Potential snagging points

After our music video was seen by other media students, the feedback received was that there wasn't anything that we had to change. Which was fantastic news! There were two points which were brought up, however that if we wanted to change would be down to our personal preference. These points were:

1) The slo-mo jump shot phrase of the 'girl in the green top' doesn't last long enough.

2) The shot where the 'boy who is listening to the music' high fives the boy next to him is too early. It should be after the drop.

As a group we decided these ideas weren't beneficial to the video since we felt the video in these areas already appealed to the target audience as best as it can so it wouldn't be necessary to change this.

So I can definitely say we are fully signed off here!

We are signed off!

For the last few weeks we have been working incredibly hard editing our various tasks and encountering new problems along the way. But now I am happy to say that we have had a production tasks all signed off, with Mrs Blackborow becoming teary eyed after watching the music video!

It must be said that there were a few changes to make to the album cover and website, however I am pleased that these amendments weren't too difficult to make and we are now signed off!

The Website

Michael used an online website designing programme called 'Wix' which allowed him to create a website from scratch!

He had to ensure that the website was easy to navigate, user-friendly and clearly promoted the artist. By taking inspiration on our research of a debut website (i.e. One Direction - the post of my research for this site can be found on my blog by clicking the research & planning label) he was able to produce a website where the interactive and purchasing opportunities were clear to the audience.

In terms of interactivity, we have links to the Influx Facebook page and the Influx Twitter account to make optimum use of Web 2.0, there are links to YouTube and Spotify to help promote the band. There is a forum page on the website where the audience is able to talk to the band and amongst each other perhaps to  discuss the debut video or the competition. Which leads me to the competition page. Here, the audience is able to download the individual components of the track from our SoundCloud account, produce their own mixes at home on their personal computer and then submit them to our competition. The 3 best mixes, as voted by the band, will have their tracks released in their own album as part of the Promises - EP. I feel that the interactivity which has been incorporated into our website is of professional standard.

In terms of purchasing, there is a link on every page to iTunes where you can buy the album 'Get On The Night' and the single 'Promises'. The events page is purchasing opportunity for the audience since they can purchase tickets to see Influx and both of these events. Of course, there is the shop as well which is easy to navigate and when you click on an item in the shop page you would be taken to a separate site which consists of the full Influx store.

The institutional information is clearly located at the bottom of the site and can be seen on every page. The same institutional information that can be found on this site, can also be found on the album back cover.


The website has now been signed off!

Mrs Blackborow's second viewing of our music video

Today we asked Mrs Blackborow to view the video with the hope that she'd be please enough with the video to sign it off. After watching it, she became teary eyed and said that it was "excellent" and she was really proud of the quality of the edit. She was pleased to see that we had taken into account all the feedback she gave us previously.

Her only critique was that she would like the video to begin by fading in from black because the first shot of the teacher's feet is poorly lit.

Overall, she was very pleased with the final edit and so are we. We may not have been signed off with the video but at least we know we are very close and I am relieved to see that on the whole our video is much liked. On monday we will find out about snagging points if necessary.

Staying Late

Today, my timetable meant that I had around 4 and a half hours in school where I was able to edit and as there was a school production that evening too I was able to stay till 10 o'clock in the evening to maximise my time in the edit suite. After spending all the time in the edit suite, including breaks I edited the whole first drop, along with the build up and transition into the next verse. I feel my time was used incredibly productive since I experimented with lots of new tools that I had never used before and came across this one tool which I'd never seen before but I had hoped to find. The spherise tool let me do this blowing up screen effect, similar to what I had seen in the club scene in the film 'Limitless' and I had brought this effect to the attention of my group early on in the project.

I showed this clip to Chris, our media technician and he thought it looked superb. He asked how I managed to do it and more particularly he was interested in how I gave the shot a vivid cyan overlay. Again I found this through experimenting with the effects and I actually achieved this by mistake. In the colour correction section, I used the RGB curves tool because I wanted to increase the amount of red, but when I dropped the reds and came across this colour I felt this actually looked a lot better.

Mrs Blackborow's first viewing of our music video

We showed her the video when the rough edit and a decent proportion of the fine edit is complete so we were able to get thorough feedback. She told us to make three amendments:

1) She understood that the narrative shows the teacher going through a progression of confidence, however the stages of her character development needed to be in the correct order, when at the moment it is not. So we need to amend for this, which will only require moving a few shots around.

2) The transition where the teacher starts accepting the chaos and joining in needs to be more obvious. For this I need to arrange the slo-mo jump shots to allow more time to see the teacher letting down her hair.

3) The pace of the build up to the first drop is too fast. To change this I need to remove much of the strobe and slow down the shots showing the students getting up.

Other than this she feels the video is of high quality editing, and although there is still time and room for improvement, the presentation of the narrative was clear and enjoyable to watch in combination with the performance.

Designating Roles

During the post-production stage we knew we needed to be efficient in managing our time so we designated the three task between us. Adam concentrated mainly on the album cover, Michael on the website and I on the video. Conveniently, we were able to position ourselves in the roles which we all preferred to do. This will allow us to produce the best possible quality products we can because we will have no problem in focusing on our individual task and producing the correct amount of work to the deadlines we set ourselves.