Making The Team Aware of The Narrative Shoot.

Here are stills taken from my phone and Facebook showing the details that were given to people taking part in the shoot and information for members of the team.

     

Week 12

As we continue to finalise the edit it became apparent that a few shots were not as steady as we once thought. I'm not quite sure how this happened as the tripod was placed on a flat surface away from where anyone was standing. There was one particular pan across the singers which was really shaky and not acceptable to be submitted. The pan shot was difficult to achieve on the day of filming anyway due to lack of space on the stage and no dolly and track. Although these would have been advantageous in getting a more successful shot we improvised by walking across in font of the singers trying our best to keep a still wrist. So to overcome this i took the clip home on a memory stick to edit at home. I converted the file into MP4 and uploaded it into iMovie, i know a simple software but it had what i needed. The software has a button which allows iMovie to analyse the clip and stabilise the video. I did this and although it made some difference it wasn't extensive but still it has made the overall aesthetics of the video better. Aswell as doing this we continued to work on the DVD cover and magazine advert.

The red squiggly line shows what parts of the clip have been stabilised. 

Week 11

Since returning from half term it has become apparent that time is upon us and that any work that hasn't been completed for the production by now has no dedicated lesson time. This to me doesn't seem to be too much trouble as between the four members of the group we have enough time out of lesson to complete said tasks. In lesson time we have split into two sub groups with one working on the DVD cover and menus, etc, whilst the other works on the magazine article. The group was told first lesson back that the editing had been completed and that only some colour changes were needed to be made but we were unable to check because of the schools computer technicians removing a vital piece of data from the computers which allowed us to edit and view the work. Fortunately this was solved by the end of it. With Zoe leaving many times in her frees, assuming she hadn't finished the edit, Chelsea and i went to the editing suite on Thursday to finish the edit. I was there for one hour long period whilst Chelsea for two. It was clear to us that although the whole video was finished it wasn't of a particularly good standard, for example there were some parts out of sync, a small segment without any video or music, and some dubious cuts where the audio would repeat itself. Also we discovered some unused footage that is perfect to replace some other shots which are either not perfect or have unwanted material in the background for example. Our teacher Mr. Shepperd helped us sync the song which at some points he found to be a peculiar feat as it became apparent the singer was out of time on the recording ever so slightly which made a simple task reasonably difficult. After this we placed the additional material that we wished to add into the correct positions to tidy up in another session. We also identified areas where shots lingered which we felt needed to be adjusted.

Also this week Chelsea gave me some work that she needed to upload to the blog but she didn't have a scanner to do so. I took the work home for her, scanned it and emailed it her back.

Magazine Advert Research

It was Molly ans myself that were charged with creating the poster. We firstly didn't have any ideas between us but this didn't stop us trying new things and i think we worked quite well together in doing so. We stumbled across the perfect idea by some choice wording into google which ended in us finding the Motown party poster on the right. We were immediately drawn to this and began to copy it. It was however me who finished in my frees as deadlines drew closer but none the less i feel Molly was still integral into the decision making and overall look of the poster in the end. Again there is many similarities in our ancillary texts and main task which was something as director i pushed for at the initial first meeting and something which i am pleased we managed to achieve. As you can see we have used images of the three female singers in the shape of the Motown "M" and added a Motown logo and the bands logo and song name as an advertising tool. I tried to achieve the same if not similar colouring as the original but couldn't i think because of me lacking copious amounts of technical skills in photoshop although what i knew was enough to create many layers and shapes that masked out the complete photo's that were used as i used three in total to achieve the desired effect. I added the Motown logo as at the time we believed we were going to have one on our DVD cover also. It also acted as a suitable replacement for the "good kids" symbol seen in the poster on the right. I am again pleased with the outcome of this piece as i didn't think i would be able to do with how little i knew about photoshop but ended up creating an almost exact replica of the original. Also i like how we have used intertextuality at some point across all of our products. One small problem we faced was that the school computers didn't have the font Chelsea used for the logo but we simply transferred my work onto a memory stick for her to do add the logo at home. 

DVD Cover Research.

As mentioned before we found it difficult to find original material from the Motown era and so we had to use secondary sources which were modern day representations or primary sources such as still photos and accounts. When researching an idea for the DVD cover we didn't really find anything too suitable for the mentioned reason so ours is somewhat of an original idea. There are some elements from modern day DVD's that suit a Motown genre like the image of the three girls but our photo is a sort of behind the scenes candid photo with the back-cover having a photo of the 60's styled microphone. We also included a blurb on the back which described what was on the DVD and the special features. For some added professionality we also included a "exempt" from age restriction symbol and a barcode. On both the spine and front cover there is the name of the bands in the font that was designed by the teams designer.

Here is some examples of what i could find that relates to Motown and from the two on the right you can identify similarities that show the band as the main focus of the cover and that both contain the bands names. Below is our DVD cover.