goes with the lyrics 'except for the fact it was my birthday, my stupid birthday'.
Below are two photos of what the cake looked like before and after!

We're so happy with the outcome! We only had one cake which is why it was quite risky but it turned out excatly how we wanted it too. Andrea stood on a chair so that the cake smashed better when she threw it. I set up the camera and filmed, but before we filmed we had to get rid of the shaddows, we had a lot of issues with shaddows getting in the way of everything but we managed to work things out. We just pushed Andrea's chair back a bit so she lent forward instead. I think this is going to look really good in our music video. The funny thing about this is there's a little face in the cake if you haven't already noticed... two cherry eyes on the top and a cherry tongue sticking out :D

Here are some other photos i took in our clock scene which is also at the beginning of the song (first verse). This is Andrea's part where she sings 'It took to long x3 for you to call back and normally i would just forget that, except for the fact it was my birthday, my stupid birthday'.

 This is what the layout of our clock scene looks like. Our original plan was to hang them up on the wall which we tried several times but a few kept falling and one clcok unfortunately broke as it fell of the wall and landed on the marbel floor :(
But it wasn't a massive problem because luckily we bought a good amount of clocks to work with. When the wall plan didn't work out i told Andrea that placing the clocks on the stairs would look quite quirky so we tried it and it does look really good in the clips.

Here are some photos of Andrea during her part, we went over the same thing several times in order to get a good amount of footage we can play around with.

Group Logo

Although I've already made one logo for our group I wanted to play around with it a little more to see whether or not I can improve it. Like i said, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I opened the first logo I made onto photoshop and experimented with it a little more.

Here's the first one I made, I made the font online, I decided to put butterflies and swirly patterns in it to make it look more girly seeing we are a girl duet. The two faries above the first letter represent Andrea and I (two girls in a group). Finally I decided to add a touch of pink with the little hearts, didn't want to over do the colour cause I thought it looked quite good like this.

This is my second attempt. All I done here is add an effect to our band name, again I added a bit of colour to it because our music video is meant to be pretty girly and colourful.

Group Logo

Andrea and I have arranged to meet up this week in order to get some filming done for our music video. We had a phone conversation and made a list of all the props we will need on the day of our meeting, we also agreed to make one logo each and choose which we wish to use as our final logo. Here is the logo I made today using PhotoShop, it took me about two hours to be precise because I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I tried out loads of different designs until I was happy with one.

Here it is:

I sent Andrea a text telling her I've completed one design and am uploading it onto my blogger page so she can have a look and tell me what she thinks of it!