Research for Ancilliary tasks

The first groups album artwork we will show is from TLC- another R&B group from the 90's with similar music to Salt N Pepa.

Both of these covers show us a good use of colours that work will for the cover, and is similar to something that we may want to use for our album covers.

Then we have a screenshot of their official website-

None of us particularly like this website design, however we believe that the colour schemes work well to fit in with 90's theme that is trying to be achieved.

The next album work we looked at was from Kid N play:

 We liked this as it portrayed the cartoon like 80's look that we have considered, also even though it is a fairly old album cover you get a feeling of modernity from it. And again the colours compliment each other well in creating the 90's feeling.

Then their websites, both Chris Browns and Tygas:

Both of these websites dont fit in to our criteria because they are both to modern to get a 90's vibe from.

Next there is De La Soul, and here are some examples of their album artwork:

Again these are great examples to relate to the album artwork that we want to create. Both of these have colour schemes that conform to the 90's idea, it seems that the use of red green and pink seem to work well together aswell.

And then for their website:

Again this website doesnt seem to fit in with our theme of the 90's so wouldnt really be able to relate to their website, however their album artwork is perfect in relation to what we are looking to create ourselves.

Album artwork from boyz II Mean is show here:

Their album covers does not link to the rest that we have shown, but these two show quite a nice white and black theme, which can be seen within a fair few R&B groups album artwork. It shows as a nice alternative for the coloured themes.

Then their website also correlates with this theme:

Again this them does work well and if we cant achieve the coloured theming succesfully we may resort to using black and white to give it a simple yet effective digipak

and finally we looked at the digipak for Mika, firstly the covers

We especially liked all of these as we feel they had the best use of coulors and a cartoonish feeling that we feel works really well. We would like to achieve something similar to one of these for our final album artwork. The colours and images in all of these work really well together and help to entice and audience.

Then their website:

Again this website is not we would like to use due to the dark colours which do not correlate with our ideas and the site is also quite boring and doesnt have much on it.

Overall we believe that we would like to recreate something similar to the colourful cartoon like album covers that have been shown here. This is cause we feel like this will work well with the song that we are doing and it also will fit into our 90's theme that we are trying to achieve. Also we want our website to be vibrantly coloured and something that grabs the audiences attention. As a group we feel that it would be good if there was some sort of link between the album cover and the website, whether its through colours or images, just something that links them together, as we feel that would look professional.

Thank you to Tyler for the blogpost

Animatic Evaluation

Storyboard’s are incredibly important in order to find out what the video will look like exactly, and it also brings some potential problems to light.

This was apparent when I made my first animatic on Final Cut Pro, I made the mistake of cutting the shots together before syncing it to the track. This was problematic because each cut was not to the beat of the track, which made it look clunky and disjointed.

To overcome this, I started from the beginning. I put the track in, and then began marking the cuts in order to link the shots to the track. Overall, I was left with quite a successful looking animatic.  However, I could see that having some literal shots, that linked with the lyrics was not a good idea as it became muddled up with the timings, therefore would crop up in places irrelevant to the track. 

I would keep the majority of what features in the storyboard, in the final product. However, I would certaintly not keep the literal shots as they became disjointed and irrelevant to the track. I would change the shot lengths also, as some of the shots appear for far too long, and as it has quite a fast paced beat. This was another weakness of the animatic because as you can see in the video some of shots are too long, therefore I would cut faster in the final edit of the pop video. However, I think it would be good to break the pattern of the beat and have slightly different cuts away from the beat, and then slowly coming back into the pattern.

I think it is difficult to show a star image through a storyboard, and as amateur storyboard artists we struggled to get across all the canted angle shots we plan to use. However, with the boom box, colour wall, and DJ Decks I think that we created a brief window into the image of our artist. 

Doing the animatic myself has been very useful in learning what order we are going to do things, such as syncing the track to the shots before cutting the shots in order to match the cuts to the beat, breaking the pattern in structured and planned way. Futhermore, it has been incredibly useful reminding my self how to use different editing softwear, and especially in learning how to make my skills relevant to editing a music video.

The next editing related task will be how to create animated words, and colours to come out of the boom-box and to appear across the screen. 

Prop and Set list

PROP LIST

• Boom box 
• Dj decks
• 80's posters (tupac, de la soul, biggie etc)
• Old, battered, weather beaten sofa
• Disco ball & strobe lights
• Vinyls
• Magazines
• Fast Food

SET LIST

• Rooftop, with a green screen
• Coloured backdrop in a white room
• Small corner with bricks (covered in posters) containing two tables with decks on it.

We will be supplying gall the props directly, and will work with the set designers to develop a set.

CAST LIST

•  Romany Henry
•  Vogue Phelps
•  Robert Keith
•  Oluwadamini Ige
•  Ali Dangote
•  Loa PourMirza
•  Stephanie Amata
•  Charles Ndiomu
•  Alec Heritier
•  Charlie Ridgeway
•  Angel Sandelson
•  Joe Hellman
•  Josh Thomas
•  Molly Green
•  Anel Salykhova
•  Gabe Jackson
•  Hannah Palmer
•  Kai Gillespie
•  Esme Chapman

COSTUME

Emily Tedrake from Universal - Polydore

ANR signs them 
video commissioner - 3 people
oversee whole process
single - brief - deadline - delivery date
talk to artist about any specific ideas - literal? what they want to avoid - animation ?
studio or location
show other videos sot inspire, work with artist, record company
director reels
more open the brief the better, go to 5-10 directors
storyboards, shotlist, images, locations, cast list
any issues should be resolved before shoot day
director of photography, any other post stuff should be sorted out 
6 week turnaround from script to product
vevo help push up view count, put in more promotion radio look at views on vevo 
most director’s signed to production companies

HERE IS SOME OF THEIR PREVIOUS WORK:

Our Finished Storyboard

Storyboard by Tyler Byrne

Our Finished Timeline

Timeline by Tyler Byrne

Ollie Algrove

Ollie Algrove

Today we had a visit from Ollie, who currently works in the business for passion pictures, producing current music videos and feature films, here are some notes I made in class: 

• executive producer
• feature films
• music video
• commercials
• animation
• This Is England
• Passion Pictures
• 30 years old
• Searching for sugar man 
• Passion - story tellers
• Independant
• Oscar winning 
• Multi-Award winning
• Talent management
• Directors
• Producers
• VFX Artists
• Treatment - explain the video - where’s the hook - Introduction/engagement with the song - does it feature the band? what are they wearing? How does it help you visually tell the story? is there gonnna be a set? why is it there? Communicate idea clearly
• How do they fit into the music business?
• Offer a unique visual voice
• Offer a creative point of view
• Who makes the call
• Artist
• Management
• Commissioner
• What does the artist want(need)?
• Hits (views)
• Controversy
• Noise
• Impact 
• Colab
• Artist and directors share ideas
• The Shoot
• No questions
• Don’t Fix it in Post