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.

Evaluation Planning

After studying the evaluation questions and brainstorming ideas, we came to several ideas as a group as how to best answer the questions.


We looked at previous year groups answers, and we noticed that for Question 1 most groups had filmed themselves sitting around their edit suites and discussing the things which are being shown on screen. This is good, and informative, but we thought it was very static and not visually stimulating, as you are not getting to see the things which the group are discussing.


We thought a better way to answer the question would be a sort of directors commentary, edited together on Premier Pro, where we could show certain clips of our video as we talk about them. We can also download other real media texts from the internet and cut them in to the video for referencing. We believe this way is much better visually, as you don't really need to see us sitting around holding scripts. This way is much more engaging and hopefully will work well. We are going to script it all together and split the commentary fairly evenly, then each use the video on our blogs. Then we will individually comment on the website and album cover.


For question 2 we are going to answer it more traditionally with text and pictures. There is lots to say though about how we used synergy and we can show lots of stuff from our website.


For question 3 we are going to interview a bunch of people about the video and edit it together. We will all use this video, then individually we will write responses to the feedback.


For question 4 it will be mostly simple, with text and lots of pictures. However we are going to make a couple of short demo's using software that we have been using, using a screencap program to demonstrate colour grading in Colour, and editing in Premier Pro.

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.