Risk Assessment: Drama Room - Canon XF100

As we are returning to the drama room with an expensive camera we are required to write another risk assessment to make sure that we know the risks being in the drama room and using the camera. This assessment is similar to the last but as certain things are different this time around there were some different risks.

Risk Assessment: Forest #2

Before heading off to our location tomorrow to film we are required to write a risk assessment to show that we understand and acknowledge all of the risks present. We have identified these risks and the ways to avoid them.

Risk Assessment: Drama Room #2

As we will be filming in a drama room tomorrow with filming equipment and we had to identify the risks and figure ways around these risks. We have written up a risk assessment to show that we have identified the risks.

Animatic

My group and I have finished the animatic! Despite having some scary-looking drawings in the animatic I feel like it will be a great help when we start editing. As our animatic is like a storyboard to music it helped us identify where we wanted the shots to be in the song and how long we wanted them to be. The animatic should also make filming a lot easier as we know what shots we want in each location, however we have decided that we wanted to film more shots than we have planned so if we changed our mind on a certain shot we will have a wide choice of replacements.

This is our finished animatic:

Making an Animatic

Over the past few lessons my group and I have been working on an animatic to help us gain a better idea of what we want to film for our music video. We have sketched out the shots on post-it notes and have taken pictures of these notes before starting to edit the images alongside the corresponding lyric or sound.

Although we do not have enough shots for the entire  song we still have a lot of shots to film whilst we come up with new ideas. The animatic gives us an idea on what lyrics in the song have shots related to them and how they will look.

Logos and Copyright Letters

Today we took a break from story-boarding and decided to make some logos for our artist Noxa and a copyright letter. We started off by making some logos that we thought matched Noxa's star image. The first is the word 'Noxa' but the 'X' has a painted look to it as we thought it matched the alternative rock genre:

This logo has a sleek look to it and would look good on top of a website or CD cover. However the font used for the 'N', 'O' and 'A' is just a first draft as we wanted the 'X' to be the main focus of this logo. Our second logo is once again Noxa's name with a rose underneath it:

This logo represents Noxa's star image in a better light: sweet and innocent-looking yet deceitful just like a rose. This is shown through the rose being a dark grey/black rather than red or white, to show the loss of innocence. The text in this logo also looks scratched or roughly hand-written with gives the logo a more personal look.
We also discussed using just 'X' from the first logo or the rose from the second logo as a image alone so our audience could identify our artist through a picture alone:

Depending on which logo we choose we could use the full logo on the website and digipak but in other scenarios the image above could act as a logo without the text and our audience would still be able to identify who it belongs to.

After creating our logos we wrote a copyright letter to the artists of our song choice "Narcissistic Cannibal", EarlyRise. We wrote a short, but sweet, letter asking for their permission to use the their song cover in for our music video:

We decided to end the letter with our names, in alphabetical order, and our artist name 'Noxa'. We also decided to include our logo (although this is not a final decision and we could not make it any smaller!) as that is part of our star's image. The main reason we wrote the letter is to make sure that we can get permission from the band as we do not want to take their song if they are against people using their song.

Group Blog Questionnaire - Answers

http://shotgunrecords3.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/auidence-rearch-1.html

The response to the questionnaire was very helpful and interesting to read. My group and I enjoyed reading the opinions from people of all different ages and to see their interests and what they like. I was most intrigued by the question about favourite music videos. Nobody had the same one and each one was like for a different reason. I decided to make a mind map on a summary of the results from the questionnaire:

Storyboarding and Writing a Treatment

This week we have been drawing up our storyboard and planning out our treatments. This is to help us have a plan for when we begin to film our music video. Our storyboard is a set of images that will help as a visual aid during film whereas the treatment is a written analysis of the overall look and feel of what we want and expect from the video. After we have completed both of these tasks and drafted up a shooting schedule we will be ready to start filming in our locations. The final image is our complete storyboard!

Meetings and Location

This week my group and I have been having meetings where we discuss our artist name, locations and props that we would like to use in our video and also went on a location check. Our meeting have been very helpful in terms of planning as we now have a artist name! Our artist is called Noxa which is Latin for the word 'harm' which I think represents our song choice and, hopefully, our artists star image quite well. We also annotated the song lyrics to 'Narcissistic Cannibal' and this allowed us to write down any ideas that came to mind when reading a certain lyric. I have taken pictures of each sheet and written them out on a group blog post. We also went on a location check which was very inspiring and I made sure to vlog the trip to show off our location. This trip helped all of us with our ideas and where we could film our music video.

Meeting Notes:

Annotated Lyrics:

 

Group Post Link: http://shotgunrecords3.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/meeting-notes.html

Vlog Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9T3mbIEZWs

Digipak Research

A digipak is a luxurious case for a CD that provides the owner with extra exclusives that would not be in the ordinary case. Digipaks are not as common as regular CD's as they usually contain special editions of the CD and have a overall nicer appearance as the case is laminated and involves several pages but the biggest reason they are uncommon is because they are expensive to manufacture. There can be either 3, 4 or 6 pages in a digipak that each have something on them such as: lyrics to a song, a thank you note, photos, vouchers or discounts, information and links.

There can also be more than one disc in the pack which can persuade the buyer even more as they get more than one CD. The purpose of a digipak is to advertise the artist or band and to tempt fans and the public to buy their digipak over another artists, this can boost sales and profits. The following alternative rock digipaks include (in order): Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Nirvana, Oasis and Nine Inch Nails.

Something that all of these digipaks have in common is they all include the CD, which is expected in a digipak, and a list of what is on the disc. This is a good way to inform the audience on what to expect from the digipak. Some of the digipaks are simple, similar to the Arctic Monkeys, Nirvana and Oasis digipak, as they only contain a front page, a disc (or two), a image and a list of what the disc contains. It does not overload the customer with information or extras and it stays to the point. The Muse and Nine Inch Nails digipaks, on the other hand, contain lots of extra content such as booklets, pullout images, a memory stick and plenty of discs. This can make the digipak feel more full to the customer and almost like a gift as their are many extra presents inside.
All of the digipaks represent the artist and/or band by the use of colour and images and each one is identifiable by appearance alone.

When creating my own digipak I would like to go down the simple route by adding in some exclusive images, a disc or two and what the discs will contain however I am keen on the idea of offering my audience more than what they would find in a ordinary CD case. I will also use colour and images to make my digipak link back to our artist, Noxa, and her star image and they way she is represented throughout our video.

Final Song Choice!

We have finally chosen a song for our music video and I am very pleased with our song choice: Narcissistic Cannibal by EarlyRise. This song is a female cover of the original version by Korn featuring Skrillex and Kill the Noise which was a dubstep-type song, however the EarlyRise version is a alternative song and is slow and has a sinister element to it which is what we wanted. There is also no video for this song, that I could find, so we can take many different approaches to the how the video should look.

I originally found this song about a year ago when looking for the trailer of the video game "Beyond: Two Souls" and stumbled across a fan-made trailer that was to this song. As a fan of the game I loved the song and relate the lyrics back to the game whenever I heard it. Therefore when picking a song I was thinking about the game and thought of this song. I showed it to my group and am very pleased that they too liked the song! The song has so many possibilities for a music video and I cannot wait to start filming and drafting the video!

Our First Group Ideas

Today my group and I discussed possible ideas for our music video and settle on these few ideas:

Although these are only 3 small ideas they will all come together in the end and will help us to choose what we want to include in our video.