Digipak Analysis - Lana Del Rey

Digipak Analysis - Blur

Artist Name

Earlier I mentioned that we would need to give our artist a name and we have come up with the name Lola Leyland. We think this is a sweet and simple name which really suits the look of our star. Now we have finally given her a name we can make her social networking sites.

Editing 29/1/13

Today was our last day of editing for a while, and this is by choice rather than teacher orders. We've been constantly editing for weeks and what we have produced we are very pleased with. With have taken the opportunity to show lots of our friends our work to get outsiders opinions and it has all been positive, they like the acting, the setting, the lighting and the overall image of the video. So far we have achieved what we set out to and have more or less finished our video and are now going to focus on our ancillary tasks (website and digipaks). After a couple of weeks we will resume editing the video with fresh eyes and rectify any issues.

As for now, it is onto research and planning for my individual website and digipak. Also, Madihah, Ella and I have decided to make a Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr for our artist that we can each use for our own websites as social networking sites are a must in today's method of promoting music.

Artist Name

One aspect of promoting our artist that I completely forgot and is probably the most simple is choosing an artist name!

The song we have chosen is by Brandon & Leah but we are not promoting them. We are promoting our own made up artist. So now before we can make posters and digipaks etc we will need to brainstorm some ideas and then pick one.

Editing 17/01/13

Today we completely finished our rough cut! We are very pleased with the basic edit of our music video and really hope that once we have gone through every detail, we can have something to be really proud of.  The last thing that needed finishing was our montage that  we wanted to put towards the end of the song. This was very time-consuming to do as it meant having a lot of shots that only last a couple of seconds, so this meant having to put each shot on the timeline then editing it down to the precise point that we want it. Finally today we completed doing this and I personally am really pleased with the outcome.

We are now months into our coursework and I really believe that Ella, Madihah and myself are working really well together and not fighting over disagreements. We always compromise or ask for outsiders opinion when need be. I have enjoyed working with them so far because we are all very calm and clear when communicating with one another. I definitely feel that there is no particular 'leader' of the group, and we all take charge of the editing equally, and there is no one who isn't quite pulling their weight (which was something I felt was happening in my last year AS coursework group).


PEER FEEDBACK SO FAR:
We have shown our work so far to a number of different people including our friends, teachers and the rest of our media class. We have been thoroughly pleased with some of the kind compliments we have received. Most people said the same thing when it came to what they particularly liked about the video:
-Natural chemistry between the 2 characters
-Good casting
-Nice use of natural lighting
-Good locations
-They liked the simplicity

We received no harsh criticism, just some pointers from our teachers who have given us comments on how to further improve our work:
-100% make sure lip syncing is perfect
-Make sure all cutting is to the beat
-Perhaps cut down shots that feel too long

All of this we were already aware of and this is now what we are going to focus on.

Institutional Information

Editing 15/01/13

Today we just continued editing as normal but we completely panicked when our file was 'corrupted' and we thought we had lost all our work! What had happened was that we were going to show our work to the class on the big screen and we had forgotten that because our project on Final Cut hadn't been exported we couldn't open it on another computer, which meant when we came back to our computer there was difficulty opening it again (the file had become corrupted). Luckily our teachers keep backup files of all the work so we were able to use our back up file and we had only lost a tiny bit of work (which is lucky seeing as for a moment we thought we had lost everything!).

Another thing I've noted about editing is that what is very time consuming is when you put the clip of film you want to use on the time line and then having to delete the audio from that little clip. It doesn't sound like hard work but when you have to do it for each and every tiny little shot, it really does take up a lot of time. However, it absolutely has to be done.

This week we are focusing on the ending of the song which we have decided to display as a montage so we've been choosing which bits of film to use in it and editing them down and syncing them up with the music track.

Digipak Images Ideas

Rough Cut

In todays lesson (11/1/13) we finally completed a very rough cut of the video! We feel very pleased in that we have a basic cut of what we want the video to look like. Surprisingly, we managed to get to this point without any arguments or technological problems. However, now is where the real hard work begins. Now we must focus on each and every detail making everything as perfect as possible such as the lip syncing, the timing, the cutting, the effects (if any), etc. I understand that it is the very fine details that differentiate a good music video to an excellent music video, and we have worked so hard so far and will continue to do so to try and produce and excellent video.

Editing So Far...

We are surprisingly far ahead with out work and almost have a rough cut of our video. Placing everything on to the timeline on Final Cut was fairly easy between the 3 of us and selecting what pieces of film go where was not difficult as we had planned thoroughly enough to have a good idea of what we wanted the sequence to look like.

Inevitably, the most trying and time consuming thing about editing is making sure that the syncing is perfect. We have worked through this quite well so far and have a very basic edit, however we know that once we have completed the rough edit we will need to go back and put our undivided attention into making sure the syncing is precise the highest degree possible.

As a team, the 3 of us our working really well and manage to explain our thoughts. We all seem to be on the same wavelength which is one of the reasons I think we have made it this far already. We don't always agree on how we should edit each specific bit but one thing we all do is compromise so that we can come to a fair agreement. Additionally, if we are really stuck on making a decision we may ask a friend who isn't in the group as they have fresh eyes and an unbiased opinion.

I am hoping that by the end of next week we will have a full first cut and from then on we can focus on detail.