CD Cover and Magazine Advert (Development)

We have been spending quite a lot of time working on getting the majority of the Advert and the Cover done so that I can finish the final designs whilst at home allowing both of us to concentrate on the filming that is coming up, we have now pretty much got a basic design that we feel is going to be simple yet exciting enough to get the audience interested in what it is. I am not going to show the whole thing because you will see it in the final design but they both include these:

Illustrations Of Band Members

We have come up with a simple design to represent the Artist on the CD Cover and the Magazine Advert. We had a discussion about the overall look of both of these and the main theme was that we wanted to keep it simple, so I sketched a simple figure using my laptop and graphics tablet :



Then working from this basic design we added a small amount of detail in order to distinguish between the separate members of the band:

Cd Cover and Magazine Advert

We have started to think about creating the CD Cover and Magazine advert and have started to produce early ideas for what we need to include. We have also been looking for real examples of Digi-paks or similar CD packaging to get a better idea of how they look and the conventions that they follow, for example:




In our preliminary discussions and plans we have decided that we do want some representation of the band on the Cover and the Advert. We have also decided to use illustrations rather than photos for both, this is because we felt that illustrations were a more interesting way to decorate and make them eye-catching.
We also want to keep them as simple as possible whilst not compromising on keeping them eye-catching.

Risk Assessment

S + J

This is the animatic that we produced for our music video project.


S + J

Permission Letter

Due to the fact that the track we are using is a recognised song by a popular band there are issues with Copyright. Therefore we have written a letter to the Copyright holder (Interscope Records) in order to gain their permission for the use of the track "Let It Happen"

Research and Preparation

Obviously before we started the actual production of our music video we researched other music videos, both general and from the band we have chosen to produce a video for (Jimmy Eat World), what follows is some of the videos that we watched and how they shaped our own video idea:



This video is similar to the video we will be making, it has an element of performance and an element of narrative. The narrative follows the band through a day as they travel through Hong Kong. The performance uses quite bright colors and the narrative uses a more subdued color palate. The narrative doesn't really lead anywhere though but because it is a music video and it is very short it does not become boring to the audience, it has a very fresh style and is very modern compared to some videos. The clothes the band wear are quite formal and they look quite out of place, however this works within the context of the video.



This video also has narrative and performance included, once again the colour palette changes between the two. Whilst the footage is performance the colours are much more vibrant and they become much more subdued in the narrative footage probably to emphasize the emotional nature of the story. The fact that these two videos both have performance and narrative shows how popular this video set-up actually is and also led us onto this set-up for our video.

The next videos are two from "Jimmy Eat World" the first is from their latest album and the second is one of their older videos and songs:






These two videos are obviously very different, the first has no discernible narrative at all and focuses almost completely on the bands performance, whereas there is an obvious narrative in the second and whats more is the performance footage of the band is anchored within the setting of the story. The colour palettes in both these videos have also been tampered with, the first has an incredibly light palette with high lighting and fairly open backgrounds, but the second includes quite dark colours and has a much more confined setting. The fact that both of these videos and the majority of their other videos include footage of the band performing obviously made us develop our own idea into incorporating this to be inter-cut with the chosen narrative for the song (Let It Happen) changing our idea into the finalised and storyboarded plan.

S

Introduction

This blog is going to be a well documented diary of events regarding the production of a music video for an A level syllabus. There will be two contributors to both the music video production and hopefully this blog; they will be me (Steven Fischer) and Jacob Smith, we have worked together previously so to check out our testing of the new A level syllabus just copy and paste the following URL into your address bar (http://steve-and-jake-media.blogspot.com/)
If all goes to plan this blog will be updated regularly with what we are doing towards the music video and the decisions being made throughout the production, so make sure to keep checking back to see what's going on.

S