Dear Moderator...

Welcome to my A Level blog! My name is Emily Brown and my blog contains all of my work produced for my G324 A2 Coursework Portfolio Unit within OCR GCE course for media studies.

I worked with another peer to create our music video to Kate Nash's song '3am'.

Along the right hand side is a menu displaying all the labels to relevant blog posts and to help you navigate my blog.

Thank you and Enjoy!
Emily Brown

Evaluation 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Evaluation Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Completed Music Video!

Ancillary Task Two: Magazine Album Advert

Here is  my final magazine advert for my artist's album, 'Moving On'.

Creating My Magazine Advert

The first website I used to create my advert is Fotor. With this website, I changed the filter of my picture to black and white and added the text. Luckily, I managed to find a font very similar to the font I used on my website.

After I had imported all the text I wanted onto the advert, I then used LunaPic again and used their 'merge image' tool in which you can add a photo on top of another. I imported the edited image I created on Fotor and then uploaded the record label image and re-sized it to fit into the bottom left hand corner. 

I then had to re-save this image and re-import it so I could add the social media logos that I took from my website.

As I was unsure on the lay out of the magazine advert I asked two 17 year old girls to help me decide where all my text should go. This ensure that it will appeal to people of my target audience. 

Ancillary Task One: Final Website

Below is the website I have created for my artist, Imogen,

http://ebrown68.wix.com/imogen

Here is the homepage of the website.

Here is the page showing pictures from the artist's photoshoot:

The homepage shot of Imogen smiling remains the background for each page. The home page displays the artist's name, album name, social media links and a menu bar for other pages. I added social media accounts as this generation follow many celebrities and music artist's lives on social media. The text has an added 'fade in' transition to make the website look more sleek and professional.

I will use the same font for my magazine advert to add synergy so it is easy for my artist's fans to recognise the brand of Imogen.

Website Audience Feedback

Whilst creating my artist's website, I had 6 pictures of my artist to choose from for the homepage and to ensure my website suited my target age group, I asked five 16-18 year olds to choose their favourite. However it was a tie between these two photographs:

I made the executive decision to use the smiling photo (bottom) as the website and I will use the top one for the magazine advert. 

Bird Cage Stop Motion

After the success of last time, we decided it would be effective to use stop motion again. One line in particular where we think it would work well is when Kate Nash sings 'and I'm trapped'. Although a short line, we wanted to emphasise the fact that she feels trapped.

So, my co-director and I had the idea of drawing a bird cage with a bird trapped inside, but to show the bird is 'trapped' we would use stop motion and show the bird moving as if it is trying to fly away. To do this, we had to take photographs of the bed moving position so we drew the bird on a separate piece of paper that could be moved.

Differently to last time, Chaya could draw the bird cage and  birds off camera and only had to show the bird moving, but the camera was still set up directly above the paper, on a tripod.

LunaPic Online Photo Editor

Once I had downloaded the 'trapped' font, I realised that it needed to be transparent or we wont be able to 'overlay' it onto the shot of the bird cage stop motion.

I decided to have a look online to see if there was anything that could turn a background transparent and I came across LunaPic which is a free editing program online!

It was super easy to use; you simply upload the picture and you just have to click on the part of the picture you want to become transparent and save it!

This could then be used on the bird cage shot! 

'Trapped' Font

With the stop motion of the bird cage, we wanted the word 'trapped' to appear when the lyric is sung. I used a website called dafont.com as it allows you to browse a wide range of fonts within certain categories, I looked in the horror section to see if there were any fonts that looked 'trapped'.

I found this one and thought it was appropriate so I downloaded it.

Stop Motion Finished!

Below are all the shots put together creating our stop motion shot! This is only the rough cut as the one in our final video will be sped up and be split up as it is too long to have as one shot.

Stop Motion

My co-director and I have always wanted to incorporate stop motion into our music video as we feel it works well within the indie-pop genre music videos.

After watching the trailer to the film, 'The Diary of A Teenage Girl' months ago, my co-director remembered a particular shot in which a still photograph of a boy is in the middle of the shot and flowers are drawn around him. 

We used this as inspiration and thought we could replicate this with our own drawings and a picture of the performer's ex-boyfriend. 

As I did the animation of Motion, my co-director decided to draw and take the pictures to create the stop motion. She stuck a piece of a3 paper to the table with blue-tack, also glued a photograph of the ex-boyfriend in the middle and set the camera up on a tripod - directly above the paper. 

Chaya drew flowers, hearts and other random doodles around the photograph, ensuring she took a picture on the camera after every line drawn! 

Here is what the final picture turned out like:

Final Motion Animation

After a lot of working out how to use Motion and experimenting with different ideas, I managed to create the animation we were aiming for.  I made the star spin, arrows bounce back and forth and the hearts appear one by one and enlarge - although very time consuming, it was worth it... even if it did make me realise how much time and effort it can take for a 2 second shot!

Here is the animated clip:

Colour Tool On Motion

For our star shape, I wanted it to spin around and have lines coming out from between the points, almost like a shine. However, obviously, I wanted the lines to match the colour of the star - I tried to match the colours motion provided, but they were either too dark or too light.

I then discovered a pipette next to the 'brush colour' selection. When I clicked on it, I realised that it would make the selected shape the exact colour of anything you choose on the screen!

Google Search Tool

When looking for the images to use in motion I struggled to find images with a transparent background. I needed them to be transparent so they could be greenscreened onto our shot.

When playing around with Google images, I found there is a search tool which enables you to pick specifically transparent images.

This sped up the whole process as I knew all the images could be used, so I just had to pick my favourite! 

Motion Animations

Aside from using Motion for animated lyrics, I wanted to experiment turning still images into animated ones. A shot we thought this would work is the one where our performer is looking at a picture of her ex boyfriend. This clip is framed using the rule of thirds and is to the far right of the shot (see below).

To follow conventions of indie-pop, I decided to work with girly shapes and used a star, arrows and hearts.

Once I had found the images I wanted I could then add them into motion. As I was using Motion on a MacBook and our music video has been edited on an iMac, my co-director sent me a screenshot of the clip we were using the animation for so I could ensure the animated images were in the right place when creating them in Motion.  I will then remove the screenshot so the background for all the animations is transparent and can be 'greenscreened' onto the clip.

Experimenting With Motion

After experimenting with VideoScribe, my co-director and I found another peice of text software called 'Motion'. This software allows much more animation with text, which gives us the freedom to put our preferred lyrics in whatever formation we so wish.

We're going to replicate Cher Lloyd's 'Swagger Jagger' video as we used her animated lyrics as inspiration for ours. To do this we downloaded the music video from YouTube and saved it as an mp4. We then imported this into iMovie and cut the video down so we only have the clip of the animated lyrics 'shoutin' at me'.

Once we saved this clip, we imported it into Motion so we could 'trace' the movements of the 'swagger jagger' lyrics for our lyrics. 

The lyrics we want to use are 'to being along again' and we want the words to appear on each beat. 

We are going to continue working with Motion to achieve the clip we have envisaged. Once we have got the shot we want, we will save the clip as an mp4 and upload it to our music video. 

VideoScribe

My co-director and I found a software called 'VideoScribe'. This allows you to input any text onto any background yet have a hand holding a pen, and letters appear one by one, as if it has been handwritten. We are going to play around with this software and see if it would work in our music video.

Below are our favourite fonts we picked out to experiment with:

Lyrics in Music Videos

I have researched and watched numerous pop music videos and it seems as though it is quite common for the song's lrics to appear in the video at some point. Whether it be appearing on the screen or the artist interacting with the lyrics.

For example, Cher Lloyd's 'Swagger Jagger' video has the lyrics popping up in different animated ways. A lot of the time these lyrics appear on the beat of the song. She also interacts with some of them too e.g. pushing the line 'get out of my way' to the left and the words leave the shot as if she had actually pushed them.

My co-director and I want to find a software that'll allow us to do similar animations of the lyrics in our music video so it follows conventions of similar music videos. 

Editing 11/4/16

As it is the Easter holidays, my co director and I met up for an editing session at my house to edit the footage we shot on 4/4/16. Watching the footage back revealed some good shots we had taken and below is our favourite.

We are unsure what colour background we should have but we like the last clip being black and white against a bright background. These drum shots turned out exactly how we envisaged them to!

I have saved these clips as an mp4 clip so we can transfer it to school.

The Making of a Music Video

Below is a video made by our media teacher showing us filming some of our music video (4/4/16).

Filming 4/4/16

Today my co-director and I filmed some more shots for the music video. We filmed the shot of our performer crying over her ex boyfriend whilst eating ice cream in her pyjamas, close up of her putting her slippers on, ripping the head off of a 'be mine' teddy bear, angrily scrolling through pictures of her ex boyfriend with other girls and her beating a drum thats covered in confetti. The shoot was successful and we shot the clips we needed.

Crying Shot

We dressed Imogen in pyjamas and sat her on the ground with screwed up tissues as if they had been used.

We dropped eye drops into her eyes to make sure her eye make up ran down her face. 

We asked her to pretend to cry dramatically whilst eating ice cream.


Teddy Bear Shot

As it was too difficult to rip the head off, I had to cut some of the stitching so it was easier for Imogen to rip off. I unstitched the side of the head so it couldn't be seen.

Drum Shot

For this shot we used a drum from the drum kit at school and poured confetti on it so when Imogen hit the drum the confetti would bounce. We hope to edit this shot with a black and white filter and slowed down.

All in all, the day was very successful and we took all the shots we needed. We learnt from past filming days to leave the camera rolling between shots so we could get some natural laughing and dancing shots.

Rough Cut for Our Music Video

These are all the shots we have so far, some of which are not in the correct place yet.

Intro for the Music Video

In our music video, we want a clock to tick from 2:55 until it gets to 3 o'clock. However, we wanted to speed it up so we used the fast forward tool in iMovie. We placed a big clock on a green screen on a table and set up the camera to record.

After we filmed this we added a YouTube sound clip in iMovie of a clock ticking and an alarm bell for when the clock got to 3 o'clock.

Below is our filming set up:

This turned out well and we gave the clock a girly pink background. 

Once the clock got to 3 o'clock, we added a close up shot of our performer suddenly opening her eyes as if she has just woken up. 

Random Shots!

After watching the footage we recorded, we realised that when we left the camera rolling between takes it resulted in some natural close up shots which we liked and wanted to use in our music video. We edited the close up shot of her eyes into the mirror effect.

In this shot Imogen looks up towards the camera so we edited this so it is in slow motion, yet in sync with one another.

Editing Experiment - Mirror

To add variation to our editing techniques we wanted to create a mirrored effect on iMovie. However, neither my co-director and I had done this before so we watched a video on YouTube on how to do this.



After watching the tutorial we attempted our own version and this was our outcome:

This shot is for the chorus so we had to sync up the two shots so they were in time with one another and also, in time with the music.

Starting Ancillary Task 1 - Artist's Website

My co-director and I decided to create two separate websites for our artist so we could design it how we wish. However we both brainstormed together to come up with a name for the artist and the album name. We decided to use our performer's first name 'Imogen' for the name of our artist as it is short and easy to remember. We got our inspiration for the name from artist's like Adele and Beyonce. We also decided to call the album 'Moving On'.

Here is what the website looks like so far:

These are the text settings. I need to make note of these to enforce synergy when creating my magazine advert.

I feel like the black and white filter on the picture and simplistic white text makes the website look sleek and professional.