Feedback On My Rough Cut

Although the original feedback for our video had been corrected in my most recent cut, I requested feedback from my peers and found a few areas which could still use some brushing up.

• People liked the shots of the dogs. To be honest I'm not sure where they went, I do not remember taking them out, but I will gladly invite them back in for my final cut.
• There was a close up, low angle shot of Josh lip syncing for the lyrics at 2:35 which was left out of this cut, but apparently it was good and should be used in the final cut.
• The blur effect at 1:09 did not go down as well as expected. It was supposed to portray that Josh was tipsy from the alcohol but it ended up looking like a poorly focused shot in actual fact.
• Josh appears to poorly lip sync during the booth shots at 2:39 and 2:42 and at the start of the 2:47 shot, so I plan to cut out the first two, and only keep the end of the 2:47 shot.

I plan to act upon this feedback before my final cut, and possibly make other changes which I feel are appropriate along the way.

Rough Cut - My Own Edit

Although my group and I have already finished a rough cut of our video, I have taken that cut and edited some of the footage on my own now. I have changed or edited around 25% of the footage from the original rough cut. Some differences are noticable whereas others are less obvious, such as minor effects being added or some shots coming in slightly earlier or later.

Rough Cut 2

This is an updated edit of our video. In this cut we start to get an idea of what the video may look like, although still about a third of the footage is yet to be either filmed or inserted, and we have not added effects or advanced editing techniques yet. We re-shot some footage as we felt Iceburg needed to perform with more energy, but we feel that he is coming along well now. Also, I feel that my longshot of the dogs really adds a new dimension to it. You know it makes sense!

First Draft Digipak Design

I used a template to create this preliminary digipak design. I decided to use a 6-panel design which includes a front cover, back cover (track listing) and 4 other panels which fold out to reveal different images. The bottom middle image will be revealed when the CD is taken out. I originally changed the contrast and exposure so that the people in the background of the bottom left image fell into shadow, but decided it would be best to use this on all the images for consistency and to spice up the images a bit anyway, as we felt some of them looked plain and dull. We creatively decided to use the black poster on the wall of the music studio (top middle panel) as a background for our track listings.

First Rough Edit For Video

This cut is our first rough one which we did on final cut. We do not have all of our footage yet and are yet to fully decide on which shots to use for which parts of the track, but this is the first effort so far, which covers just past the first verse.

Mock Magazine Advert For Album (Rough)

This is our magazine advert to promote our artist's debut album. We used a large picture of the artist which shows his face and his style in fashion which allows fans to judge him based on his appearance and get an idea of what genre his music could be (jeans, trainers and baseball jacket are likely to represent urban pop or rap). This is conventional for a young urban artist who is not yet established, with such artists as Wretch 32 and Ed Sheeran using similar images.

We put the name of our artist at the top to clearly let people know, and the name of the album so that people can search it or identify it when they see it in stores or online. We wrote "Available in stores 12th December" as it is vital to let people know the release date so they know how new the album is and when they can get their hands on it. These conventions are also seen in the above adverts, and indeed apply to all genres.

This is followed by icons of HMV and iTunes as these are the top places to purchase the album, with HMV being a popular high-street store and also being popular as an online store where customers can order a physical copy of the album. iTunes is important in the modern music industry as it is the number one online music store, and by searching the iTunes store for the album, customers can purchase it digitally and immediately receive MP3 files of all the songs on the album as well as the artwork which appears when they play the song on their desktop, tablet or handheld device. A link to purchase the song on iTunes will also appear on the 'More info' section of the artist's music video when uploaded on Youtube. The main inspiration for this was Wretch 32's advert, as Ed Sheeran's placing of icons is less prominent, with just the iTunes logo appearing next to the price. The price was included in this advert as iTunes was the only store linked, however with Wretch 32's advert and our advert the different stores promoted could hold the product at different prices. The price is not always inserted into the make up of the advert anyway but is important to some people as it can affect whether they want to buy the album or not.

Below this we posted links to the artist's social networking pages on Facebook and Twitter respectively. This allows readers to visit the artist's page on their favourite sites and learn more about him and follow him directly on those sites which will allow direct promotion onto their homepages in many cases. We mainly used our initiative here, however Wretch 32 has one example of this in his advert as his Myspace URL is at the bottom of the advert.