Ancillary Tasks

For our Ancillary tasks, Abbi and I thought it would be more practically and save time if we split up the task of making a digipak and poster at the same time.

We then decided that I would make the digipak while she made the poster.

This turned out to be very beneficial as we finished on time and we were able to get feedback from one another when editing our images.

Ancillary Product Inspiration

I saw this picture on the internet and it helped me and Emma when we were discussing ideas for our ancillary cover. Becky gave us the idea of a comic book style, which we thought was very good and would relate to our band, 'Power Rangers Redezvous'. This picture has helped us in our style of writing for our cover.

We have planned to incorporate the comic book element throughout our digipak, including a comic book strip of our 'hero' Steve rescuing a 'beautiful lady' and we are also including it on our poster advertising the CD.

Just a few pictures for Cd covers :)

Our final ever ever ever video... WOW!

And now it is the end of the editing and filming of our little creation. A bit upsetting really... NOT!! I'm glad all the stressing is over, but we're happy that we made the dead line first thing in the morning :)
So here she is... (Drum roll)
I give you... Power Rangers Rendezvous - Sleepyhead. Enjoy :)

Tweeting can cause over excitement!

Although unable to see, Greg James Tweeted me back. Yes, a famous man tweeted a normal girl like myself! Exciting news.

When our band are crazy famous, the feeling i have right now of "buzzing" is what they will be feeling... that's why we've intended to make our band a Twitter page so their fans can talk to them.

Greg James is our life!

Our Draft

Don't worry, it's all going to be changed!!

We understand also that there's a lot a lot of blank bits because we hadn't filmed them bits yet,

but the idea has now completely changed, so luckily we didn't film them bits or we would of just

wasted our time.

Ideas for our CD cover

For our album name, Abbi and I have decided to call it "The old school hates clowns" which is why there's a very sad looking clown at the top of this post. Using this very sad clown as inspiration for ideas, i will draw up a few ideas about what we would like the album cover to look like, adding and changing ideas as we progress into the actual making. 

I will remember to upload all of the other ideas :)

The new idea guys :)

So, after having the feedback and being very very grumpy over the review, Abbi and I had a sit down to talk about how we could improve, when we came to the conclusion that we're were stuck and doomed! Just kiddin'. We thought about how we could make the video more entertaining and relate more to the genre and the song. 

So, using the title of "Sleepy Head" we came up with the idea of having the whole video based around a dream... why we never thought of that before i don't know. 

Basically, the idea is to have him waking up as he did before, as if it's just a normal day and the audience are looking in on this boy's morning routine, but adding editing techniques like the stop motion of a shoe (was a sock but we had to change that) following the boy out of the room as he walks out, the days passing by really quickly, rewinding as if he's living the dream over and over again and jumping from one room to the other. This will require a lot of time and patients for us in the editing stage, but we need to make sure we get it spot on; lighting, distance and height is key for when the boy jumps out of one room into another. 

Abbi took inspiration from the song Run Away by Kanye West, which she informed me about, she liked the idea of having girls running over when they heard music. We thought of how we could use this idea in our music video, when I came up with the idea of having the boy play a recorder and instead of having girls running towards him, have toys in stop motion coming towards him, this is because the theme of dreams would match very well with this. Also, we have many toys in our music video to show the genre and gender :) In a way we linked this to the Pied Piper with him and his rats.  |

We also wanted to have some link with the name of the album this song is from, which we have named "The Old School Hates Clowns", so within the dream we want to have clowns or maybe mimes, if we're unable to do the clown make up. This will again add to the dream like state the boy is in, as we're using stop motion again to show how the clowns have moved around the room next to him.

For the party scene, which we could never get rid of, we want the boy to step out of one room to end up in a corridor towards the party area, again slick editing will have to be used for this.

We also want all the people who are attending to be wearing masks to make the music video a bit of a nightmare, as you cant see their identity.

Once inside the party, we want it all to be crowded and like the skins party we have previously talked about in a post. We must make sure that we have the whole crown clap to the beat, as in our feedback people thought the clapping in time to the music was really really good and fitted in well with the feel of the video.

As you can hopefully tell, we want our music video to have many aspects of dreams, the deja vu of reliving a dream, spooky sides of dreams, the weird dreams that are just so so random and the dreams you don't want to wake up from. But what about the lovey dreams?! Well we've made sure we have that involved too. We intend to have a girl in a eye mask in the middle of the room, who the boy will see. He tries to take her eye mask off but she runs away, this would link to dreams when you wake up before you know what happens.

We want to have these two at the ending too, as we want the girl to drag the boy outside to give him a gift and whispering in his ear. Using a close up of her lips saying "wake up" into his ear, we want this to be the first thing that the audience realise to be a dream. Then we want her to push him back, for him to then fall onto his bed back at home, showing that it was all a dream. Shame. But... the gift she gave him (which is going to be a bracelet) he has round his wrist, which will leave the audience wondering "was it really a dream?!"

A spanner in the works..

After getting the results from the teacher and peer assesment, automatically Abbi and I knew we had to change a lot of things to one, get a higher grade and 2, to make our music video more interesting.
We've had a lot of problems thrown at us durring the filming process such as, the change of the male lead role and now we had the problem of having our main girl character not being able to attend for filming because it was durring her learning time. Therefore, we had to either think of a way to get around this or just scrap that idea all together. Bare in mind that at this point we only had 2 and a half weeks left until the final dead line!! 

Being the brave troopers that Abbi and I am, we decided to start new with where our music video went and ended up... we did this mainly because of the feedback from the other people in our class said. Which was "i dont get the boy's and girl's relationship" and "you should add more stop motion, because it fits really well with the music video". So, taking these ideas on board we've now changed the idea. 

The feed back we got from our teachers wasn't what we really wanted to hear, because the bits of our music video we thought were really good, for our standards any way that thought, "you can do this better by..." The mise-en-scene we were told was not right, and it was too much like a boy's room, not a boy's music video room, which to be completely honest i dont understand one bit! But we've taken this on board and have figured out ways to make the teachers happy and to make our music video amazingly fantastic (touch wood). 

'See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil'

I saw this picture on the internet, a take on the saying 'See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil'. Although it doesn't necessarily relate to the narrative in our music video, I really like the image and feel that me and Emma could perhaps incorporate it into our stop motion ideas as it is a well known saying and I like the idea of it.

Kanye West - Runaway

Kanye West's amazing video for his new song, 'Runaway' really inspired me. Obviously we would not be able to create something as perfected and detailed as this but some of the shots can easily be replicated. For example, the shots of the car driving at the beginning, the solo shots of Kanye and the dancers and still shots of them. They are simplistic yet work really well and reflect the narrative of the video.

I also like the use of the slow down shots, as we have a lot of sped up shots we could try slowing others down to see how it works within our video.

The scene of Kanye playing the piano is also a great shot as it relates to Emma's suggestion of Steve playing the keyboard during our video, this incorporates him with the song more as he is meant to represent our band. I also like the angle used on this scene and it looks great when the dancers run in after hearing the piano, something else we could incorporate - others reactions to the music, which we could also link in with our stop motion.

Stop Motion Music Video

I found this video on YouTube, during additional research for mine and Emma's music video. Due to certain complications we have been rethinking certain scenes in our video and what we could change. One thing we decided on was to include more stop motion and to have it as a more recurring theme throughout our video.
This video inspired me, in giving me ideas of extra stop motion we could include in our work. I like the use of stop motion that includes the character, e.g. when the girl puts the shoes on and the laces move. I think they combine the stop motion with reality really well.

Our Draft Is Finished :D

Finally, we have completed our draft for our music video. We know that we have not got all the footage that we want and need to have a full music video, but we have made it clear that we will include the footage in our final piece.

The shots we plan on including in the footage yet to come are;
For the party scenes, we intend to use a range of different shots to create a "skins" atmosphere, like this one below.

We also plan on filming other scenes that involve both Steve and Chloe together, representing a flash back. The shots we want to use for this are a mid range shot of them both together, close ups of them holding hands and a full length shot.
We also need to re-shoot certain parts of our video, such as the scene when we first see Steve's feet, as MR SMITH told us that he needs, and I quote "more exciting socks". Also, when we see Mr Potato Head, the "banana" figure, which is actually two ducks, hugging is distracting.