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.