Website

http://www.wix.com/DelilahTonight/Coombe13D3

Digipak

 

The Ending!

We were having some debate about how to end the music video as the lyrics are quite strong and we wanted to do them justice. The last line of the song is 'You don't care if I love you'.
When we figured out that cross dissolves work nicely in our video, we thought that doing a few different scenes joint with cross dissolves would be very effective. W also wanted to end with the moon  as the song is called 'Tonight'. However when we showed the ending to our teacher, we had a discussion and as a group we decided that it would be even more effective if we saw the artist sing the last words to the camera.

Syncing

Once we had done practically all of the video, we watched it back and realized that at the beginning the syncing was not right- The song was being played just a few frames before the actress would mime. To fix this problem, we zoomed into all the clips and cut of all of the extra frames- we were worried that this would have an effect on the timing of everything else, however thankfully it did not.

Cross dissolve or wash in?

During our lesson today, we were experimented with using cross dissolves instead of a wash out followed by a wash in. The reason why we did this is because after consulting our teacher we figured out that perhaps in the few parts of the video where the screen goes completely white it may look strange. We thought that instead using washout's/in's we would use a cross dissolve so that there would always be an image on the screen. However after trying this, we all agreed that keeping the wash out's and was in's and having the screen go to white would create the sense that the main actress (Treeva) was thinking back to old memories. This would also keep the narrative strong as it would be more apparent to the audience that all of her memories of her and the main actor (Ivan) mean that they are no longer together.
In the end we stuck with wash in's and wash out's :)

Website

I am currently still working on finishing the website in my own time, it is nearly finished however, I did find a better host site than freewebs so I have started to make another one, just transferring the same information that the freewebs site also has on it. The only problem with the new host site is that it can be very slow which gets annoying and slows down the process of making the site. I wasn't happy with using freewebs because I didn't think it was very good as the websites didn't look as professional. The new site has allowed me to use effects, page transitions and animations too which make the website look more effective. When both sites are complete I will post them both on here.

Gemma

Digipak

For the digipak I was looking at producers for the songs as some of them would have been produced by different people. I was also looking at publishing companies, as we agreed in our digipak we would have information about the songs. I came across BMG, who have worked on songs from Ronan Keating and even Melanie C and Alexandra Burke. Before I chose this company, I wanted to research through some more, so looking at some CDs I owned and on the internet. Through BMG I found another company called Cherry Lane, this company have worked on songs from Elvis, The Black Eyed Peas, Estelle, Beyonce, Jordin Sparks and many more and they have another joined company called Stage Three. This company had worked on songs by Aerosmith and even Macy Gray.
However, even though I had found this information I still wanted to make sure I had chosen the correct companies to work on the songs so I found the CDs I had that were most like Delilah's music and looked at their digipaks. But the closest CDs I could find to Delilah's genre of music were Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Kelly Clarkson, as it is harder to get this information from just buying a song on iTunes.
On Britney's album I found a company called Zomba Music Publishers ltd. So I decided to research this further. The company are actually owned by Sony Music Entertainment. However, I could not find a website for this company which made it hard to see what other music they had published. Some of Britney's music had also been published by BMG.
Christina Aguilera's songs were mostly published by BMG, but this also showed that they related to Sony, as on the back of her album it repeated Sony BMG music entertainment. However, even though she seemed to be on Sony's record label, the music information said that the songs were administrated in the EU by EMI.
Lastly on Kelly Clarkson's album the information was only on the bonus tracks however, it clearly showed that her music was published by BMG also and she was on Sony BMG's record label.

After looking at this I decided that Delilah's music could possibly use Cherry Lane music, as this is a major publishing company, and the reason I have not used BMG (even though they are apart of the same company) is because the artists that seemed to have used BMG were on Sony's record label, and we had already decided that Delilah's record company would be EMI.

Gemma

Digipak

Still focusing my time between the digipak and the website, I have been currently working on the album cover. After looking at album covers from over artists I noticed that they genuinly include the artists name bigger than the name of the album. The things I came across hard were deciding where to place the artist name and the album name, an also whether to have effects on the photo or not. In the end, I auto-toned and auto-coloured the photo but left it very realistic and I included the name and album name in the same fonts I have used for the back cover so that it all matches.

Gemma

Website

Today, I have continued to spend my spare time completing the website, it is all coming together well, and there are only a few small things left to add. I have started to make the template for the background and this will be added as soon as it is completed. I have been experimenting with sizes making sure the background looks as good as possible. I also have added more posts in the blog, forum and tours and show pages, and I have made sure these look as authentic as possible, continuing to research other artists web pages.

Gemma

Editing

Zaynah, Gurleen and I (Alia) came into school on Wednesday just to try and finish off our media editing. Unfortunately when we tried to go in at 10.00 am the computer we needed wasn't available and so we had to come back later. Zaynah started editing for about an hour before Gurleen and I came; she was able to fill in some of the gaps that we still needed to add clips in to.
During the 4 hours of editing we managed to finish 3/4's of the whole music video.
After discussions with our teachers, we decided that using cross dissolves would be the perfect effect to include in our music video as our song is slow and completely compliments the soft, calm and acoustic feel of having a cross dissolve. We decided as a group that using cross dissolves, particularly near the end of the video in order create a sense of the song ending.
In order to add some ore creativity to the music video, we thought of the idea of having some of the singing scenes out of sync on purpose. This would work nicely with the song as it isn't fast and so wouldn't look too distracting or 'in your face'. Gurleen tried to test this out with one of the sections, however it did not look as good as we had anticipated so we decided to not go through with this idea.

Website

So far the website is coming along well, most the information is practically published now, and I just need to concentrate on the template editing which I left as the last thing so that I could spend more time on it. I will be editing photos for the background of the website, and also the headers. Everything seems to be coming together smoothly, the last page on the website I will need to add information to is the Video page. But for this I am planning on uploading our music video when it is completed. I am going to continue adding more forum posts so the website looks more professional and 'active' and I will continue to create events for the artist. After this is finished I will focus all my time on completing the digipak, but again for this most of the work left is editing the photos correctly and making it look perfect.

Gemma

Website & Digipak

Today, I have continued with editing the website and the digipak in my own time. I started to focus on the tour and show page of the website. For this I looked in to venues that would be suitable for a new breakthrough artist. As our artist is releasing there first single, and debut album it would be very unrealistic for the artist to be playing bigger venues such as The O2 arena and Wembley, also it would be very unrealistic for a new European artist to start a tour in America as a lot of the time, there music is seperately launched in different countries. Therefore I searched the internet and used my own knowledge to think of what the artist would do. I have come up with a single launch, in-store performances and signings that would take place in HMV stores as they usually facilitate these events. The other things I looked at where small venues around the country, so I decided that Delilah would focus her tour in venues such as various O2 Academies (for example the one in Newcastle).

Gemma

1/12/10

Today, most of our groups attention was focused on our music video.
I (Zaynah), Gurleen and Alia spent our free time in the media room, editing and finishing off our video.
I felt that we had got alot done, as we had quite a few spaces to fill in, but overcame these, ending the day with just under 1 minute of the song left to fill in.
During our free, working on the video, we had asked our teacher for advice on how to end the video, as we were not sure on which clip to do it with.
Our teacher also gave us advice on how to improve our music video, with the use of transitions.
This helped us immensely, as it taught us that the footage we have, doesnt have to be completely perfect, but we could improve it by using different effects and transitions which made the video flow and work to our advantage.
We didnt really have any problems, although keeping certain parts of our video in sync with the song and the timing of the music was an issue but we overcame this too.
Overall, today was a useful and effective day, as we got most of our video done and learnt a few things along the way, almost in time for our deadline.

Editing

Today During my frees, I (Gurleen) did more of our editing for our music video. Alia also accompanied me during this time and we managed to do quite a lot of it today. We have nearly done two and half minutes of the video and hopefully we will be finishing it soon. during our lesson time, me and Zaynah continued editing and we faced a technical problem during the editing which was the Stop motion clip, it kept duplicating a new clip to itself but we managed to overcome that problem very easily by deleting the duplicate clips and realised it happened because of the VideoFx we added to the clip, which also gave us the chance to learn something new about iMovie.  

30/11/10

As the deadline for our Media coursework is creeping closer, as a group, we're using our time fully to concentrate and spend most of our time on our Media work.
In today's lesson we split into pairs to work and focus on two main tasks: editing the music video and creating the digi-pack.
I helped edit our music video with Gurleen, whilst Gemma fully concentrated on the digi-pack besides providing help with the video too.
Alia put all her time and effort into both tasks, which made a major contribution overall to our work and I feel we all equally helped one another as a team, offering assistance when needed.
Hopefully, this will lead  to us completing our assignment by the coursework deadline.

Zaynah

Back Cover Digipak

I have developed the back cover for the digipak, and it is almost finished, the only thing that needs to be finalised is the font being used. After looking at other back covers I have made sure that I have included essential elements in the small print such as, the fold that binds the CD cover on the side, the record company information, website information (promotional, official websites) and even the bar code.
It took me a while to decide on the finished product of the back cover as I did different effects to see what looked the best, however, I also looked at other covers which are the same genre of our music which also helped me to decide as I wanted to use conventional elements, so that the audience can relate to the product.

At first I had to choose the right background image, I had this background in mind, until I tried using it. I decided that the photo of our artist didn't really go with the background, but here is a rough cut of what I was planning to do. It is only rough as I didn't go ahead with it because I didn't think it looked as effective.

Here are some of my rough designs where I chose a better background to suit the artist photograph:

 

 Additionally, to get to this final stage of the photo I had to combine two photographs that had been taken. I initially did this because the photo with our artist in wasn't very focused which did let the photo down quite a lot. But I also did this because of the conventional settings of back covers, I wanted to have the artist set to the side of the cover, so that the track listing could be used on the other side, and it wouldn't be interfering with the image. But then after I had layered the two images I noticed that this allowed me to create better effects, as I was able to chose one layer and effect it rather than changing the effect of the whole photo. The only trouble I came across was cutting out the artist from the original photo as this had to be done precisely so that it would look effective.

Gemma

Digipak - Back cover.

Today I started to create the back cover of the digipak, firstly I looked at similar artists to see what they included on their back covers of their digipaks. Some of the artists I looked at were, Eliza Doolittle, Carrie Underwood, Shania Twain, Taylor Swift, Dido, Katie Melua and Norah Jones. From looking at these I saw that a lot of the artists have photos of themselves on the back with the song titles to the left or the right of the page. However, some back covers just have a linking photo on the back with the titles on the page. One that was very quirky and different to the rest was by Eliza Doolittle, as they had placed her photo in the middle and used many different fonts to show her song titles around her.
Here are the examples:

Here I have added two examples of Katie Melua, as these were interesting and quite contradicting, as one she is in the frame and the other she isn't. But the photo is not just a random photo it is linked to the front cover of the album.

Gemma

Institution Research

Today we also looked at what institution would be suitable for our artist. We came up with the idea of EMI records, as this catered for European singers from various music genres, such as artists like our own, Corinne Bailey Rae, Eliza Doolittle.

Digipak

Today during the lesson Alia and myself (Gemma) have been researching the digipak and planning it. We initially started using word to document what we were going to include for our digipak, we then decided that we would draw out a plan as we were finding it hard to visualise. As the digipak would be 6 pages we planned out what would include in each side, the front being the album cover, the back including tracklisting, one side of it having information about the tracks for example who produced it and wrote the songs, two sides using photos one for behind the CD, and the final side being a thank you message from the artist.

Fonts

So continuing with my font experiments I have decided to upload some of the fonts that I am experimenting with, when I have come across a final idea for the digipak and website, choosing a font will create the image brand so I will have to narrow down my ideas. Here are some of the newer fonts I have been experimenting with:

At the moment I have been looking at curly fonts, however, I am going to look for more fonts, possibly more quirky ones, and develop the idea I already have.















Gemma

Website

So far after editing the website, I have now come up with two main headers for the site. I am not sure which one will look most efficient to use, however I am hoping to improve both ideas after getting used to the freewebs hosting site.

This is the first design header for the website:

Here is the second header for the website:

Both headers have been edited using photos I have taken while we have been filming and on location. However, there is still more things to edit to improve the template of the website, which I am currently working on, such as the background of the pages, although this is hard to change using the host site. What is also annoying about the hosting site is that it displays an advertisement on your website, and I cannot get rid of this which makes the site look more unprofessional. Also, when creating my own template I have only been able to use my own photos in already created templates which are not the same as what I would like the website to look like. Therefore I may have to create my own full template.

Gemma

Website

For editing the website I have continued to think about my own design to make for the background. I started by making a header for this blog and for the website which I have already blogged about. Today I was looking through some photographs taken, and I decided to experiment with some of them. I began by making a general header which could possibly be used on the twitter, website or even on here. I have not perfected my skills yet, so many changes are to be made but here is an example of what I have done:

I am still not sure about what font to use on these photos, but once that decision has been made I can edit all images to have the same artist brand. The font will need to match the genre and artist, and supply the audience with positive connotations which is why it is harder to chose one font. At the moment, I have been downloading unique fonts and just experimenting with them. However, the fonts I have been experimenting with are not just random fonts, I have been choosing ones which suit our artist so that the one that is chosen will be relatively close to the genre of music. In my own eyes, the type of music suggests a curly, 'girly' and yet sophisticated font. However, when downloaded and used the fonts always look different to the preview. I think the font needs to portray an emotional artist, possibly slightly quirky, and yet have a calm effect.

Gemma

Digipak

Initially for the album cover I wanted to use a photo from the photos we took in Bushy Park. This would still be a possibility depending on how I can edit it. But since the weather was very foggy that day, the camera lens wasn't able to keep in focus very well, therefore the photo isn't as focused as I would like it to be. However, I am trying to edit it to make it look sharper, here is the original photo:

This is one of my experiments on this photo, as I edited it, it showed that it may be okay to use as a photo for the digipak as it doesn't look too bad. However, I would like to edit it more, and I would possibly not use this effect. (The photo is a different size and more of a square shape as it is was created using the proper dimensions for the digipak).

Gemma

Digipak

When I started to create a possible cover for the digipak, I started to experiment with use of effects on photoshop, this helped me to familiarise myself with the programme and also helped me to decide what looked effective and professional and what wouldn't look as good for our artist.
Here are some of rough examples of what I experimented with:

This image gives emphasis to the guitar as I used a filter on a certain part of the image called 'charcoal.'

In this image I used a filter on our artist, which was called 'cut out' this gave the image of the artist many layers, and almost makes her look surreal.

Using a different effect called 'liquify' I was able to make the background more surreal, I only experimented on one part of the background, as if I am going to use an effect on the background I will have to transform the image in to many layers so that the whole background will use the same effect.

I have only done these as rough experiments as if I was to use these ideas I would want to perfect them.

Gemma

Digipak

Tonight I started to create a possibility for the front cover for the digipak. I looked through the photos that I had taken whilst we were on location and I thought that these photos would make good cover images to represent our artist. However, these are still just possibilities and I will continue to experiment with images and see what looks most effective.

Gemma

More Editing

Today aswell as doing research for the digipak,  I helped with 3 hours worth of editing; we got quite a lot of the music video done. We experimented with some different transitions in between different scenes which made the narrative more obvious. We also changed the colour of the 'memory' sections of the video to sepia which gave a nice effect to it.

Class Evaluations

We thought we would be able to carry on editing during our lesson on Friday, however when we went into the classroom, our teacher told us that we would all be evaluating each others work up to where we had edited up to. Our group had done about a minute of editing so there was a fair amount of the video that the other groups could watch. We were given the mark scheme and levels we will be assessed on by the examiners and so by evaluating others work using this, we could understand how we would be marked for our final mark.

Most of the feedback we got was quite positive, but it also gave us an outlook on how audiences would respond to our video, and what we could improve before the final deadline to make our video as effective as can be. We got feedback from 3 groups :

Digipak Research

Today during our lesson I researched what kind of things are included in a digi pack. It was a bit difficult trying to find the exact information I needed as most of the websites which came up just showed examples of digipak templates. I did find out that the content of a digipack is usually the album name, the tracklist, pictures of the artist and sometimes the lyrics of one or all of the songs.

So that we could think of a realistic album name for our artist Delilah's album/digipak I researched the history of different country singers such as Taylor Swift, Shania Twain and Carrie Underwood. The rest of the group and I found that a lot of artists had named their first albums after their own names eg. Taylor Swift's first album is named 'Taylor Swift'. A reason why artists may have done this is to make the public recognize their name and music. As a group, we discussed whether we wanted to go through with this idea and we are still deciding the final name of Delilah's album name.

Photos

Everytime our group has been on location filming I have continued to take photos of the making and also of interesting images of our artist, and our location. The photos I have taken will be good to use within the digipak and website. Here are some more of the photos I have taken:

I am going to edit these on photoshop, to make the more effective.

Gemma

Digipak

Today in the lesson, we also continued to research what we would need to include in the digipak. We agreed on the photos we would use for the cover of the album, and decided what else we would need to include, such as the back page being the tracklisting, a possible thank you to fans by the artist, photos, information about the record company etc. The digipak will be 6 pages, including the front cover of the album this will need to also reflect the genre of the album.

Website

Today I continued to look at templates for the background of the website, however, after looking at these I decided that I would like to create my own using photoshop as this would be more effective for the promotion of the artist and also make the website look more professional. I also continued to edit the pages, adding more to the news page.

Gemma

Album

Today in the lesson we continued to edit our video, while doing this we also thought of a tracklist for the album and an album name. This goes towards the creation of our digipak. Our album will have 12 tracks, and the name of the album will be called 'Reflections.' We thought of the album tracklisting by looking at other artists in the same genre of music, and researching their albums. We did this so that we could come up with appropriate track names to fit the genre.

Twitter

As part of our website I have created Delilah a Twitter account, this means that the music and would be promoted more. I made the account as I featured it on the website. The twitter profile will include all the latest updates and news of the artist.

Gemma

Website

Today (25th November) I spend time editing the website, I started put together the information on each page, the pages I edited were News, Forum, Home, and Bio.
This was good use of time as I learned how to do much more on the website, such as add wigets. Some of the widgets I added were for example, 'Share' button so that people could share news to their friends and the 'Like' button so that the news could be liked through Facebook, a very popular networking site.

Gemma

Editing

After having finally gotten over all of our technical issues by transferring all of our clips from one computer onto another, we could finally concentrate on progressing with the editing of the music video.
We thought that although it was a good idea to edit in the chronolgical order of the song, it was also helpful to edit some of the sections that we knew we wanted edited in a certain way and that we knew would be put in a certain section of the song.

Digipaks

Today in the lesson, we started to research digipaks so that we knew exactly the size of it and what we should include. This will allow us to get started with making the digipak. This would be made using photoshop as it allows us to edit the photos in a high quality way. When the digipak is ready we will be able to upload it to the blog.

Before creating our digipak we looked at other artists to be inspired. Obviously, the ones we looked at  were country pop so that we could relate it to ours an get ideas for the photos we should be using.

The dimensions of a standard 4 page digipak is usually 139.5mm x 6mmx 125.5m.

The dimensions of a standard 6 page digipak is usually 140.5mm x 8mm x 127m . 

Website - Biography

During the lesson on 22nd November, we continued to write the biography of our artist for the website. We used other biographies of similar artists in the same genre to give us inspiration. Also, the photo page on the website has started to be edited, this is where we will upload photos from the making of the video, the location and also photoshoots of our artist. While we were doing this we had the technical issues so some of us were focused on that.

Technical Issues

After having completed all of our filming for our music video, we were excited to get it uploaded and ready to edit. When we opened our video to edit on the computer, all of our clips had been moved to the trash and we had lost all our editing. This held us back because we had to use our time to work out why the computer wasn't working and we had to figure out how to try and get our work back. We figured out that the my book that it was saved on wasn't working so we had to try and use other computers to access our work.

Bushy Park Filming!!!

Today, we filmed at Bushy Park, it wasn't the exact location we planned to go to due weather changes, but we found a similar place and filmed there.
We filmed the whole song in that location, having our main actress singing the whole song in one angle.
Even though,it was very foggy, we managed to film the main part of our video and we also supported each other as a team.
During the day, we faced a few minor problems such as: the weather change, change of location, traveling to the location. Yet we managed to overcome them by having alternatives! We filmed in a foggy weather to give a cold atmosphere to go with our song, We managed to walk to the location in time, before it got dark and also managed to find the an alternative location to Rose Garden!

Research: Dresses for Rose Garden

Open publication - Free publishing - More clothes

Research: Make-Up

Open publication - Free publishing - More up

Research: Camera shots

Open publication - Free publishing - More shots

Research: Iconography

Open publication - Free publishing - More taylor

Researching: Mise-en-scene

Open publication - Free publishing - More settings

Broken Hearted Girl music video by Beyonce

We looked at this music video for ideas for our own work becasue both songs have similar tempos.

Themes and ideas which we interested were:

-The ligthing- there are is a lot of dim ligthing which creates a sombre feel which may relate to the lyrics of the song.

-Use of black and white and colour change- we liked that some scenes were black and white and some were brighter than others. We felt that this could
create a feel of different emotions within the artist and the lyrics.

-The the sun is filmed- we liked the fact that the glare of the sun is right in the camera.

-Make up- we like the minimalistic make up on Beyonce and felt that it didn't distract us from the actual video and listening to the lyrics.

Starting to Edit!

We've uploaded everything we have filmed so far so we decided to start editing and cutting up some of the clips. While editing, we questioned and discussed the order in which we wanted everything to go in and where our flashback/memory clips would look best. We decided that to keep the 'narrative' in our video more interesting and the audience engaged we should have the memory clips spread out.

Website

Today, we continued with the website. The hardest bit is having the information to write and create all the pages. The pages that we have started to create is the artists news and homepage. For research I have looked at other artists web pages to see what is most effective, but these of course are artists with similar genres of music. The websites that we looked at for inspiration are:

http://www.taylorswift.com/
http://www.shaniatwain.com/

Both of these websites are effective as they promote the artist and inform the fans of the current updates and news. For our own website there is a lot of information we will need to include, here are some examples, Biography, News, Video, Photos, and also a blog from the artist can be effective.

Editing Website

Here are some fonts I found to contribute to editing our website, I used photoshop to experiment with how they could be transformed. This helped to start to visualise how the artists 'logo' should look. I don't know if I will use any of these on our actual website, as I might change aspects of them or try to develop them.

Filming - 12th / 13th November

Today and tomorrow we have all decided that we need to film the rest of our footage for the music video. This will include the parts with the male actor, and also the footage from the Rose garden. Today, we will be filming the footage with Ivan and Treeva (our actors), hopefully this wont take too long as he doesn't appear too much in the video, he is mostly in the memories. Tomorrow (Saturday), we will be filming in the Rose Garden, this will include Treeva performing with a guitar. Hopefully this will all go to plan and we will be able to focus on editing next week.

Photos

In the time we have been filming, we have used a stills camera to photograph what we've been doing. Whilst Zaynah, Gurleen and Alia have been shooting footage, Myself (Gemma) managed to take many photos of our location and our singer. Some of these photos can be used for our other work, such as the website and the digipack. However, some of the photos are 'behind the scenes' of our music video.
Here is a few photos I have taken:

Editing Photos - 12th November

Today, I started to use photoshop to create effects and templates for our website. I have not come to the final design yet, but I started to get used to using the programme. Good effects I found were editing the exposure, and also embossing the text. Below I have uploaded what I designed, however this may not be what we use on our final website. The photo I have edited was something I took myself when we were filming in Kingston.



After this first image I designed I decided that using unusual fonts would look more effective. I taught myself how to install different fonts so that our website would look more aesthetically pleasing.



Gemma

Filming Problemosss :(

On the 8/11/10, the weather was not what we expected it to be, as it was raining heavily, so we decided to rebook our cameras and film on Friday onwards.
For today, we booked a still digital camera so we can take pictures for our photo shoot of our main actress which will be used for our digipack.
Later, on after uploading we plan on editing the pictures through photoshop.

08/11/10

During our lesson on Monday, we uploaded our scenes from the last time we filmed. This included, a lot more footage from the bridge and footage from outside Starbucks. We also filmed for the stop motion along the high street and by the rotunda.
We also continued to plan as a group as we will be filming tomorrow. We planned what times we would be filming and what props an costume we would need. On the 9th we will be filming in the rose garden, this will be where our actress will do more of a live performance, incorporating a guitar.  

Website Editing

Today in the lesson (5th November) we continued to edit our website but we came across some technical problems on the computer with accessing websites so we had to change computers. We decided to make our own template for the website as the ones supplied on the website dont really suit our genre of music or our artist. This will be made using photoshop and it will have appropriate use of font and photos to match our artists style, this will help to create our artists image and brand.

Website & Artist Name

Today we started to make the website for our artist that would be used to promote her. This will have details about the single, which is 'Tonight' and also a lot of information about the artist for interested fans. We decided to use 'freewebs' as a host for our website as it is a website we are familiar with, which means we will all be able to build an effective website for our artist.
To make the website we had to all decide on a definite name for our artist so that we could carry on with the rest of the work. The name we decided to go with was 'Delilah' as this was something we all agreed on and we thought it suited our genre of music. We decided not to use a surname for the artist as it is not always necessary.

http://delilah-tonight.webs.com/ 
Over the next few weeks we will continue to design and develop the website to make it most effective for promotion.

Filming on Friday 5th November

On Friday we will be filming in the Rose Garden and hopefully will get that location filming done on time.

Filming

On Tuesday our group continued filming for our music video in Kingston.
We re filmed some parts near Kingston Bridge that we thought were not good enough for our video, began filming scenes near Starbucks and near the Rotunda.
For the scenes near Starbucks, our actress had to sit on a bench and sing the main chorus to the song.
We filmed many close ups of her face to capture her expressions and add feeling to the music video.
We later moved onto film the stop motion scenes near the Rotunda, and to capture the stop motion scenes, we had our actress stand in the middle of the  frame of the camera, not singing the lyrics but acting natural, due to the fact that when we edit our video on Final Cut, the clips will be fast forwarded and her singing wont be in sync with the music.

Film Planning

Today, in our media lesson, we planned further on when and where we will film and also, we booked HD cameras, a tripod and a monopod.
We hopefully will be finished filming by the end of this week.

Filming

On Thursday the 28th October, we went around Kingston and looked at all of our locations that we had not yet filmed at. We walked to Bushy Park to look at the sights there were and  figured which areas we want to go and film in.

Naming Our Artist

During today's lesson, we decided that we should focus on actually naming our artist and what image she should have. Also we thought about how we could promote the song.
We feel that the name of the artist is important for how appealing they sound and look. This is obviously why some artists, in real life actually change their name (also known as their stage name); a lot of rappers do this for example Eminem's real name is Marshall Mathers, and even some country singers change their names for example Shania Twain's real name is Eilleen Edwards. Both of the names Eminem and Shania Twain sound more appropriate for 'show biz' and for the genre that there music is catorgorized as.
Some names we researched and came up with were Delilah, Summer Scotts and Jasmine however we have not decided on one for certain.
We also conisdered using just a forename and not a surname which works for some real life artists such as Gabrielle. The name is important, to create a 'star image,' it also can tell the audience what type of genre the music is, for example you wouldn't get a name like 50 Cent in the country genre. When we have decided the name we can continue to develop the album cover for example, choosing an appropriate font, an almost creating a brand for the artist.

Stop Motion

This was another one of the videos that inspired us. After thinking of ideas for our music video, we decided something that would be effective, would be to use stop motion. The effect they create in the background of this video is something we would like to try and re-create, where the background is moving faster than the singer. This would be filmed in the evening, in the centre of Kingston, or by the Rotunda, which is always lit up and full of people. There is also many passing cars and buses in this area which we would need to make our shot look more effective.

Lyrics

Having a copy of the lyrics helped us to plan what parts of the song was going to be filmed where, and it also helped us to interpret what the song meant and what we could include in our music video. Although we didn't understand the exact meaning of the song at first the tune and the words helped us to interpret what we thought should be included. It also meant that we could make our video completely accurate and have the singer singing exactly the right words, as she could learn it before filming.

Here are the lyrics and our planning:

Planning & Uploading

Today in our lesson, we planned what we were going to film next. This included sorting out our location and the costume that we would need. We also had to inform our singer what verses she would need to learn in order for us to film her. 
Also, during our lesson half of our group continued to upload what we had already filmed by the bridge, as we had one more tape to upload. 
This continued to show us what we needed to re-do and what we had to add. 

Album Cover

We also started the process of forming an album cover by researching similar artists. Most of the inspiring artists had album covers with the singer on the front, usually a mid-shot or close up, and possibly with a guitar. By looking at other examples it helped us to start to plan our cover, and it highlighted exactly what we needed to do to reach our aim.

Here are some of the inspiring album covers:

Uploading Take One

The next lesson after we had been filming we managed to upload one of the tapes that we had recorded. We did this so that we would know what went well and what we would need to re-film to improve. While uploading we came across some technical issues such as letterboxing, but we managed to overcome them. Most of the filming was very effective but there were some parts which would be easier to re-film than to edit. Something that we would definitely change would be to have the singer to sing in to both cameras at both angles instead of her just looking at one camera. Also, the part I think that would need to be re-done, would be with Treeva (singer), when she is singing on the steps. Additionally, we would want more footage of the couple on the bridge, for example a close up of them holding hands.

Filming Process!

Today we started to film our music video, we filmed in Kingston at the bridge by the river which was the perfect location for one of the parts of our music video. When we got to the location it was very easy to access the place which made it easier for us to film. Along that, the weather was perfect because it was just the way we expected to be, bright and sunny. We filmed our singer, Treeva Pasha, sitting by the river singing the third verse and chorus. Also we got shots of her walking with Ivan Ustenko, who is another character in our music video. We made sure we included close ups and footage from both angles to include in our video. We were filming in the evening, so we had to be aware of the time because it was getting dark very quickly and the lighting is an essential element of the mise-en-scene. We succeeded in filming the parts we planned to film today because we got the shots and the scenes that were necessary.  

Today Zaynah, Alia and myself, Gurleen, did most of the camera work. Gemma assisted very well in giving great ideas and took photos of the mise-en-scene and filming to upload for the blog to show the processes of us filming. Moreover, we all helped in directions and it was not just one person doing all the directions which contributed to improving our team work. As a whole, today went very well because everything worked out  well and our main actors acted very well.

Inspirational Videos

We researched videos that we felt would fit in well with our music video. One of the artists we looked at as inspiration was Taylor Swift.



This video, in particular was our main ideological music video because it fits in perfectly with the mise-en-scene and settings and narrative that we want for our music video. Also, the way we pictured our main artists style to be  was clearly set in this video of Taylor Swift. She is a Country Pop music artist and has done many videos which would be similar to the genre of our own song.



We looked at the video by Narina Pallot-Sophia mainly because we wanted to have this kind of background in our video as well. Looking at this video gave us the idea of having silhouettes in our music video as well. In this video, it clearly shows how it starts with the sun; fades into the night and back into the morning. From this video we want to take this idea but change it a little bit where our music video starts in day time with the sun and finishes at night with the moon which sets in well with our lyrics as well.

Storyboarding

Before we could start filming we made sure that we knew exactly what we were going to do, planning the locations, shots, costumes and cast. We did this by making a storyboard. At first when we started to do the storyboard we realized that we needed to go into more detail by planning more of the shots. We all took part in this process improving our team work, making sure everyone contributed in ideas, and the drawing of the shots. This process made it much easier for us to visualize filming as it highlighted exactly what we needed to do. Although we knew that our video would not turn out exactly the same as the storyboard as somethings may not work, and new ideas could arise.

Theory Lessons

Before starting our practical work, we had theory lessons with our teachers where we were taught about different iconography in different music videos. Along that, we were taught about videos such as 'Crazy in Love' by Beyonce, 'Just' by Radiohead and 'Stan' by Eminem. Through these videos we learnt about the narrative of a music video and how they can have completely different meanings to the actual song and how a narrative is not important at all in some music videos due to it's stars.
For example: Crazy in love- the video is mainly based on Jay-Z and Beyonce's stardom where there is a use of voyeurism as we watch Beyonce do a photo shoot in the video and due to her revealing clothes; Jay-Z is rapping about his life and the money he has and he is evidently wearing a lot of 'bling' and expensive clothes. They both are in one video but completely contrast each other, as in, Beyonce is showing her body and is acting like a pole dancer where as Jay-Z is completely covered in clothes and and doesn't even pay attention to her.



Another Example we looked was 'Just' by Radiohead; in their video there was a strong element of a narrative and the outstanding feature in it was the dialogue which was shown through subtitles as we couldn't hear the people talking; this made it more interesting to watch.