For this project we as a group aimed high, even if this wasn't realistic for a 'College' project. The brief asked us to produce a music video to a song of our choice - using creative commons/no copyright. Me and Em had spoken for very long before and throughout this project about how we didn't want our video to be stereotypical or cliche, we wanted to do something that had not been done before at Ludlow College, which therefore meant to consider locations much more carefully and mind not to use either Ludlow Castle or the Drama Studio as this has been seen and done before. Instead we solved this by hiring a room at the local Assembly Rooms, we filmed in an old School room and various off site locations. The song we selected
was from a Creative Commons website named Jamendo.com, the idea of having a song with no copyright at first annoyed me, but now looking back and reflecting I believe it was a very good idea as our group had to think out of the box and come up with something original instead of relying on ideas from a proper band. The song is by unknown artist "spitfire" (Do you) I immediately felt a connection to this and very strong ideas came along, as I couldn't help but feel this genre of music was almost historical. 
It reminded me of 50's/60's artists such as Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, The Beatles and Jerry Lee Lewis, so my initial thought was that we could re-create this era. Going to break I spoke to Emma and she too had strong feelings about this song and we started talking about what we could do with this, when Emma suggested re-creating the mad world of Andy Warhol, Edie Sedwick and the Factory. This was a great opportunity to put all our strong sides into action. As my stronger side was of creativity I did a lot of research on costume, iconic people and came up with the groundplans for shooting. I did a major blog on icons of the 60's and the 
'fashion' of the early 60's which i believe benefited us extremely much because when we went into the wardrobe of costumes at the College I and the group had a very clear visual understanding of what we were looking for, especially considering hat this is a period piece we wanted to get the feel of the early 60's right, e.g. not mix it with flowerpower as that was the late 60's and therefore avoid any confusion. 
Emma and myself watched the film 'Factory Girl' to get an idea of how this whole world had been interpreted compared to the real one, for this I did notes on just about anything of interest such as notes on costume, angles of camera, people ect. All this research showed itself being of great support in our work as whenever we went filming we knew exactly what to do. Casting for the video was rather difficult as we had a lot of people on mind but no one seemed to fully suit or work the characters. 
In media I and Em asked Owen Lewis to act as Warhol because his way of behaving was rather camp, he was build like Warhol, looked fairly much like the part and having done Art and Design he actually knew who Andy Warhol was. He agreed and we ran some costume and make up tests and finally agreed as a group he'd do perfectly. Compared to the real world of producing and directing a music video, I believe we've handled our project very similar, very proffesional and we've been very mature about what to do, we've all developed major skills from this project, casting was a long process itself, and so was the initial background research, but we couldn't have made our video the way it is without it. When you switch on MTV what the viewer usually sees is a woman dancing against a boy, or a large flashy car... We challenged this idea of mainstream video by taking the true story of Edie Sedwick's rise to fame being Andy Warhol's muse, then followed by her major downfall and eventual death. We added a character to this who in the film Factory Girl is Billy Quin 
and in real life is rumoured to be Bob Dylan, because we wanted to make this video into as much of a love story as a serious, sinister, shocking real life story, basically, we wanted to shock the audience and give them something unexpected. 
In the video we've used Band shots which are shown in very contrasting black and white because its a way of dividing the two worlds up in half in a symbolic manner, in the video itself it shows an introduction with our musician (Matt) entering a place where he is about to perform a gig with his classic rock'n roll band. 
Instead of using the mise en scene of the early 60's beatles with same clothes and hair, we converyed the idea by letting Felix (Guitarist) David (Bassist) and Luke (Drummer) wear their own clothes, only Luke had a minor costume change and we put him in a plane white shirt due to a very anti 60's t-shirt. Performance wise and exterior wise, Felix was very energetic and in many of the shots we've used he almost comes across as a Jimmie Hendrix, Luke was drab and mad, whereas David showed a very neat and tidy side. Matt (Singer) we gave a costume because we had an idea of him being almost rustic, he needed to have a bit of a folk edge to himself. For this scene we used the A2 Drama class and whilst Emma was filming Matt's entry I sorted out costume, I felt that here it strongly benefited us all knowing about the costume because we had an amazing contrast of 
vividly colourfull, patterned and simple dresses for the girls, the boys were mainly put in the background because at a gig like this the girls want to be near the star.The main plot is the 'musician' reflecting back on the time when he tried to help his lover Edie leave the Factory scene before it was too late. The musicians perspective is that he wrote a song about the events occuring... The colour scenes reflect the past. In the video we will attempt without intend to insult anyone to show how Warhol used and drained Edie -then pushed her out... Alas by the end, we have a shot of Warhol mourning Edie's death. This is not something I believe has been done before and we convey the stereotypical music video in the media by having followed this idea, usually when a story is told through music videos it is because they are film soundtracks and therefore the video shows clips from the film. Our video I feel has been done brilliantly and is in no way similar to any other music video done in our media group. To polish off the video and make it look more presentable and proffesional, we did the colours very strongly to suggest the colourfull world of Andy Warhol. We've chosen to use short snappy clips for many of the scenes, mainly the factory scenes, because this symbolised and conveyed the idea of the lifestyle Edie (Sara) was leading, whereas the contrast is clear when it comes to the band shots which are very smooth and delicate. Editing wise we've tried to keep a strong link between on screen action and lyrics, every clip has a lyrics and meaning it goes with which is what we've discussed that we had to do in order to make the 'story' the singer is telling understandable and believable. We chose to use a 40/60 when it came to band scenes and on screen action, 60% of the video is mainly the story of the singer and Edie
but we felt we needed this in order for it to make sense, but I feel in contrast to this we've made up for that with some extremely strong bandshots, e.g. a lot of close up and general action, we've tried to show that each band member has a personality such as Felix our guitarist is the flirtatious one whereas Luke the drummer is very energetic, silly and pulls drum faces. In the average high quality production the band are all very similar, especially compared to the early 60's beatles, where they all looked alike and acted the same, and it is something which we've strongly tried to convey.2. How effective is your combination of your main product and ancillary text
For our Dikipack and advert we've used still shots from our video without giving any of the storyline away. We sat down and had a long talk about what to include in our digipack picture and font wise. Then we set each other homework analysing a cover of our choice -music, DVD or video case. And I chose the Hildebrandt brothers who did the original star wars poster. Jasmine questioned this asking whether we were now doing star wars or not which I just had to simply say "No..." to. I decided to analyse the Hildebrandts work because it appealed to me how everything was build up in scale and I strongly believed we could do something interesting with that idea. What I came up with for the front of our case was a build up of the band members in black and white. The singer (Matt) being the main focus and the rest subtly blending in. This I took further and started editing on a program I used to use when I studied and carried out my A levels in Graphics corelDRAW 13. In this is used contrast and light further to smoothen up the pictures, then I added each picture needed and used a transparency tool to blend them all in. My initial idea for the font/name was bold white thick text with red and yellow to go with the idea of the name Spitfire... But I found it didn't work, it looked very tacky and too modern for what we were aiming at, so I changed this to red and framed the title with some border lines making it look fairly modern but it also links to the idea of artists in the 60's like Jackson Pollock, Vasilly Kandinsky and Andy Warhol. I chose to put a warm yellow/golden border at the bottom of the case to make the text in the bottom stand out further and also to give the case much more contrast. For the spine I did almost the same thing, I used red text and chose
a font which seemed like a handwriting, then used pictures of Warhol (Owen) Edie (Sara) and the singer (Matt) Edie in the middle looking almost angelic but it is to show the contrast of the two worlds and tconverying the idea of her being torn between two men. The back of the case was made by Jasmine and shows the tinfoil which is an idea she took from the factory, she used the painting of Warhol's famous banana which I'd painted as a prop and used a picture of Edie, this contrasts with the front cover because it shows the to vividly different worlds. The Advert was designed and constructed by me, it is intended to go in a magazine as advertisement for gigs and Spitfire's 'greatest hits' collection. For the advert I thought that we've stuck to the cool exterior 50's-60's rock'n roll facade, and therefore I did a very warm design using 2 black and white photos merged together (Matt and Sara - Singer and Edie) and on top of this I've chosed warm pop artsy colours in the name of Warhol. I got my inspiration from a poster made for 'Factory Girl' in which Edie's face is overlapped with a strip of yellow paint, only in mine I only used the idea of overlapping onto the original image, the rest was about linking it to the digipack. The font is very bold, I chose to do this to keep it pop artsy, original and for people to be able to read it. The overlapping is very simple, I build up colours blending them together using the transparency tool in corelDRAW13, I added shapes like boxes and circles, it's bold and very pop artsy! I chose to not include the whole band because I felt this was a cliche idea and if people knew who the band Spitfire were they'd know them mainly by the lead singer, and also they'd know their minimalistic and simple style when it comes to marketing. 3. What have you learned about your audience feedback?
The audience feedback was very helpfull, overall we've grown to like our video because we've worked so hard on it, so therefore we see the flaws less, so letting others have their input whether we liked it or not gave us an insight in what our target audience wanted to see.
the majority wanted for example more band scenes and factory scenes, so we sat down and tried to find places to edit this and add. Eventually we knew we had to cut out some extracts which we found very hard, but having completed the video we now see it was for the best and it would in the end have benefited us all much more. On another scale letting the cast viewing our video was also helpfull as I saw it as a process in which we'd asked them to help so we'd have to make sure they also were happy with the shots we used of them, for example Owen wasn't too keen on some of the shots of him and he told us, so we could then change it. Main changes we changed involved the lip synching being off or adding more shots.
the majority wanted for example more band scenes and factory scenes, so we sat down and tried to find places to edit this and add. Eventually we knew we had to cut out some extracts which we found very hard, but having completed the video we now see it was for the best and it would in the end have benefited us all much more. On another scale letting the cast viewing our video was also helpfull as I saw it as a process in which we'd asked them to help so we'd have to make sure they also were happy with the shots we used of them, for example Owen wasn't too keen on some of the shots of him and he told us, so we could then change it. Main changes we changed involved the lip synching being off or adding more shots.4. How did you use Media Technologies in the construction, research & planning, and evaluation stages?
For the project comparing it to last year, where we individually produced music magazines we've this this year used a larger range of technologies. Last year the main program used was Publisher and in some cases photoshop, but this year we've made great use of computer tech for example for our blog and editing. In the construction process we used digital cameras and cam corders, lights (Spot lights and stage lights for band scenes) laptops, phones and portable music players. 
For editing the video we used the College Apple computers provided and Final Cut Pro, a program on these computers used to edit films and songs. Having only used this sort of advanced technology once last year for our sample video of 'Ghostbusters' I felt I was out of my comfort zone, I knew how to use Windows Movie maker but have never used anything so extremely complex or high tech in my life, so I basically spend a few hours on my own getting to know Final Cut Pro by doing some minor editing which wasn't constructed or something which we added to the video, I am just a strong believer that if you can't do something learn how to and then do it. Eventually I got the hang of it and grew better, so myself and Emma spend unanimous hours on 
editing, Jasmine couldn't do much outside of lesson unfortunately due to her timetable being full. The editing process gave us an idea of the awareness and made us plan every major scene carefully because of the dangers describes in Jasmine's risk asessment and because of all the cables and cords surrounding the major outcome of extras and us. For the main research we spent a few weeks doing individual research in to music genres and previous music videos made which eventually would give us a wider perspective and greater idea of what we intended to produce. For this I researched Marilyn Mansons famous song and video for 'Coma White' which I chose to do because we sat down and agreed to do 3 very different genres and video types, Jasmine analysed 'Disturbia' by R'nB singer Rihanna and Emma did 'Bad Romance' by starlet Lady Gaga - the fact that at the time the video and song were new gave us a fresh input as mine and Jasmine's choices had been around for longer. 'Coma White' I found was a classic example of breaking the boundaries and music video conventions, the lyrics were about drugs and how they wont help solve your problems despite anything you do. 
Yet in the video Manson himself portrays JF Kennedy and the video, which is concept based, evolved around the day he was assasinated. What fascinated me about the video was the strong message it carried forwards, the people surrounding the 'President' all seemed somewhat like puppets, remaining still. Despite the fact that this eventually wasn't our chosen path song and genre wise I like to think and I do believe strongly that our video also has this idea of "don't do drugs" General planning went very well and we posted everything from what we'd done to our next move on the blog which was extremely helpfull in case one or two of us were not in lesson due to exams the people remaining in media still had a very clear idea of what to do and what was happening, for example we had to re-cast our Edie Sedwick 3 times due to illness and a full schedule, this was nerve wrecking but it was a comfort to know that as soon as anyone knew anything it would be posted. Having to re-create the mise en scene from the 60's and the Factory we knew the expectations were high, so therefore we produced and collected our own props and selected locations carefully. Overall I've enjoyed the project a lot and found it challenging in the best of ways, I worked to the best of my abillity and believe strongly that we've successfully established what we can do.
For editing the video we used the College Apple computers provided and Final Cut Pro, a program on these computers used to edit films and songs. Having only used this sort of advanced technology once last year for our sample video of 'Ghostbusters' I felt I was out of my comfort zone, I knew how to use Windows Movie maker but have never used anything so extremely complex or high tech in my life, so I basically spend a few hours on my own getting to know Final Cut Pro by doing some minor editing which wasn't constructed or something which we added to the video, I am just a strong believer that if you can't do something learn how to and then do it. Eventually I got the hang of it and grew better, so myself and Emma spend unanimous hours on 
editing, Jasmine couldn't do much outside of lesson unfortunately due to her timetable being full. The editing process gave us an idea of the awareness and made us plan every major scene carefully because of the dangers describes in Jasmine's risk asessment and because of all the cables and cords surrounding the major outcome of extras and us. For the main research we spent a few weeks doing individual research in to music genres and previous music videos made which eventually would give us a wider perspective and greater idea of what we intended to produce. For this I researched Marilyn Mansons famous song and video for 'Coma White' which I chose to do because we sat down and agreed to do 3 very different genres and video types, Jasmine analysed 'Disturbia' by R'nB singer Rihanna and Emma did 'Bad Romance' by starlet Lady Gaga - the fact that at the time the video and song were new gave us a fresh input as mine and Jasmine's choices had been around for longer. 'Coma White' I found was a classic example of breaking the boundaries and music video conventions, the lyrics were about drugs and how they wont help solve your problems despite anything you do. 
Yet in the video Manson himself portrays JF Kennedy and the video, which is concept based, evolved around the day he was assasinated. What fascinated me about the video was the strong message it carried forwards, the people surrounding the 'President' all seemed somewhat like puppets, remaining still. Despite the fact that this eventually wasn't our chosen path song and genre wise I like to think and I do believe strongly that our video also has this idea of "don't do drugs" General planning went very well and we posted everything from what we'd done to our next move on the blog which was extremely helpfull in case one or two of us were not in lesson due to exams the people remaining in media still had a very clear idea of what to do and what was happening, for example we had to re-cast our Edie Sedwick 3 times due to illness and a full schedule, this was nerve wrecking but it was a comfort to know that as soon as anyone knew anything it would be posted. Having to re-create the mise en scene from the 60's and the Factory we knew the expectations were high, so therefore we produced and collected our own props and selected locations carefully. Overall I've enjoyed the project a lot and found it challenging in the best of ways, I worked to the best of my abillity and believe strongly that we've successfully established what we can do.
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