Creating Our Inserts

For the inserts in our album we wanted to go for a thankyou page, to show Nova's gratitude and a picture page. 

To create the thankyou page we took a still image from one of the videos that we shot on our filming day to Margate. We then inserted a short thankyou note in write writing, then we used the curves tool to arc the writing, we then moved the horizontal scale to make it flat to the wall. I think this looks really professional as the writing looks as if it should be there. We wanted a really plain font so that it didn't overpower the whole image.

We then decided that the image we wanted to put in was a selfie, as seen to the left, however after much debate we decided that this wasn't the way we wanted to go as we had some more professional pictures that we thought would work better. Unfortunatly, we couldn't all agree on what image to use so I came up with a solution to put all of the images in the frame, as seen to the right. After this was created we all thought that the inserts looked really professional and artisitc.

Song Selection

We wanted to go in an uplifitng direction with the order of our song titles; we wanted the album to be a 'finding yourself' album, in this case, finding yourself after a heartbreak. The first few songs are about being heartbroken with the last few songs being about self love and empowerment. As we have mentioned before, we want the song titles to be open for interpretation to our target audience, the descriptions below are just how we interpret the titles.

1. 'Without You'; As this is our chosen song, it's no secret that it is a real song by Lana Del Rey so we didn't create the title however, we feel that it was best to start with this song as we feel that it connotes the idea of Nova being unable to live without her now ex-boyfriend. This song therefore will show Nova at her most vulnerable.

2. '1811'; to the unaccustomed, this title is a challenge to figure out however, this is something we intended to happen as we want the audience to think about the meaning behind the songs, we don't want it to be obvious. As a group we wanted this title to represent a time; the time they broke up, the amount of times she thought of him, the time it clicked that they weren't together anymore. A time. We wanted it to represent her mind being so invovled in the moment that she can't focus.

3. 'Infactuation'; It continues on from the idea of Nova constantly thinking about her ex: it is rather self explanitory. She was and still is obsessing over their relationship and she finds it incredibly difficult to come to terms with her reality.

4. 'No Light'; This is the last heartbreak song on the album. For us it represents Nova at one of her lowet points, she can't see how she can live without the man she loves, she's really hurting. We feel that this shows that Nova feels like she has nothing good in her life, as if all of the light has been turned off.

5. 'We Are Human'; For me, this is the turning point in the album, this is where Nova begins to get better. She realises that it's okay to feel sad over the situation, everybody goes through it at some point and most people go through it multiple times. This song shows that its part of our nature to feel emotion.

6. 'Spectrum'; This title is quite vague but once explained it becomes fairly obvious. A spectrum is a large range of colours; this is a metaphor for Nova's emotions, she is letting them all out - releasing them to help her become happy again.

7. 'Recovery'; This is the breakthrough of the album, this is where Nova is putting in effort to become herslef again.

8. ' For Me';  I feel that this song represents Nova's self love, she realised that the most important love you need is love for yourslef, she now knows that her main priority is herslef. It is also a secret message of her recognising that she's made this album for herslef, when she goes through a heartbreak this album will help her through it.

9. 'Afire Love'; Afire love is a title that we feel shows Nova's passion and intense enjoyment for her career, her life and her friends; we feel that this title shows how grateful she is for being able to lead this life.

10. 'Home'; this is the final song on the album so we really wanted it to be a sentimental one. This songs symbolises her full recovery, she is herself once again. She went back home. The title 'Home' also connotes the overall idea of comfort, family and happiness.

Creating The Side Strips

To make our album complete, we needed the spines to be created. As the spines connect the front and back together we needed to have the geometrics again to make it all flow together. To do this we quite literally copied and pasted a strip of the shapes and then pasted on all of the text onto these strips. We wanted to have the Opal Records logo a different orientation to the other two pieced of font as we wanted to highlight that Nova is signed to Opal Records and they are responsible for advertisng the star.

Creating Our Back Cover

This is our finished back cover. The process of creating this began with us openeing a photoshop document the same size as a CD case. We then used the dropplet tool to select the grey from the front cover and used the paint bucket tool to turn the whole of the new document this cover.

The next step was to create the geometrics of the back cover, this was done so that there was a continuous theme throughout the cover. Just as we did with the front cover, we copied and pasted in the shape and used the gradienct tool to create a fade in colours, this time however, we had the shapes breaking off from further down the frame instead of right at the top.

Then we inserted the song titles, I will do a blog post on the meanings behind the titles at a later date. For these titles, we used the same front as the album title, again to create a link. We wanted to make the font slightly different though so we used the paint bucket tool to make some letters seemed thicker than others, we liked this as we thought that it showed a more creative side to Nova.

Finally, we inserted legal information, our record label logo and a barcode onto the cover - this was to make the cover look just that bit more realistic.

Creating Our Front Cover

In order to make our front cover we took to photoshop to begin editing. As Evie is more experienced with photoshop she was the Cone to do the main part of the editing here.  Firstly she started off by airbrushing the chosen image. I have written a step-by-step below of how she done this...

1. Change the colour mode to CMYBK and select the yellow channel, copy and past it and then invert it. Next, change the colour mode back to RGB.

2.You then copy the background layer and move it to the top of the list. To get rid of any blemishes you use the spot healing tool to conceal these - this makes the skin look clearer and more 'perfect'. Once this is done you convert all of the layers to a 'Smart Object.'

3.Next you duplicate the layer twice. On the first copy you go to fill, blur, surface blur; you need to move the scales so that you can barley make out the skin but can still make out the eyes. On the second copy you go to fill, other, highpass and move thescales so that you can make out the skin details. Once this is done you change the mode to 'Linear Light.'

4. Group all of the layers to create an airbrush folder and apply a layer mask - then use a soft paint brush to paint on the airbrush in the areas that you would like it to be applied to.

5. Merge all of the layers and use the dodge and burn tools to contour the face to make it look more defined.

Once the main airbrushing was done, Evie filled in my eyebrows and made my lips slightly brighter.

The second part to this edit was creating the actual cover itself, again I have listed a step-by-step below so you can see how we came to do this. For this part of the edit all four of us contributed to it...

1. First we turned the image black and white, this is because we are planning on having a colourful background therefore, we didn't want the image to clash with the colours - black and white photographs are a good way to avoid this.

2. Next, we put the image onto a light grey background, we done this by cropping the original image into a square shape and duplicating the layer onto a new photoshop document. We chose to have a light grey background as it will make the colours that we are going to use really stand out; it is also a similar colour to the photograph then, making the cover pleasing on the eye. This is the step that we made the document the correct measurements for a CD Case.

3. Thirdly, we inserted the font needed on our cover, this inludes Nova's name and the album's name.  We spoke about why we chose the font used for 'Nova' in a previous post, 'Final Logos'. For the album name 'Fragments' we used a font called 'Basic Title Font,' we liked this font as it is rather minimalistic, which is something that we wanted as we are planning for our cover to be quite busy. We chose to keep the fonts black as it matches the photograph on the cover.

4. This was the final stage of creating the front of our album cover, this was probably oen of the most difficult parts due to having to tesselate the shapes. We started off by copying in a basic hexagon shape from Google, we then used the gradient tool to create a smooth transition of colour throughout each individual shape. The closer we got to the titles the more we broke off the shapes, this is to make them look like fragments, just like the album title. The colours fade from blue into yellow like a sunset would, we done this so that it would show an obvious link between the album and our music video - we plan to use a large variety of sunsets throughout our video.

This is the final outcome of the front of our album. We are extremely pleased with how it turned out as we feel that it looks professional and it also shows continuity accross the board within our project. If we were to do this again we said that we would try to use a larger amount of colours to make the cover look more vibrant.

Filming Day 6 - Margate

14/10/2015 - Margate

We decided to go to Maragte to film for numerous reasons, one being that it is a seaside town therefore, we could do some more scenes by the sea and also Maragte is known for it's arcades, this is something we thought could incorporate into our video in some way.

We began our day by filming in a small café just opposite a stretch of the sea. This café had a really nice shabby chic, vintage look to it, this is something we want in our video as we feel that it fits the look of our vision really well we also thought this worked well in cooperation with Nova being surrounded by trinkety bits. The café also had a sentimental feel to it, which is important for us as the video is based on reliving happy memories that the couple had together. I feel that the café location worked really well as it matched other footage we have rather stylistically thus, connecting the locations together. I also filmed little sections of the cafe to use as filler shots if need be, I managed to film some small focus pulls that I feel will help us have more sophisticated work.

For the next part of our day we ventured over to The Turner Contemporary Art Gallery, we felt that we could gain some interesting and creative shots here due to its artistic nature. I feel that our visit was succesfull as the gallery consisted of projectors, coloured light sources, televisions and many more resources that we found useful. We found that this location was really helpful with the point of view shots as it allowed the camerwoman to follow Nova around to make it seem as if the boyfriend was following her, this gives the audience a more personal insight to the couple's life.

We then felt that we should proceed to the seafront so we can get some good lip sycning shots, on our way over we stopped at a sweet shop and by a mural to get some extra little bits that we can use in our music video. When at the sea front I changed my top so that we have a variety of outfits running through the video. All of the girls took it in turn to film and they used the tripod for extra stability as the weather was extremely windy - again, they filmed me off centre to match in with previous footage that we have gotten and to get a lovely pale blue background in a large amount of our shots.

The last part of our day consisted of filming some bits in the arcades, this is where we got a lot of point of view footage as we made it look as if the couple are playing games agasint eachother; we felt that filming indoors in a place with bright lights would give us some more unique footage that we could make useful. We took inspiration for this location from Lana Del Rey's 'Ride' video, in which she has a lot of scenes in an arcade.

Costume

The outfit that I wore for all but one shot was a dark grey one shoulder jumper with a black crop underneath, paired with black jeans and converse - this was to show the winter part of their realtionship. Again, we chose dull colours to fit with the edgy look that Nova has.  For the outfit that I changed into I just changed my top to a white ripped crop, this was to be similar to other outfits I have previously worn, whislt giving variety to the overal video.

Review of Footage

This is a clip of some of the lip syncing scenes that we filmed; unfortunately you cannot hear the music due to the wind overpowering the song. We decided to film the chorus up against a mural that consists of a collection of bright colours, we felt that this looks artistic and links in with the colours we have previously used on filming days - I personally really like this background as I feel that it shows Nova's interest in the country she lives in (the mural is a timeline of Margate's history), this will make her out to be a good role model to her younger fans. Something that I do not particularly like in this shot is the complexion of my skin, it is quite red however, this was due to severely cold weather so when editing we will use colour correction to make me look warmer.

This is one of the more candid shots that we wanted to film; Kate thought that this window in the café was a good location due to the Volkswagen parked up outside also, the natural lighting allowed the shot to be illuminated.  I think that this shot will be successful once placed to music as I think that it will be a clear candid shot. I do feel however that a more successful shot would be one of me pointing at the car, this is because it then creates a vintage feel to the video, which is something that we would like due to the overall video being a flashback.

Filming Day 5 - Projection

8/10/2015 - Projection

As previously mentioned we wanted to put some projections into our video. In this session we done both image projection and moving projection, we feel that this will make our video look more artsty and entertaining for our niche target audience.

When doing the photogrpah projection we went back to the darkroom like we did for the trails of this. The darkroom is a really successful location for us as it guarenteed us complete darkness without any light interuptions, this allowed the picture to shine brightly and vividly. As Evie has most experience with the projector she was incharge of positioning both me and the machine to give us the best result.

The first image we tried was a sunset with pinks, purples and oranges being the main colours in the picture, this image links with the video as it is an establlishing shot, which we have and plan to continue filming a lot of these - sunsets are something that we find beautiful and they fit in with our nature theme. We have filmed a sunset in Faversham and the one in the image is pretty similar therefore, this shows some cosistansy within our work. For this to work successfully had to be completely bareback, this is so that there was no distractions from clothing, we wanted the sunset to be the main focus of this shot. I feel that this has worked successfully and will help progress our music video into a more creative and sophistictaed final product.

The second image we used was one of our friend Louis, as mentioned in a previous post; we wanted to toy around with introducing Nova's love intrest to the audience and we thought this would be a good way of doing it. After reviewing our shots we decided that this was not a route that we wanted to go down -  we put ourselves in our audience's shoes and figured out that if we saw that in a video we wouldn't think it was clever, infact we would most likely laugh, this is not the reaction that we want for our video.

Majority of the camera work used for this part was simple panning up and down, we didn't want to distract from the images on my back.

We then decided to put some moving projection into our work as we feel that this is unique and visually different to the rest of our video; moving projection is really simple yet so effective so we thought that this was the way forward, one thing we needed to be carful of was that it didn't look like a green screen, this is not a look we want in our video. We decided to chose a cyrstal clear ocean moving as the video that we projected, this was because it links with the locations used in our previous filming and it didn't distort my face in any way.

To make this work we used the projector in our media classroom and I stood on a chair so that my face was covered by the video; I wore an all white outfit to make it easier for the video to be seen if it were to end up on my clothing. Tamzin and Kate were filming this scene and they chose to film wide shots and close ups as I was lip syncing, they wanted the shots to be concerntrated with no distractions.

Review of Footage

From this short clip you can see what the photograph projection looks like, I really like how this looks as I think it gives off an artistic flare that our video will really need. Obviously, from this clip, the footage doesn't look amazing however, onve edited, cropped and put to music I feel that this can look rather good. The only downside to this is that I do not really like how Nova's hair is in this clip however, it was the only way that we could successfully have projection therefore, it is something I am willing to compromise on.