Evaluation pack, questions 1 - 4

Final album advert

Final music video

final music video from siobhan arnold on Vimeo.

Digipak final

Digipak draft 4

This is my fourth draft of my digipak and I have adapted new things into it in comparison to my old work. I have changed the text positioning on the track page. I didnt feel like it looked the best it could be to the left, which is in my third draft. It was important for me to experiment with different ways I could have my digipak, and I came to the conclusion that I preferred it central. It really draws in the attention of my audience and how they can look through all of the songs. I like the fact their is room for the text due to the fact the image has a large space to the left of it which is free to add extra text and fill up the space. It doesnt take away the attention of the image, however, it does add that extra little aspect which is essential, and fits with the codes and conventions of folk rock.

Digipak draft 4

This is the fourth digipak which I have created. After reviewing my previous drafts of this piece of work, I decided that I wanted to alter certain aspects of it, one of the main parts being the font I have used and the placement of the text. Since my previous draft, I have adapted the placement of the text from at the top aswell as the bottom, to both at the bottom. It took me a while to chose the font I wanted to use in particular for the album name, which looked good with the style of font I had already chosen for 'Sophia West'. It was important to keep the font of the artist's voice interesting, and therefore I chose a more basic font so that it doesnt look too much.I feel a lot happier with this work in comparison to my previous drafts as I feel it is more professional looking and is a lot more appealing to the eye.

Evaluation question 4

Before beginning any of my research and planning, I had to create a blog on www.blogger.com, so that I could keep note of every product which I meant, and all of the progress which I have made within the process of creation all three of my main products. It was good using blogger as it was my second year, I had experience through AS. By using the blogger website, it has proved to be extremely great in displaying my multimedia skills and portraying my work in a visually interesting way. It was extremely important for me to find a variety of ways to showcase my media work, not just in essay format. I began to familiarise myself different format's, such as with Prezi, which is a web based presentation application, which helps to present work in abstract and entertaining ways. I have been able to put this work onto my blog through embedding my work to my direct blog, therefore my work is accessible online.

When presenting videos and copies of my music video drafts, I wasn't primarily aware of the different ways I could upload it. However, through feedback and asking questions I found Vimeo was particularly good as it allows you to host videos in HD compared to uploading to a more standard quality. Often after I exported my music video drafts, which were made using Premier Pro, I would find that uploading them straight to my blog was not possible. This was because the file size of my music video drafts were generally over 100MG . I wanted me to be in as higher quality as possible, and die to this, blogger would not allow me to be uploaded.  Therefore, finding various alternative ways to exhibit my videos was something I both learnt myself, but also learnt from others. Other methods might include placing my video into Windows Live Movie Maker and converting it from that, as it would automatically reduce the file size, however visually the video didn’t look as good quality as it would of if it was on Vimeo.

Using Microsoft PowerPoint was a format I often used, especially when analysing products such as my similar product research for music magazine adverts. This is because using the Text Box Tool and the Shape Tool (when drawing arrows to parts of the images), meant I could analyse products quickly and easily, as I am familiar with PowerPoint. However, adding a PowerPoint presentation to Blogger is not as simple as just adding it to my blog. There was different ways that I could have done this, I could have saved that as individual pages and upload them as a JPEG file - this would be seen as a visual image on my blog. Or, the alternative format I could have used was scribd – which is the method I used more often. This is a digital documents library that you can upload your work to and it allows users to publish all of their work online. The way I got my work onto my blog from this was by embedding it and pasting it into the HTML section. I also used a similar format which is called SlideShare. This was also used, but as a provider of information when carrying out research on the Indie Folk genre, this website displays presentations created by people around the world – meaning I could access different views and opinions of my research topics such as “Who are the Indie Folk target audience?”

When shooting the photos for my preliminary tasks I used a Cannon 550D. This camera had all if the lenses and settings which I needed to crate my images successfully to the standard which I wanted them. Using the different settings meant that I could take all of my pictures differently, up keeping the interest of my audiences. For example, my album advert, I used shallow focus to create a more creative and interesting look. I wanted to keep all the focus on my singer/artist as I wanted to be able to entice the audience to my advert and singer. When I was editing these images I would place them into Adobe Photoshop, which allowed me to use the Crop Tool to make images the size I wanted for my digipak or magazine advert. To make my image more effective in my album advert, I titled he image to the side slightly, as I received feedback that the image was too focused on the background. When editing the photos for my digipak, experimentation with colour was key as I wanted to try and portray the nature side and the natural colours which I brought with it. For example, one image I have got is of trees but I was unsure of whether to add a transparently effect or leave it as the normal image. In the end I did add an effect but less than the one to the right of it. I felt it was necessary as it doesn't draw the attention away from Sophia. 

In production, I shot my music video using a canon 550D to grasp the professional aspect which I wanted; I wanted to ensure my footage was of the highest possible quality. Using this camera provided a cinema-look to my production piece as it uses shallow focus which creates the more creative effect in which it is introducing the audience to different transitions. To light the shots of the main actress (Sophia), as she was indoors in some areas, I adapted the brightness of the shot to the area of which she is in. In some shots I have natural lighting such as the sun, however some lighting was used such as red lights to brighten the inside shots. This meant I could control and create the shape of the light you want. I chose to use red lights on indoor shots and place them behind Sophia to give a more professional approach to singing in a recording environment.

I used Adobe Premier Pro CS5 when editing my music video, as it allowed to me to cut shots using the Razor Tool and rearrange them into the order I wanted and then add the song and any other audio I chose to have within my music video. I also used the razor tool to cut the song down also as it was too long. The option to add titles came into use at the beginning of my music video, when the artists name and song shows on screen, as well as my own. To create this, I placed this title on top of the first shot in my video and used the Dissolve transition to make the writing fade on and off screen as it would on professional music videos shown on music channels such as MTV or VIVA. I also used Adobe Premier Pro to create short videos to present initial ideas and to overlap the speech with images to illustrate my journey.

After Effects was used when adding a filter light to my music video – I placed the auto contrast over some shots as it will make he shots look more professional as they have better lighting. I had to drag this onto the layer of where I wanted to brighten. It gave my whole video a more professional look as the quality was better in comparison to my first draft which I didn't apply the lighting to. However, after converting it and watching it, I decided it worked better in comparison to my first draft and it would work better towards gaining a higher grade.