Advert design.

For our advert design we decided that we wanted a picture of the band large in the centre as they are the people that create the music and are important. As soon as people see a picture of artists they like, they take more notice of it as they recognise them. We have used dark colours as it is stereotypical of heavy metal bands, we also used red for the parts we wanted to stand out such as the release date as it is a vibrant colour and it will stand out against the dark colours. It is also a negative colour as it can represent blood, danger and death, this is affective as negative lyrics and imagery are the main focus of heavy metal bands. We wast the background of the photo to be of a rundown building as it will add to the negative vibe we are trying to get across and will look good. We also want red seaweed to be replacing where their hands are meant to be, this will give it a weird, monstery look which makes it seem adbstract which is common in heavy metal music videos. 

This is a video of me and Freedie discussing Photo ideas for our advert.

For our photo shoots we want it to be similar to our music video in that it's mainly black and white and  has some red in it. This is because it stands out and represents negative things which is what we want to come across as it is what people associate with heavy metal music. I also think that black and white photos for our advert will make it look more professional and I like the gritty affect over this photo as I feel it makes it look worn down and will add to the negative affect we want to create through our music video, album cover and advert.

CD Cover design.

This is our album cover design. We made sure we interesting visual imagery on each side of it so it looks professional and interesting. The front cover is going to be a landscape photo of a beach but we are going to edit it on photo shop to make the sky dark and the sea red so it goes with the heavy metal genre of darkness and negativity. We also want to use posed photo shoots of the band to show who they are, we will edit this to look dark like the rest of the images on the album cover using the main colours of black and red.

This is an example of an album cover that I thought was really affective, we want to take the idea of having an object or something other than the band on the front of our album cover that will create a negative feeling as soon as you look at it and like above we decided to have a landscape picture of an ocean/ beach that looks dark and like a place you just wouldn't want to be. Most photos taken for heavy metal bands have quite a gritty, dark affect to them which you can see looking at the picture above, we want to apply to all of or photos in our photo shoot as we think it looks affective and will help the negativity we want to get through.

Location

This is an image from google maps and images taken of where we are hoping to film our music video, there are a number of warehouses that we can film in or outside of. We want to film in a place like this as it is typical setting for a heavy metal music video (quiet areas that don't usually have a lot of people around.

List of Costume, Make-up, Props and Equipment.

Costume and Make-up:

• Lead singer: Dark clothes; t-shirt and jeans, trainers, sweat bands, rings, piercings, dark eyeliner.
• Guitarist 1: Dark clothes; t-shirt and skinny jeans, converse, dark eyeliner.
• Guitarist 2: Dark clothes; t-shirt and skinny jeans, trainers, dark eyeliner, rings.
• Bass guitarist: Dark clothes; t-shirt and skinny jeans, trainers, dark eyeliner.
• Drummer: Dark clothes; jeans, t-shirt and hoodie, converse, wrist bands, hair in front of face.
• Girl: Dark clothes; skinny jeans and a t-shirt, lots of dark eye make-up, dark hair, piercings.

Props and equipment:

- 2 guitar amps.

- Bass amp.

- Drum kit.

- Bass guitar.

- 2 guitars.

- Mic and stand.

- Camera - More than one at some points during filming.

-Tri-pod.

- Fig rig. 

- Car.

Bellow is a 'Gif' I created showing equipment that Asking Alexandria use and that other heavy metal bands also use in their performances and music videos. Through research and watching heavy metal music videos like this we created the list above of all props and equipment we will need.

GIFSoup

Storyboard

This is a video of my group creating our storyboard. We all had different roles each, one person drew, one person added colour, one person wrote in shot types and camera angles and another person wrote the shot numbers, sound and timing.



Here are pictures of our finished storyboard.

This is our animatic we made of our storyboard, we created it on Imovie and put our song over the top to show what shot is being used at what part of the song.

Concept

This is a video of my group discussing the concepts of our music video and some ideas that we want to include. This video explains things such as; we chose this specific genre of heavy metal as you can do a lot of things with it visually and we chose the song as when reading the lyrics it sounded interesting and very visual. We want to use dark imagery as it is stereotypical for the heavy metal genre and it will look really effective. For our locations we have discussed filming the performance of the band in a bar as it will look more professional or at an industrial estate as a lot of heavy metal music videos are filmed in areas like this or run down warehouses. 

Image Annotation

Our genre is heavy metal, in class we discussed what costumes we will need people to wear. We looked at heavy metal and rock music videos to get an idea of what they generally wear and we came up with this list.

• Black t-shirts with gothic graphics on it
• Skinny jeans, various colours
• Straightened hair, rough/jagged
• Vans (Canvas shoes)
• Tape (accessory) 
• Anti-Christ like jewellery
• Make-up, foundation, eyeliner, painted finger nails
• Tattoo's
• Dark hoodies
• Wooly hats/Tight baseball caps
• Piercings eg. Nose, ears, lips, eyebrows

Bellow are some gifs of heavy metal music videos to show the costume that they wear. As you can see they wear dark coloured clothes, mainly blacks and greys. They have tattoos and piercings, have longish hair, wear skinny jeans and t-shirts, vans or converse. 

GIFSoup


GIFSoup

Lyric Annotation

These are the lyrics of our song choice and we annotated them on Microsoft Word and wrote about ideas that we had for each part of the song and what the lyrics are saying. As a group we had to  unpick each line and find the meaning behind it to be able to understand the song more and have visual moving image that relates to the lyrics, we discussed some really good visual ideas for our music video and now have a better understanding of the meaning behind the song.

Song details

Asking Alexandria - A Single Moment of Sincerity; is the song we chose to create a music video on. We chose to do this genre of music (heavy metal) as the music videos are generally really visually interesting. We picked this song because the lyrics create visual imagery so it will be interesting to work with and we can create lots of different ideas to make the music video visually interesting. This is also a fast pace song which enables us to use lots of fast pace shot changes.

Technical Tutorial - Photoshop

For this tutorial we got taught how to work on Photoshop to create the front and back of our digipack, doing this our group was able to experiment with effects and colours and see what would be successful for our genre of music. We used a black background as it instantly gives it a rock/ heavy metal look as it is a colour which is stereotypically associated with this genre. The black also gives it a negative look this is effective as negative emotions are usually the main focus of rock/ heavy metal genre. The writing is whit so it is bold and stands out against the black, this is also good as when people are looking for it in the shops it is easy to see and stands out well and we chose the specific font because it is bold and interesting. The photos of the people were successful. Even though we didn't have costumes and props we used the chance of taking the photos of trying out different camera angles and poses which would make them look stern and serious as rock/ heavy metal is quite negative and also to make it represent the genre which is really shown in Daryl’s pose as the hand sign is used often within the rock/ heavy metal genre. We used thus specific filter on top of the photo to give it a surreal effect as a lot of rock/ heavy metal muic videos portray the sense of the unknown or really unusual imagery. This is created in our photot as they are unclear as their faces are quite blurred/ distorted and look unusual. Below is a video that I took of a member of our group taking the photos.

Technical tutorial - Final cut.

We created a new lip syncing video which consisted of using a green screen so we could learn how to use it and how to edit the background on final cut. Me, Elenya and Daniel created this video on Jing which allowed us to video what we did on the screen and add a voice over to explain. When doing this we decided to explain how final cut works when you want to edit the background and take the green screen out, we wrote on a piece of paper what to say first and then read out the points over the video.

Roles.

This is a photo of our group. When making a music video there are a number of jobs that need doing to make it go successfully, we are going to share these out between our group so we have all contributed equally.

Me- Filming, Photographer.

Luke- Filming, costume and props organiser.

Daryl- Filming, location manager.
Freddie- Filming, lead singer, technician.

Initial Ideas.

In class my group mind mapped our initial ideas of what we need to include in our rock/ heavy metal music video. For our costume we knew that they had to fit in with the genre of our music choice of rock / heavy metal, for this we noted that the costumes need to be dark colours and quite casual like jeans/ skinny jeans and a t-shirt. For our song choice we were told that it needs to be English and it can't already have a music video to it. We also made a list of artists of our genre so we could listen to songs and watch music videos to get an understanding of what they consist of. For the performance we knew that we would need a lot of instruments and equipment so we created a list of them; bass guitar, guitar x 2, drum kit, keyboard, speakers, mic, amp, jack, leads.

Research Assessment.

Audience Research.

For my audience research I created a questionnaire online. This is a link to it -https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHhUMmpzU1pUYTBnYkF0MzEyN3RnUmc6MQ

Results:

For my audience research I created a questionnaire to find out how people listen to and purchase music and also how people feel about music genres and what they expect from their music videos. The most popular genre was rock with pop coming in close second, I think this is because these are the most commercialised genres so more people know and hear about them. I also found that a lot of people now download their music off the internet and watch music videos on television, this shows that the internet and television would be a good place for advertising as they are popular. I asked how people feel when listening to the genre of rock/ heavy metal as this is the genre of music we are going to do our music video of. Most people said that they feel happy and excited but that really depends on what genre you listen to, I think if a lot more people took the questionnaire the responses would even out more. I also as asked what people think are the main conventions of a music video as an open ended question. They gave answer such as electric guitars and other instruments, dark mise en scene and costume etc. which I need to include in my ideas when I think about what to use visually in my music video.