Website and Album Cover Sign off!

Our website and album cover have been signed off!

Our Website, made on Wix.com

The inside cover of our album

The back of our album cover

The front of our album cover

This has been months of work and after working so hard on our video we are thrilled with how the album cover and website look. We had an absolute disaster with Wix.com, in that most of our website was permanently deleted only a couple of days ago (see group blog for a more detailed post), but we have managed to rebuild and even improve on our website.


This marks the end of the production side of the project. It has been fantastic so far and am excited to discuss my products in my evaluation.

Video sign off!

Today we heard those fabled words from Mrs B: 'you are signed off!'. For our video, that is.

Editing has been a great process, we decided early on that the editing would be split more or less evenly between the three of us: one would edit, another would work on the album cover and the other on the website. We decided that having three at once on the edit suite would become a bit crowded, and this let us each project our own creative influence on to the video. We would then reconverge, discuss changes and give each other feedback. This way also meant all areas of our project could move forward simultaneously.

For the big sections of the video, like the chorus drops, we did work together, as we believed that we needed to come to a communal decision.

I am so proud to be a part of this group; we are all thrilled with our final product and so pleased to get it signed off quite early, now we can focus our efforts on to making our website and album cover look just as good.

Final shoot reflections

Last night was our final shoot- the UV section of our performance.
As we knew this is going to be the best bit of our video we totally went for it. We had Olivia Murphy, an art student at Latymer, who came and covered us in the paint. We are so grateful for her help and we think the finished stuff looks really awesome.

We put our band symbol on Eoin's chest, and covered our bodies in runes, in keeping with the backdrop of our set. George in particular looked great, Olivia used a tree like design which (on camera) makes George look like some kind of otherworldly drumming monster. We are thrilled with how the shoot went; we just hope the footage looks as good on camera as it did to us whilst performing.

It's actually quite sad now to be pulling down our set; it's been really great being able to perform in my basement and the shoots have got better every single time.

Final 2 narrative shoot reflections

We spent the last two days shooting the final sections of our narrative.

Wednesday was a day of inspiration; we simply grabbed a camera, got in to costume and wondered around Edmonton looking for locations which would make for cool shots. The area around school is quite grungy looking; a large estate provided some great locations for us to use. Once again, we used our tried and true method of blocking it out, then shooting every possible angle repeatedly until we were totally satisfied! I'm really getting in to this role now; high levels of emotion are constantly required and being very scared at a creepy looking Eva is now becoming part of my daily routine!

We know that some of the footage we shot will most likely be completely unusable, but that's okay because we believe you sometimes have to shoot something wrong in order to reshoot it perfectly.

Thursday was a much more structured shoot; we had a full storyboard as this was the climactic fight scene in our video and so needed to be safely choreographed. It went really well; the location was near my house and looked great. We were particularly ruthless with our shooting yesterday; this fight scene has to look as good as it possibly can be, and as none of us had any experience shooting a physical fight it proved to be quite a challenge.

Eva actually did punch me during one take- i'm sure this will make it on to our outtake reel.

2nd and 3rd Performance shoots

This weekend we did two evenings of shooting our performance in a row! It was extremely tiring but we are really happy with the results.

After reviewing footage from our first performance shoot we realised we needed some guidance with our lighting (see the group blog for more details about over exposure problems), so we got the technician, Chris, to come and help us.

Upon arriving to help us with lighting, we discovered 2 of the 3 lights we had were inexplicably broken! So we've gone from 3-point lighting to 1-point lighting overnight. No problem however, i spoke to Mrs. Blackborow and another light has been delivered to my house; the lighting now looks fantastic: much moodier and more in theme with our branding.

Also, from a performance side of things, i think we really pulled out all the stops this time. The original footage was quite static; we probably weren't going for it as much as we needed to. But this time, especially whilst messing around with the smoke machine and strobe lighting, we went completely mad! We also got a great performance from our drummer, George, who was quite conservative originally but went full on last night.

I am so excited to get editing with this footage: both our narrative and performance sections are coming together nicely. We didn't get to shoot the UV light stuff, but this is better as now we have a whole evening to work on this. Also, painting ourselves and only shooting some of what we needed would be pointless as achieving continuty with the symbols we are going to cover ourselves with would be really hard.

We're on our way!

First performance shoot reflections

Last night we had our first performance shoot. It went quite well in the end; extremely tiring!

We had decided that there was absolutely no point in storyboarding our performance, so instead we wrote up a list of every angle we needed; simply having them in text form is enough- drawing them too would have been unnecessary.

We didn't think we would shoot anywhere near everything (and we didn't), but we just worked our way down the list one by one.

For our master shots we had two cameras filming at once, one steady and one freehand. This is good as we will be able to use some match on action between shots.

Lighting proved to be an issue; we wanted a dark and moody feel to our set up, but balancing this out with 3 point lighting was tricky in such an enclosed environment. Especially as we are dressed in black, too dark meant we blended in to the background, but too light meant our set and faces looked horribly over exposed.

We will need to review our footage to see how the lighting looks; hopefully there will be some stuff we can use but we were treating tonight as a semi-test shoot; all of us are expecting 2 or 3 re-shoots to get the best footage possible.

Walthamstow Shoot 2 Reflections

Yesterday we shot potentially the trickiest section of our narrative. It was the chase scene between me and Eva; starting fairly early and sprinting for hours upon hours has totally destroyed my leg muscles!

The shoot went really well. We had storyboarded certain key shots which we needed, but let our inspiration take us the rest of the way; within our group we are discovering that ruthlessly shooting everything is working out really well for us. Instead of planning every shot and shooting it once or twice; we block the scene and then shoot every possible angle about fifteen times! Our philosophy is even if the shot seems perfect: shoot it again!

We believe later on, during the editing process, we will be very happy with the huge amount of footage we have amassed. No matter how well you shoot problems can always arise later on; shooting everything loads and loads of times will hopefully stop this problem occuring.

Walthamstow Shoot 1 Reflections

Today we went to Walthamstow to do some initial shooting and to continue location scouting. We needed to find a good looking and appropriate alleyway for the chase scene which we will be shooting tomorrow; and we found it!

It's near Eva's house which is good as we can have a break in between shooting sections easily.

The shooting was okay; we hadn't actually planned exactly what we were going to shoot and where- we knew roughly what shots and what section we were filming but were not as prepared as our Broomfield park shoot. As such we didn't actually get that much footage- but what we did get looks great. Improvisation with shooting is not necessarily a bad thing, but maybe a bit more structure to todays shooting could have been helpful.

The eyes look great in Eva though!

Check it out! Sweet!

First shoot reflections

Today we shot the opening narrative sequence of our video in Broomfield park. It was more demanding than i had initially expected!
The shots we took were fairly static, which meant we had a lot of fun messing around with framing and trying to capture every angle of the scene.

I had to cry a lot, scream, laugh, drink, smoke, shout: trying to believably convey madness is quite tricky, but after looking at the footage i am quite happy with some of our footage.

We were lucky with weather conditions; it did rain but only slightly- rain could seriously impact continuity, and also would mean we would have needed to be extra cautious with the camera. Luckily it was just a grey day, which suits the mood of our narrative sequence anyway.

As well as shooting, we spent a couple of hours at my house (2 minutes walk away) storyboarding, planning further shoots and set dressing my basement for performance sections.

The spray painting was great fun, and we think the symbol is going to end up looking great in our finished project.