Final Website Link

http://jolliepopsarah.wix.com/bad-gals-fc-3

Finished Music Video

Finished digipak

Here is the finished Digipak. We took in our final audience feedback from the focus groups we held and made the appropriate changes to the digipak in order to create a final, matching package.

I added a water colour filter and brightened each photograph in order to make all the photographs link together, and also adding unique qualities to the digipak (aka the watercolour filter). I also changed the font so it is clearer to read and made the writing black instead of white, also making everything easy to read.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

How Effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

What Have you learned from your audience feedback

final ideas about the digipak

We all decided to have a group meeting after everything we had learn't through the evaluation stage. We all decided that the digipak could be improved and it needed something extra. I went onto photoshop and looked at changing around the text and panels to see if a different photograph would be better for the cover. I found a photo I took of Emma smiling at the camera and I thought it looked much better as the cover. I then looked at different filters we could put over all the panels in order to make them tie in together and give the digipak a more professional effect. We decided on using a cross-hatch filter over the panels and brightening the images a bit. This gave the digipak a more surreal effect and this fits in with our star image of Emma living the 'fantasy dream' life. Cheryl Cole's CD "Messy little Raindrops" has the same kind of "dreamy" effect to it, so this inspired a bit of our idea to use a filter --

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation?

Researching into our music video idea has been a long and quite complicated process, we firstly researched other music videos and adverts on sites like youtube. After a long sessions of youtube searching we then found the Dior fragrance advert titled, "A Dior Created Woman". We decided we wanted to take inspiration and ideas from this video and create our own take on their style. 

We made a treatment on powerpoint that presented our ideas of what the video would look like using an array of photographs and explanations of what would be going on. 

We had lots of feedback from this treatment and we found out interesting things that people liked about the pitch. For example they liked the colour scheme, and the idea of using shadows, but we also learn't that our narrative could not be too complicated incase the audience got lost or were too distracted from the song, which ultimately was the main product. Using powerpoint was a very helpful media technology as it made it easier to show the audience exactly what the atmosphere of the video would be like. Youtube made our research easily accessible as through youtube, we could see other videos and listen to songs by similar artists, which of course, ended up in us finding our song.

On youtube we found the artist stereo total, and were able to listen to all their other songs on their channel, and see what kind of videos they made. We used google in order to look up what genre they were and what kind of fan base they had. This helped us to determine how we could change our artist to fit her genre, yet reach out to a larger fan base. 

I also went online and looked at the style of similar artists and annotated them in order to see if we wanted to make a star have any qualities like Avril Lavigne or Lily Allen. I used fan sites and official websites to get posters of their tours. This was significant to finding out more about our chosen genre as I could see in advance what we would have to create and what kind of style we wanted for our artist.

In order to plan the music video thoroughly we had to find the perfect girl, and the way to make sure we knew whether she would be comfortable and look good on screen, we had to do screen tests. We used the Sony NX5 digital camera. This camera was quick and simple to use, and this made things easier and we could film quickly so had to time to plan and film different kinds of shots, and time was crucial as we had to book the studio in advance and only had around 20 minutes. We all had a go at filming the screen test on the camera so we all learnt how to use it. the quality of the film was outstanding and without this camera we would not have been able to tell whether the girl we chose would look good on screen or if she was comfortable in front of the camera and didn't look nervous in the film. 

Before filming the screen tests I also had a quick search around the web, mostly using youtube again, and looked up screen tests. This was our first screen test so no one really knew what they were doing. With the help of youtube as a digital technology, I was able to get a good idea of what to do in screen test by looking up other music video and film screen tests. Without the web we would have probably wasted time chatting and thinking about what we needed our girl (Emma) to do and wouldn't have gotten everything done in time.

We used the technology 'iMovie' on MacBooks to edit the clips of the girls and cut our song into the iMovie   clip also. This helped us to see not only how the girl looked and acted on screen, but which girl suited best tot he voice and vibe of the chosen song also. We then used an NX5 camera to shoot a screen test of the shadows behind a sheet that was a shot that we wanted to incorporate in our video. This helped us to understand and see that the silhouette idea would work out easily on the day and would look good in our video.

We also put of camera phones to use in our screen test and took photos of our 3 girls in poses they think would suit the character of the girl they were playing. This helped us make our final decision as we could look back at the photographs and see who fit the girl best and who had the best ideas for their character. We in the end decided that Emma was a clear winner as she was dedicated, confident and knew how to send a message across through the camera.

We came across a few problems in our screen test as we couldn't get the music to work at first because we hadn't purchased the song, so we tried to play youtube on our phones but there was a signal blocked in the studio which prevented us from doing so. In the end we recorded the song on sarahs phone and although it wasn't top quality, we could play it out loud on the speakers and it was enough for the girls to dance to.

Choosing the boys was made a lot easier by the school online students book where we could see their pictures so we could choose the look we wanted. Email also helped us schedule rehearsals and ask if they would be in it. This was very useful as it was an easy way of communicating to everyone at once, and gave them the chance to reply with questions etc. I composed this email to all the boys in order to ask them if they would like to be in our video and were comfortable with it!

We used the Sony NX5 to shoot the run through, screen test, with the boys and filming it was very useful as we got to see that our original choreography was awkward and didn't work! This gave us time to change it before the actual filming day. After the screen test I went up to the editing suite while Sarah, Chuffy and Layla worked on storyboard and choreography and edited the clips for our screen test so we could see what it looked like in the end. This helped us see what worked and what didn't. Unfortunatley, some of our clips were deleted by people by accident as there wasn't much memory on the computer so I had to work with what was left, which didn't include some of the shots we liked and still wanted to use.

We had to complete our full storyboard, and once this was done, Chuffy and I filmed in on a Song NX5 and uploaded it to the editing software 'Final Cut Pro' to put it together. Once edited, we all went through it to see what we thought. This really helped as we could see if we got all our shots in and how long they would have to go on for. We decided what we liked and it helped us get a clearer view of what our music video would look like.

The internet allowed us to search a whole range of costumes and sets for our video easily. We could search  around for styles and era in a very convenient way. From this we worked out what kind of costumes we wanted and what props we needed in our sets. 

Behind the Scenes

We had a lot of footage backstage when we were shooting our music video. So much that there was so much we didn't want it going to waste. We all thought it would make a great 'behind the scenes video' for our website etc. Chuffys IMovie wasn't working and it squished all the footage, so I decided to try and work it out on my computer. Luckily my IMovie was working so I was able to edit the video on my computer. It was a long process to get all the clips together and unfortunately our phone memory ran out by the time we got the beach scene so the video only shows the behind the scenes up to there.
Even though there were a few problems I really like the way this video turned out and i think it captures the fun atmosphere of the set, and all the hard work every did to create our final product.
Here is the finished behind the scenes video i edited...
enjoy