This is a album cover I created for a exercise to practice making album covers, for when we eventually make our album cover for the song we are making the music video for. To make this I used a random Wikipedia article generator to come up with the artist/band name for this album cover exercise. For the title of the album I used a random quote generator and found a quote then used the last four words of it which were, 'the presence of witnesses.' To get a picture I went onto a picture blog website 'www.flickr.com', and used the third picture across as the background for the album cover. I came up with the idea of making a album cover with reflective text on when I saw the picture I randomly chose, as the picture is split along the centre, I decided to make the text reflective to match the background picture. I did this by simply making two of the same text, same size and same font and then flipping one text so that it's a reflection of the other piece if text. I make the two different texts colours that stand out from the background but are not colourful, to stick with the general monochrome theme to the album cover. I also believe that by coincidence the title of the album matches the theme of the album cover which I think shows people that are almost self contained and keep themselves to themselves. I used a very clean and simple font which I downloaded off of 'www.dafont.com' called 'Headlines', I then installed the font into Photoshop so that I could use it for the font for the album cover.
I think this exercise was very good practice for designing our real album cover as it allowed me to experiment with different ideas on Photoshop based on a background image I had been given. I now will feel more confident about designing the album cover for our band as I can base a general theme for the album on whatever I like allowing me more freedom to play with different techniques and styles on Photoshop.
This is the album cover from Kendrick Lamar's debut album 'Good Kid Maad City' (2012). This album reached number two on the Billboard 200 album chart and sold roughly 240,000 copies in the first week of release earning the highest amount of copies sold of a hip-hop album in 2012. The album now has been certified platinum and of the end of December 2013 has sold 1,109,000 copies.
This album cover was hand picked by Kendrick Lamar as the picture shows so much about his life as a self portrait and how he was raised throughout childhood. The album cover is set out as a polaroid picture to show the age of the image, it also gives the album cover a vintage look. The picture explains a lot about Kendrick's life, in the picture are two of Kendrick's uncles, and to the far left is his grandfather, and in the centre is Kendrick when he was a baby. The eyes of his family members has been blacked out Kendrick says for 'personal reasons', but in the album her explains how both of his uncles are in prison and his grandfather passed away but he was a criminal is his younger days. The uncle that is holding Kendrick is showing a gang sign, showing how he was involved in delinquent activities. Kendrick is the only person in the picture that hasn't been blacked out to show innocence since he is just a child.
The items in the picture also tell a story about Kendrick's life as there is his baby bottle on the table, next to a 40oz bottle of beer, explained in the album how member of his family members were alcoholics and he was being openly exposed to this even when he was just a baby.
The text on the album is handwritten, similar to how people would write on polaroid images, giving it a very unitdy look as it looks like is has been done really roughly. There is also many marks and rips on the album cover to show how the picture is very grubby, old and hasn't been stored well.
The album cover for this is very effective as is shows a peek in Kendrick's life before even hearing the album, this allows the user to almost enter Kendrick's life throughout the album.
This is some feedback we received from a class of media production students who viewed our music video and then discussed what they liked about the video, and also what they believe can be improved about the video. They gave us good criticism on our video and also gave us some interesting ideas that we could use for our video. We can use this feedback to improve our music video and also correct mistakes on our video that were notice even though some obvious such as the background noise, nevertheless this feedback is helpful for use to progress in finishing our music video.
This is the rough cut to our music video 'Green Eyed Monster'. This is our rough cut of the video so there are many errors with it that will be corrected for the final video. Some of these problems involve audio problems, where the audio hasn't be correctly cut out from the video layer. This is the main problem with the current rough cut. There are also issues with the editing of the video, such as the continuity of editing throughout the video, an example is the pace of the cuts in the video. We are in the process of now making the full complete music video and we will use our rough cut to see what else we can do to improve our music video.
We have got to a point in the editing stage where we have now roughly finished the first minute or so of our music video. This includes the intro to our video and the intro to the song. The process of editing the video is taking longer than we expected as there is so much footage that we have recorded we think we filmed 'too much'. Since there is so much footage it is taking time to select the parts we want from each clip meaning we are spending a lot of time re-watching our clips to choose what parts we want to use.
Our timeline in Final Cut involves many different layers so that while editing it is clear what layer is being used and we can cut between different layers. Also since in most of the lip syncing shots the whole song is begin sung, all the clips are now synced up to the music so it means we do not have to waste time trying to sync each clip up with the music as they are already in time with with the music.
In the music industry there are Organic band/groups and Synthetic bands/groups. Organic bands or groups are created by people coming together and making music to then be discovered by a record label, who then markets the band on the qualities that they have, hoping that they become popular. The record label will have to market the band to the correct audience. Organic bands were more have been more dominant since early bands such as the Beatles. The Beatles were a band that formed by themselves in late 50's and then did tours to become more popular, to eventually become to biggest most popular band in the world ever.
The Beatles have been ranked as the greatest band of all time and have an estimated album sales of 600 million album sale worldwide.
In the UK alone they have had more number one albums and have sold more singles than any other British artist/band.
In 1966 was the first synthetically made band were The Monkees who were put together by film-maker Bob Rafelson, who originally created the group for a TV series about a 'band who wanted to be The Beatles, but were never successful.' The TV sitcom aired from 1966 to 1968 and had 53 episodes. All of the members were all actors but could also play instruments but were not as near as musically talented as The Beatles at that stage. After the sitcom was cancelled in 1968, The Monkees become a full time band. The Monkees did not tend to writ their own music as none of the members were able to do this as they were not professional musicians, instead they had music written for them and they would perform the music and make albums. The band became very popular and at their music peak in 1967 outsold The Beatles. As of 2012 the band has sold 65 million album and single copies worldwide.
The 90's was the beginning of multiple synthetically made boy and girl groups. These groups were formed by record labels who try to market a particular image of the boy or girl band to try to bring them into fame to make the companies money.
Since we had finished filming all of our footage for our music video, we then began to capture all the footage from our camera into Final Cut Pro, which is the program we use to edit with. This gave us all of our recorded footage. We then started to roughly cut all of the footage so then we would end up with all the usable shots for our music video. This gave us almost 10 minutes of footage which was much more than we expected, so we are now in the process or beginning to edit all the shots together to firstly made a rough cut of the music video. The once we have a rough cut we can then finely edit the music video to create the whole finished edit. This is what the timeline of our music video looks like now as we have yet to begin cutting the clips together, this is a screenshot from Final Cut.
Today we refilmed particular shots and also filmed some extra new shots. These shots for for the intro of the music video and the ending. For the intro the werewolf is in his room and is about the mark off the day on the calender which is the full moon.
For this we made the room dark by pulling down the blind and turning the lights off. This made the room completely dark and was too dark to do the shot. This is what the room looked like with the blinds pulling down and the lights on for the purpose of the picture, but without the lights on the room was too dark to film the intro sequence.
To make the room not too bright we used a little mood light and had Terry hold it in place so that we could get the correct and efficient lighting in every shot. This light worked out very well as it didn't make the shot too bright but not too dark. It was lit enough to see what's happening and still gave off the impression that it was filmed at night-time. For every shot the light source would be moved so that the light wasn't too strong and gave away the fact lighting was being used. We used this throughout the whole of the intro section until the werewolf went to bed. We tried to recreate the same angle from the closing shot of the intro and the opening shot of the song, even though these were done on two separate occasions.
For all of the filming done on this day we used a monopod except for the closing shot of the intro where we used a tripod because we wanted a completely stable shot.
A digipak is a packaging type used normally as an artists album which is used to store the CD in and also display artwork to do with the album theme. A digipak is also often used as a limited edition or deluxe version of a album as they involve much more detail than a regular CD case. The artist can choose what they want to feature on the digipak to allow the packaging design to be very personal. Some digipak's have been considered as artwork as some has been designed by famous artists such as Andy Warhol.
This is the digipak for Rihanna's album Loud (2010), and the album got many positive reviews from critics for the 'upbeat material and Rihanna's vocal performance.' The album reached number three on the US Billboard 200 chart and sold roughly 200,000 copies in the first week of it's release and of the end of 2011 sold 5.7 million copies worldwide.
The digipak for this album is well designed and though tout. Firstly I noticed that the title of the album is almost a juxtaposition to the design on the digipak. The album is called 'Loud', however the theme of the digipak seems to be very pure and innocent as Rihanna is wearing a light colour dress and is walking through a rose bush. The colours on the album are very rich such as the predominant amount of red of the album, such as Rihanna's hair and the roses on the six panel package. The album is a two disk edition, so it means it has two places for the CD's to be placed. Both of the CD's are designed in the same way having a rose on each of the CD's to carry on with the theme of the flowers. The colours of the roses on the CD's are different to the colours of the roses on the six panel digipak as the CD's match the colour of the dress Rihanna is wearing. Throughout the digipak there is a goodamount colour coordination.
Today we filmed the band sequence. For this we had to use a drama room in our school so that we could get a plain black background. By using this room we were also able to use the advanced lighting in that room. This allowed us to play around with the lighting in our video so that we could create a particular lighting effect for the filming of the band sequence. Since there are many lights to use, we had to make sure that we had the lighting pretty much even so that we can minimise the shadows in any of the shots. Since we filming in a variety of different angles, we had to keep altering the lighting so that in every shot the shadows were limited. In some shots though we used particular type of lighting such as a spotlight.
For this scene, we only used a spotlight to get this effect. This would make the background dark and Tom very bright, however we wanted a straight on shot, but due to the camera needing to be in front there was always a shadow on Tom, to change this we moved as close to the spotlight as possible so that the camera and the tripod would fit under this.
Tom lip synced the whole song through with this camera angle so we can use it whenever we want throughout the music video. We also made sure that the spotlight wasn't too bright otherwise the light would glare off of Tom and into the camera so we would not be able to see him probably.
For some of the lip syncing parts, we also used a monopod to get moving shots of the wolf singing. By using a monopod we could get much more smooth shots rather than just using the handheld method. We also used the monopod to do instrument closes ups on the guitars. We would sync this with the music in the editing stage in a way to make it seem like the guitarist is actually playing.
We changed the lighting for these shots because the cameraman would be moving around we tried to prevent an shadows of the cameraman being shown on the singers or band members. We had a prop throughout these sequences which was a mic, this was supplied so that the singer could look as if he was performing in the band sequence.
We run into a few problems while filming the band sequence, the main one was the the tripod that we had we not tall enough for some of the shot angles that we wanted to carry out, so we had to improvise by using things in the room such as tables and chairs. We make sure that the camera was still level in the shots so that it wasn't slightly canted. Another problem that we had is that there was some technical difficulties with the lights and the lights kept on switching off halfway through the shots, so we had to film quickly so that we could get everything we had planned to film completed so that it's ready to edit.
Out of the 100 greatest music video's there are many very memorable videos, which have influenced the way that music videos are made today. All these videos bring something different to the history of the music video and many have used completely diffrent methods to make the video individual and unique.
98.. Smalltown Boy - Bronski Beats (1984)
This music video is a very significant video in the history of the music video. The video features a gay man tht moves to a new city for a new life, you see this through the opening shot on the train tracks. However, in this new city he is discriminated due to his sexually. Throughout this video, he is very shy as he keeps himself to himself and keeps his head down to show this. In this end of the video, he is walking in an alley and it approached by a group of guys. in the next shot he arrives to his house with his mum answering the door accompanied by a policeman, as he was beaten up by the group because of his sexually, resulting in him moving back to his howtown. The impact of the video was stronger in 1984 when the video was released as non straight sexually was not accepted in society as much as it is in modern society.
96. 21 Seconds - So Solid Crew (2001)
This video is by a British rap group called the So Solid Crew. The song is called 21 Seconds and in the song each memeber has 21 seconds to introduce themselves, as the group was new and this video would hopefully by their breakthrough, which it was. In the song there is a repeated line "I got 21 seconds to go", which is why the song plays on each member having 21 seconds. This video also had good special effects for a music video at the time as each member would have a special 'power', as some would have the power of fire or wind. In terms of a black british hip hop group this video was very big for the culture on British hip Hop.
95. My Favourite Game - The Cardigans (1998)
This video is just about a woman driving dangerously, the reason for this in the music is not made clear but the song is about her failing love affair. The video had three different endings, and the directors did not know which to use. In one ending she dies, in one she gets up from the crash and is fine, and one where she gets her head cut off from the car crash. The directors decided to go for the comical ending where she has the car crash and gets up fine, but then gets hit with the rock which might of killed her or knocked her out. This music video had a very high budget due to all the stunts that took place in the video taking the total cost of the video to £220,000. There was also much controversy surrounding the video due to the blood and violence throughout the video, also because MTV feared that this video would encourage teenagers to drive reckless, so the video was initially banned from many music video TV programmes.
92. Rock It - Herbie Hancock (1983)
The music video for Herbie Hancock's song 'Rock It', is also a very significant song and video. Herbie Hancock was originally a jazz musician, but in this sound he was one of the first people to experiment with hip hop sounds, such as scratching of a turntable. In this video there are many different machines and sculptures that are moving around and doing repeated actions, making the video very creepy to the viewer. Since in this song there is no lyrics, the video is almost synced with the song such as the scratching of the turntable is synced up by the video to seem as if things are being quickly repeated and cycled as a scratching does. Hancock being a black musician, in the early 80's found it very difficult to get his videos including himself on MTV as MTV refused to play music videos with black artists in them. Herbie is rarely seen through this video and when he is seen it is through a TV within the music video. This was the only way that he could get his music videos on MTV. However this music video was banned in Britain due to scenes of sex by the dummies was being shown, such as a dummy masturbating in the bed.
88. I Want Love - Elton John (2001)
The music video for Elton John's song I Want Love was very significant for one reason and that was the shock that Robert Downey Jr was the one lip syncing the song. Robert Downey Jr is the only one in this video as he walks from room to room in a large house. At this point in his life Robert Downey was a rehabilitation from use of cocaine. This meant that Robert Downey could use his personal issues to portray real emotions throughout the video. The whole video is recorded in one whole shot so it took many times for Robert to get the part completely right, to get a compelling performance.
Our second day of filming was much more successful than our first time. On our second attempt filming we shot all of the sequence of the human waking up, getting dressed and leaving the house. This when very successful this time around. We started by planning what shots we had to complete that day so that we could use our time efficiently.
We started by filming the first shot that is shown when the song begins to play. We have not filming the intro do our music video yet but there is no need to film in chronological order because the clips can be reordered in the editing process. So the first shot for when the music starts is the human raising up out of bed while lip synching to the opening vocals of the song. We then film all of the shots of Tom getting out of bed and going into the cupboard were we have a jump cut from him going into the cupboard to him coming out of the cupboard, as if he got changed instantaneously. We did this by using a tripod to keep the camera completely still so that the shot looks as if it is continuous. If the camera moved slightly, the shot would not be successful.
When we came to school and got our computer, we uploaded the raw footage into Final Cut Express so that the footage would not be lost if the tape gets damaged etc.
Emil Nava began work in the film industry as a runner boy for production companies. This introduced him in the film industry and allowed him to work his way up through the business. After working as a runner, he graduated to become a assistant director, which allowed him to manage the video shoots. He then began making adverts for big companies. Even though adverts obtain a higher production value and pay, there is a strict limit on creative freedom which Emil did not enjoy, so he then began to make music videos. Music videos allow a lot of creative freedom so Emil could base a music video on whatever he liked. Emil started by shooting videos for independent record label making relatively low budget music videos with budgets low at £5000.
Emil freelances for OB management, and their aim is to nurture talent and match to right director with the right artists. This was Emil Nava's first release music video for a independent record label from the group Kid British with the song 'Our House is Dadless. In this video Emil showed good knowledge of a music video and was able to create a well done music video for an upcoming group. The video was made on a relatively low budget of £20000. To cut down costs, Emil casted local people to be extras in the video. The whole filming process took only a day and took 2/3 days to edit. This video also very simple looking, allowed Emil Nava to become more popular and branch out to more famous artists to expand his workload.
Emil now has worked with artists such as Rita Ora, Jessie J and Ed Sheeran, and has made multiple videos for these artists because of his style of making videos. Jessie J has been a artist that Emil has worked with now many times, and every time the video that Emil creates has been a big success. The first music video he directed for Jessie J was the music video for her single 'Price Tag'. (2011)
In this video, Emil shows Jessie J to be a 'good girl', using many bright colours to make Jessie J be perceived as a good girl to allow her to be popular with a young aged audience. He uses the upbeat, feel good song and then matches the sound with the visuals by using quick cuts between shots.
This video and the song became very popular. The song was number 1 in nineteen countries and has sold 1,070,000 single copies as of November 2012.
Another music video that Emil did for Jessie J was for her single 'Do It Like A Dude'. This video shows a different side of Jessie J, a more naughty, promiscuous side to her. This video is very dark and raw with images of nudity. This gave Jessie a change of identity are allowed her to branch out to a wider audience.
In the past, Miley Cyrus was known for her Disney Channel sitcom 'Hannah Montana', where she played a role of a girl with two lives. One life being a normal schoolgirl, and the other being a famous popstar. Miley Cyrus was in the past known for being a sweet Disney star, however recently she has took the approach of many other former Disney stars and decided to change her image. Miley Cyrus is known more recently as a naughty popstar that is always getting into trouble and showing off her body on national television and in music videos. Britney Spears was also a former Disney star and decided to take this approach of changing her image. However more explicit Miley Cyrus becomes, she also becomes more famous and well known by doing so. Due to Miley Cyrus's recent acts, she is becoming a iconic figure as a 'good girl gone bad' following many of the former Disney Stars that proceed her.
Miley Cyrus became popular by the mainstream audience from her music video 'We Can't Stop'. The video for We Can't Stop divided opinions, as many people believe that the music video was too sexual as there are many different images of her and other woman flaunting their body and taking part in sexual acts.
This music video has launched Miley Cyrus's music career as a big mainstream star as she continues to make more music. This video allowed Miley Cyrus to come back into the 'limelight', becoming the most talked about topic on social media. And now Miley Cyrus is becoming more known to a more broader audience of multi generations. Miley Cyrus's music videos have been so popular that the type of body movement 'twerking' was added to the Oxford Dictionary. This type of dance has been around for a few years but Miley Cyrus's music videos have allowed the dance to become a worldwide sensation. This shows the huge effect that Miley Cyrus has had on the media.
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