Shoot Reflections (Saturday 22nd Nov)

This was another long shoot, from 13:45 until 21:30. We spent this time re-shooting our wide shots, and we re-shot our glide-cam footage using a shoulder mount. We also got some mid-shots of each of the band performing, as well as one of me playing guitar in an empty set. At the end, we quickly got some superhero shots of each of us posing. The bold shots are the ones we didn't get.

This shoot wasn't quite as productive as our Thursday shoot earlier in the week but we still got a lot of good footage. I was particularly happy with the shoulder mount footage, as it was a lot smoother than the original glide-cam footage we were working with.

Mahalia shooting a MS performance shot of Alice

Seeing as we couldn't shoot the Nintendo 64 shot as we didn't have access to the console, nor the 'fighting with swords/nerf guns' shot as we were short on props (we ended up not shooting this shot at all due to a choice to get rid of it), this shoot went very smoothly and we got to a point by the end of the shoot where we had most of our footage, and our final shoot was just for a few extra shots and pick-ups.

Development of Digipak

For the back cover of the digipak, we decided to stick to the conventions of many indie albums in that they have a consistent colour scheme and style across the front and back covers, and often inside too. Below are some of the references we used to draw that conclusion.

Arctic Monkeys - AM

Dan Croll - Sweet Disarray

The 1975 - The 1975

Therefore we decided to keep our blue texture on the back cover also, and have quite a simplistic design with the track listing centred. Below is our initial design for this.

We then created some track names to go in and added institutional information. We added a band website, a facebook page, a twitter page, copyright, record label (Alma Gavon Records) and parent company (Beggars Group) as shown below.

With feedback, we realised two things. First of all, there is a lot of empty space on the back cover. However, I personally quite like this, and looking at some of the existing back covers above, they often have a lot of 'negative space'. Also, we realised that we couldn't gain much credit for the image as it was found on the internet and we hadn't done much in the way of editing to it. To solve this, Mahalia scanned in a lace pattern that she had at home, and I duplicated and flipped it so that it was a continuous pattern. We also lowered the saturation to make it blend in a little better. This texture became the new texture of our front and back cover, as well as the background of the website. We think that this texture connotes a feeling of homeliness and has a vintage feel to it. Below is the final back cover of our album.

As for the inside covers, we again took inspiration from existing inside panels of indie albums, as shown below:

The 1975 

Arctic Monkeys

We looked at all of the shots from our various shoots which featured the whole band in. We liked the picture below because it makes us come across as a very playful band, and the pink background goes well with the blue front cover.

Alice and Mahalia then edited the image to get rid of the line between the floor and backdrop, and to make the pink background more even and vibrant, as well as brightening the band, the final product of which is shown below:

Through a Facebook discussion, we decided to make us a bit smaller in the image, which we all agreed worked better, but felt that there was now a lot of empty space on the back inside frame after getting feedback.

To fix this, we decided to crop the VHS tape image and put it on the inside back cover, and found a new image to go in the inside front cover.

There was a lot of disagreement at first with this image as we couldn't work out whether the angle of my head looked odd, and what kind of image it was portraying. In the end, we agreed to keep it as we thought it was quite a playful image.

Finally, we darkened the background of the spine to a block colour as it was difficult to read the white text over our lace texture.

We now had four panels for each part of our digipack. Below is our final album digipack.

Shoot Reflections (Thursday 20th Nov)

 This was our main props shoot. We had the studio booked from 12:30 until 21:30, and we pretty much used the studio this whole time as we had lots of shots to get done. The shot list we used is shown below:

This shoot was very efficient as we got all of the prop shots that we needed to get. We didn't manage to get on to any performance shots, but nonetheless this shoot flowed very easily as we didn't have to stop to change costume or lighting set-up (apart from the backdrop light).

our VHS tapes shot

me making a popcorn box prop

This was our first properly long shoot, and I am personally glad that we didn't lose concentration and kept going until we were finished, meaning we could maximise our studio time.

Shoot Reflections (Tuesday 18th Nov)

We had the studio from 7am until 12:30pm on this shoot. As we had a lot of prop shots to get done on this day, our collective call time was 7:30am. In this shoot, the shots we got were hula-hoops, Monopoly, Monopoly money, slinky, Jenga, Twister, silly string, party poppers and Nintendo 64.

our Jenga set-up

our Monopoly set-up

The lighting set-up was similar for each of these shots, meaning there was not much of a turnover between shots, as we didn't have to move the drum kit and amps around as there were no performance shots to do. The only difference in lighting set-ups from shot to shot was the background, some of which we had saved already and some of which we created on the day.

me changing the backdrop colour for the next shot

As we only had 5 (uninterrupted) hours for this shoot, I feel that this shoot went very well as we got a lot of good footage done which we don't have to re-shoot.

Meetings (week beginning 17th Nov)

We had 3 shoots this week, and so a lot of our time was spent actually in the studio shooting. What little time we had, we spent making sure we had all the props we needed for our shoot.

We had so much time to do our shoots this week and now that we were in our third week of production, most of our costumes and props were already in the studio, and many of our lighting set-ups were saved on the system, meaning we could easily set up for the shoot without too much preparation.

Shoot Reflections (Friday 14th Nov)

This was a relative short shoot (15:45-17:45). We had the studio from 13:45, but me and Gavin had lessons until 15:45. Therefore, we didn't plan many shots in this shoot - we planned to get most of the confetti shots out of the way, as we had asked 8 people to come in to throw confetti over the band whilst we performed.

We got the helpers to stand on chairs, 4 on each side of the band so that they were out of shot and to throw confetti over us. However, we found that the confetti wouldn't travel far enough to cover the whole screen. To fix this, we got a fan on either side of the frame to help blow the confetti into the middle of the frame, which worked very effectively.

the confetti didn't reach the middle of the frame

using fans, the confetti filled the frame

We had created our own confetti out of lots of pieces of tissue paper, which proved to work very effectively apart from the occasional clump of confetti. We had also bought 4 confetti cannons which we used at crucial points in the song where we knew we would be using that particular part of footage in the final video. Luckily, the DIY confetti and the confetti cannons blended very well and didn't look different.

We just about got every shot finished, although it took a long time between takes as we had to clear up all the confetti. The picture below shows the extent of how far the confetti travelled on the set.

Shoot Reflections (Wednesday 12th Nov) and Publicity Shots

Our second shoot - our call time on Wednesday was 9:30 and our wrap time was 13:45.

During this shoot, we did a shot of me Gavin and Alice messing about in the balloons without instruments, as well as taking some publicity shots. We got our friend Alex to take the publicity shots as she does lots of photography. Below are a couple of pictures of the publicity shoot.

Because we weren't all free for shooting until 11:00, me and Gavin sorted out the lights for the balloon shot before Alice and Mahalia joined us.

me adjusting the backdrop lights

I feel like because the balloon shot was the only shot we were doing, we found it difficult to get straight into character. However, I think there are some good bits in the footage that we can use.

I loved the way Alex was taking the publicity shots, and below are some of the shots I particularly like. If time allows, I would potentially like to take a few more shots using the same positioning as some of the shots Alex took but perhaps with us looking more like a band and less just like ourselves.

Meetings (week beginning 10th Nov)

This was the first week that we had footage to work with, and so some of our meeting time was taken editing and making decisions on which takes were useful to use in our final music video.

screenshot of me editing our WS pink performance

picture of me editing

During one of our lessons, our teacher talked to us about our actual performance, and said that we needed to 'characterise' ourselves more, in that we needed to create full characters for each of us, so that we didn't just look like ourselves performing. Alice, Gavin and I discussed this and came up with character profiles for each of us - names, body movements, facial expressions and body language. This helped at our next full performance shoot, which was Friday 14th November.

The rest of my group also dropped some of the publicity shots taken on Wednesday 12th November into some of the album cover templates we had made in October, shown below:

Personally, I think the colours are too 'soft' in these album covers, and the shots themselves aren't perfect, often due to one or more of me, Gavin or Alice not looking or standing where we should be.

Also, because we slightly rearranged some of our shots from the shoot on Saturday 8th, Mahalia created a new, revised shoot schedule, fitting in the extra shots in later shoots.

Lighting & Set Design

Lighting

When talking through our ideas, we didn't want any low-key lighting as that would take away from our positive mood. We took inspiration from the following videos when we decided on using lots of different coloured backgrounds to give the video a playful feeling:

Dog is Dead - Do the Right Thing

Mcfly - Love is on the Radio

George Ezra - Budapest

Darwin Deez - Radar Detector

Little Mix - Move

Before production started, we had an opportunity to go into the studio and do some tests with the lighting to see what might work. We worked out that we would need 24 different coloured backgrounds, some of which we saved during the test so that we would have easy access to them during our shoots.

me saving some of the lighting set-ups

The main issue we faced when lighting the set was getting enough light to fill the set and light the performers, but not so much that it washed out the coloured background. This is something that we decided we would be able to enhance in post-production.

Set Design

We decided that we had 2 main set-ups:

1. Performance set-up: This set-up included the drum kit in the centre of the frame and amps on either side of the drum kit. The influences we got for this arrangement are shown below:

The 1975 - Girls

Biffy Clyro - Mountains 

Blink 182 - All the Small Things

Green Day - Basket Case 

Band of Skulls - Nightmares 

Muse - Uprising

We decided to stick to the convention that all of the videos above conform to, which is that the drum kit is always behind the rest of the band. At one point, we considered breaking this by using jump-cuts to move the band around in the set, but this proved inefficient for the time we had. The amps being on either side of the drum kit was also a convention that we picked up on, possibly to not draw attention away from the performers.

We also decided to have me on the left of frame as people usually 'read' images from left to right, and so I am seen first as I am the lead singer of the band. Below is an initial design we made before production to give us a better visual idea of where we would all be spaced on the set.

2. Prop set-up

This set-up is effectively an empty set with us playing with props. Occasionally we will have a table on set for playing Monopoly or if we need to raise something. I main influence for this was the music video for Mcfly's 'Love is on the Radio'.

empty set with props