Influences of the Digipak covers.

The front cover of an CD for a grime artist would usually be trying to give of an image that they are hard and tough. Today in the mainstream market on the album covers it is usually a picture of the artist face or of the artist posing which gives it this mainstream look. However in the niche market of grime they don't show their faces because the people are more interested in the music they produce instead of what they look like. Therefore to try and get Affie to break through to the mainstream market we should put him on the cover of the CD. Here are a few images to give us an idea of what we want on our cover.

Research and evaluate the institutional context of your artist?

When doing the research for our artist Affie i related him to an artist who i think is similar to what the image of Affie is like in my head. With the song we have chosen (Party Animal- Mikill Pane)  the artists that came into mind was Dizzee Rascal. This is because he was a grime artist in his early days and then with his grime music he brought it to the mainstream market and was successful. Dizzee is with a mainstream record label called XL Recordings. He has also set up his own record label called Dirtee Stank, which is purley grime music. Another record label that Affie could be signed to is Conglomerate Records. This is more of a Hip Hop genre record label which could be good for Affie, because hip hop is very popular in the mainstream market at the moment. However Affie is still a low profile artist so putting him in such a mainstream record label will not do him much favor. Therefore we should put him in a record label which is in between the two. There is a label called Tempa which i think would be perfect for Affie because there are similar artists within it. http://www.tempa.co.uk/
I think this would be good for Affie because artists with similar music types such as Skream and Benga etc are with the record label. 


The target audience of our artist 'Affi' would be the younger generation. A teenage audience to young adults. Between the ages of 16-20. The fans of Affie would probably be from a working class background because grime was brought up in underground clubs which were cheap to get into. Also the fans would be huge grime artist fans.

Presentation on examples of shot ideas and design elements.

Shot ideas, design elements

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Feedback

This a is a really proficient start to blogging of your concept with good research into the grime Genre.It would be even better if more use would be made of academic ideas, such as Negus or Dyer into the music industry and stars.  This would help underpin and support the points you make.  A creative blog - where you have posted the brief, some of the text cannot be read.

Initial ideas/treatment

Song- Mikill Pane – Party animal remix, featuring empressa.

The Genre of the song and act we are doing is - Grime/ dance music. The reason we have decided to investigate The Grime/ Dance genre is because it’s a genre that is of huge interest to our age group. It is also a new genre. Research – History of Grime/ Dance.

The grime/ dance genre was first discovered in  East London in the early 2000’s.  Dizzie Rascal and Wiley were two of the first artists to bring the genre to the mainstream audience between 2003- 2004. Although it was brought to the attention of the mainstream media Grime / dance is still considered as ‘Underground Music’. Record labels are still to acknowledge the Genre and expose it to the Global market. 


Our type of act will have a particular style. we would like this style to be Individual, quirky.
These are a few images of the type of look we are going for. We want our act to look more old school and retro.
These four images relate to the style and type of act we would like to convey, images are vital, especially as they have to fit our genre and overall style.

Research into real and similar artists.

Research into real and similar artists

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Narrowing Down Our Ideas

Ghostpoet's video of 'cash and carry me home' inspired us to create a deep and dark video, designed to unsettle the audience. The design elements used within this video has given us an idea of the theme that will run through our video and the sort of minimalisitic prop type we will be using.
After watching this video we have come up with a list of possible props/ideas to use-:
- oil canister (set alight)
- see-through glasses
- a cardboard cutout of the innards of the body.
- large heads placed on small bodies- puppets
- clear bottles, jars, hanging up (fluorescent liquids in the bottle)

-setting - blacked out studio space (minmal)
- using the natural light created by the flames of the oil canister
- possible spotlights focused on the props
- floorlights

characters- Afalabei will be our main guy who will play the part as of the grime artist in question.

Research into real artists...



This is a link to the official foals website.
http://www.foals.co.uk/entry/

This was my first idea to do an indie rock band called the foals. I chose it because I liked the song and the shots that were used in it. The video interested me because of all the different shots and ideas that they used. This video is unusual and different to a normal mainstream video.

The Breif for advanced port folio

The Brief

1. A promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with two of the following three options:

                       

a website homepage for the band;

a cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package);

a magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package).

All material for all tasks to be produced by the candidates with the exception of acknowledged non-original sound or image material used in a limited way in video/radio work. Further guidance will be available in the support materials. For music video, permission should be sought from the artist for use of the audio track.

The centre will be expected to allocate marks according to four levels for each of three categories:

Research and Planning

Construction

Evaluation

In arriving at a level for each category, teachers are advised to look for evidence of ‘best fit’. It is possible both for a candidate to be placed in different levels for each of the three categories and to receive quite different marks from other members of the same group responsible for producing an artefact, according to his/her contribution. Teachers are asked to support marks with written comments under the three categories on the assessment sheet.

A few things I learnt about a music video.

These are the big five which take up 76% of the music market otherwise known as conglomerates:

1. Sony
2. Universal
3. BMG
4. Warner
5. EMI

An oligopoly is a small number of companies that own and control a market or company.

Andrew Goodwin- a music video in not primarily a commodity form but a promotional one

Keith Negis- interdependent 'web of major and minor record labels'

Richard Dyer- part of the construction of the image of a particular band or performer (part of the process of constructing stardom)

Alot of music videos became more popular because of music channels.

A rationale for teaching music video- They now provide pictures for the songs in our heads. Goodbye imagination... All kids have to do is watch and listen, stare straight ahead.

Our section of the music video

This is our section of the prelim task.

Research into the performance shooting and editing for prelim video

In this shot we did a close up of musicians to enhance the fact that they are playing the music for the singer to sing.

In this shot we had shown all the musicians and all of the singers to show that they are a group and re-enforce that they are a band.

This shot is to shows that the lead singer has more status than the other singer and band members.

Music Video Analysis

In this music video it shows Tinie Tempahs star image as being a heroic figure and someone with super human power and strength.

This video also shows that he is a classy man who women love. In one of the scenes he is with an attractive woman who is lying down in a sexual way this show that he is asterational man and gives off that image to a young generation.

Also one of the scenes is of him bending some bars to break in and save the woman. This shows that he is really strong an classy. This make him the hero and the woman the princess in the narrative of the story.

Both of these examples give of the image that his music is better than others and that he can do anything with his music to make it the best.

Music Video

Evaluation of Pop Promo Prelim

The video was split up into four different parts which each group filmed in our 45 seconds of them. In our group we all rotated roles so we had a chance of having a go at everything. This consisted of three roles which where, camera man, director and playback. The first shot I did was of the band performing was a wide shot which was a shot of all the band members performing together. The problem with this shot was that it was quite hard fitting all of the band members in the shot without any of the singers being in front of the drummer or the bass guitarists. I also did close-ups of the bad members to jazz up the section we were filming.

We all played equal roles throughout our section of the video

Audience Feedback

Evaluation Task 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to product?

Looking back at our preliminary task, i feel that i have progressed from it and learnt a lot more skills. However i also realised how much the mise en scene means and really helps set the scene in the shot. In our thriller we had one tracking shot the whole way through and with the use of our new skills and knowledge we managed to create a back stage effect with the mise en scene. I have also improved on my editing skills, this was helpful in our thriller because we had to use a lot of extra audio to create the effect that there was a large stage very near by. We layered a sound of a crowd cheering to make it sound like there were thousands of people there. We than also added reverb to the sounds to make it sound like he was playing on a huge stage. And if we compared this editing to the one in our prelim task we did hardly anything to the prelim and absolutely nothing to the audio in it. Also with the camerawork the camera ran smoothly and with the improvement of our camera handling we managed to get everything in the shot as well as making it run smoothly.

This is  is one of the opening shots in our prelim task, it is a tracking shot of his feet walking into the room. I am comparing this to the opening shot of the final product that we have made because the are quite similar shots, and this shows how we have improved because of the more controlled and flowing movement.

With regards to the planning an preparing the prelim task, there wasn't much involved however in the main task we knew that to get a really good shot an understanding of how everything is going to work we had to plan a routine for all the actors to know when their cue was to walk across the screen etc. We also needed to rehearse how the camera was going to work around the actors and to get everything in. We had to rehearse this through around eleven times, then we had to have about seven takes of this to make sure that there was a good and decent shot. Also before all of this we made a story board to plan ahead of what we were going to shoot. Our story board was quite tricky at first because we could get our images down on the paper because we weren't good at drawing. But in the end we found someone in our group who was good at art. However in our prelim task we didn't rehearse it once and we only took one shot of everything.

The camerawork between the two tasks are very different in terms of controll and meaning. In the prelim task some of the shot are pointless and meaningless, for example there is a shot where the camera is place up high looking down on the two actors, when we thought of this shot there was no need for this shot to be placed there. We did this because we were playing with the camera and we wern't thinking of what this was for or what it would look like on the the screen. Also for the prelim there is a lot of unnecessary cuts which made the whole scene look very random and out of controll. However in the main task there was a lot more controll and thought behind the one shot which we managed to capture everything in. It ran more smoothly and to capture everything in it was very good.

Overall I am now think about the type of shots which I could start to use and where shots would look good in other places. However I now know that alot of information can be given out in a tracking shot aswell as using sound, editing, camerawork, mise en scene to get your point across. Also by using sound, especially in our thriller you can get a poin across really easily by getting the rigtht sounds and by putting the right effects on the sound.

This is the tracking shot in our prelim task and the one below is the tracking shot in the opening scene of our thriller.






This is the tracking shot in our thriller and you can see that the flow look almost natural coming off from the flight case.

Evaluation Task 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

This is our final product with annotations

Evaluation task 5

How did we attract your audience

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Evaluation Task 4

Who would be the audience for our media product?

Our media product is aimed at 15-30 year old's, and targeted at a wide mainstream mixed market. This is based on the action thriller genre. It would be release in the cinemas because we have aimed it at people who go to the cinema which are 15-25, however we also have a secondary audience which is aimed older people  because we thought it would catch their attention as we were inspired by the death of John Lenon when planning our film.

We chose our main actor to represent of an older more established rockstar. We decided to use a more established rockstar because we thought it would work better with the idea of our film. We decided not to have a young actor because it would decrease the amount of people who would come and watch our film, because if we did this this would also bring down the age of people who would watch it. We have decided to have our actor looking like a typical rockstar that a wider range of ages would familiarise.

Evaluation Task 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

We decided to use the Vertigo as our institution because of the type of films they have made. The type of film we have made is a low budget film which show reality of backstage at a gig. This is similar to some of Vertigo's films because they show a lot reality. Films such as ‘The Business’, ‘Football Factory‘ and ‘The Firm’ all prove this. Also they are targeted at a male audience as of which are Vertigo films. However our story line is a mystery and is therefore is similar to an american film called 'the Ghost Writer'. This is because it has a similar story line and they are both very thriller like.

 

Evaluation Task 2

How does your product represent particular social groups?

Our final product is influenced by the lifestyle of a rock star because it is very much based around musicians. Therefore this means that we are going to aim it at people who are indugled and really intrested in rock music. Everyone in our thriller you can see that they are into rock music and especially the reporter because she is the main charichter. You can see she is a music lover because of the way she dresses, andthe style of clothing.

Evaluation Task 1

In what way does our product conform to a real media product

This credit is very creative because we have placed it within the scene of our  thriller  and this is an idea of what a real film company would use.

This shot is very good because it captures the two main character just before the incident happens.

Here we have put a credit on top of the clip to show who the music was by. You would see this in a proper film production.

 As you can see from these screen grabs, our product shows a setting of a typical backstage area, because of the props, alcohole bottles, flight cases, clothing, furniture and lots of people creating chaos and commotion. The lighting is quite dark and dingy to set the mood and atmosphere of being back stage at a gig. All of this upholds our expectations of what we would expect a back stage area to be like. You would expect the backstage area to be very neat and tidy and very quite for the rock stars to relax, however in some you would see what we have in our thriller.

Account of shoot day...

We filmed our thriller on Wednesday 26th January. The thing we did first was setting up the set to make it look like what we wanted and most importantly make it look suitable for are thriller. After doing this we then thought about where the tracks for the tracking shot were going to be place so it would look good in the best possible way. After doing this we ran through the shot a couple of times to see if it would work.

The set ended up looking very similar to our original ideas and matched our drawings of the set, in our storyboard and other plans. We tried to make it look like there was a stage coming off from the main stage and that it was quite chaotic backstage with sound engineers and lighting crew moving equipment backstage. Also costume designers there choosing which outfits for the stars to wear. We scattered a lot of random props everywhere to make the scene look realistic and to create an atmosphere, thing such as guitars, flight cases, monitors, drinks and a seating area for the rockers to relax after performing. All of these props together reinforce the fact that it is a typical backstage area where the rock stars are off guard and relaxing.

Our plan was to use about 10 actors, to create chaos and disorder that you expect to see backstage at a gig. On the day of filming we used 12 actors who all had specific parts to create the setting and atmosphere. We had lingerers, groupies, managers, sound engineers, lighting crew, drunken people, costume designers, photographers and journalists.

After all of this was done we then had to make sure that the dolly was fitted properly and that it all ran smoothly and that there were no collisions. There was only one problem which was that one of the areas in the scene on camera was too dark and you couldn’t see what was going on. This was sorted by adding an extra light.

We had to do eight shots to try and capture the perfect secne. We smashed a glass bottle without anyone knowing at the end of the shot where we were going to put the non-digetic sound of the gun shot. We did this so we would get a more realistic reaction for when we put the gun shot in.

Here is our props list, our story board and our stage/set design, to show our planning before our final product

Opening Sequence Idea - Rockstar

Our final and most successful idea is influenced by the killing of John Lennon and the motives behind Mark Chapman, his killer and crazed fan. Completely filmed backstage, the rock star will walk off stage after his performance and muscle through the onslaughts of fans and hassling interviewers. When a fan comes and asks for his autograph, he is shot and the sudden incident will create a shock for the audience. A reporter before the shooting will walk along with him and ask him the probing question, ‘apparently you are thinking of retiring’ this is met with a dismissal but gives the audience a two different perspectives of the murder. The murder could well have been a harrowing surprise to the rock star, or he may have set it up to get him away from the hectic lifestyle of a musician. This would make the audience question the meaning behind the sequence, long after it has been watched. Although the idea is simple, it is also effective when you question what the rest of the movie would be about.

Rockstar Idea

Scrapping an idea,and finding a new one...

We have decided to scrap the lift idea and have moved on to a completely different idea. We have decided  to do this because it was to predictable and we thought people wouldn't be intrigued by it. We also thought that is was sterile and the audience wouldn't be in the characters at all because we hadn't developed on them much at all.

Miners’

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Thriller ideas PP

Level 5’

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Elevator scene from The Eye



What is a thriller?

Something that thrills, especially a suspenseful, sensational genre of story. These pictures below have been denoted and connotated to weather they are a thriller or a horror.

Denotation and Connotation

Image	Denotation	Connotation
Still from Scream	A blonde girl, holding a phone to her ear looking at something/somebody through a window who is holding a knife and is wearing a white mask and a black cloak. She is dressed in a cream jumper, juxtaposition in clothes.	Innocent blonde girl in danger, is going to be killed by the person in the mask, they are dangerous.
Still from Psycho	A lady in a shower, wet, looking at something with a shocked expression on her face.	Something is scaring her/shocking her, signifying that danger is nearing.
Still from Gothika	A girl facing writing that is written on the wall, saying “Not One” in red writing. She is dressed in normal, plain clothing.	There is a message written in red which signifies blood, and danger suggesting death and murder.
Still from  Friday 13th	A blonde woman dressed in dark clothes stood in an empty car park, facing a man who is far away and blurred from our vision.	The man who is unclear seems mysterious as we cannot see who he is. The open space and the man suggest to us that there is danger ahead.
Still from The Exorcist	A girl with cuts all over her face, long red her, blood dripping from her mouth and eyes wide open that are just white and black with no colour. She is dressed in a white blouse.	The cuts on her face signify violence and blood. Her long red her suggests she is dangerous. Although she is dressed in the colour white which represents purity and innocence, there is a juxtaposition.
Still from The Ring	A young girl sat on a chair in an empty room, looks clinical. She has long black hair that covers her pale face. Wearing a very white, clean dress and little girls shoes. A wire is near her.	The young girl looking pale, suggests that she is ill, signifying that she could be possessed by something evil. Again there is a juxtaposition between this and her innocent clothing.

Still from Omen	A young boy stood in a black and white suit stood in between white crosses in a grassy field. He is wearing a black hat on his head, and he has his hands on his hips looking up towards this camera.	The stance that he is stood in shows us that he has confidence and power. There is a juxtaposition between the boys clothing and the white colours of the cross, signifying that he is evil, as white signifies purity.
Still from It	A person with a painted face and fang like teeth. Red hair and green eyes. Placed on a black background.	The painting on the face signifies the figure of a clown, there is a dominant use of the colour red signifying blood and danger. They have their mouth open looking as if they are ready to bite something.
Still from Halloween	A man looking over a staircase shot from a low angle, holding a knife and wearing a pale mask.	Him looking over the balcony and being shot from a low angle shows us that he is looking down at something and that he has the power and is superior. The knife suggests danger, and violence signifying that he is going to kill someone.
Still from H2O	A man with a very white, pale face who is looking through a hole/porthole and a woman with a terrified expression on her face. There is a blue colouring within the shot.	His pale face suggests to us that he is ill or dead, as it is juxtaposed with her rosy coloured face looking alive. The use of blue colouring and a porthole reinforces the fact that they are on a boat.

 Still From the film 'Scream

'

Still from the film 'Psycho'

Still from the film 'Gothica'

Still from the film 'Friday the 13th'

Still from the film the 'Exorcist'

Still from the film 'The Ring"

Still from the film 'Omen'

Still from the film 'IT'

Still from the film 'Halloween'

Still from the film 'H20'