Storyboard

A bit late, but here is the storyboard that we did before our rough cut.
Since we completed this, we have received our audience feedback, and can see that it is in fact very repetitive. This is why we have re-planned our project so that it is more entertaining and captivates the audience more.

Editing Techniques

As Glenn has been the one doing the editing, he has begun posting the techniques he has been using so far.
- Cross Dissolve
- Dip to Color Dissolve
- Soft Edges

Rough Cut 2.0

Group S.A.G. Rough Cut 2.0 from Alex Newcombe on Vimeo.

We have this second video to help show how we have appreciated the audience feedback and taking it into account, made some changes. Unfortunately, because we have had to make such a large amount of changes, we feel that it would be best to post this video to act as a stage between the Rough cut and the final cut.

Cd Digipak

As Sophie is creating the CD Digipak, here are the links to the posts she has done on them:
- CD Pictures
- CD Digipak Cover Final

Audience Feedback for Rough Cut

We received very consistent criticism of our rough cut. Almost every person who told us their views said that the storyline was too repetitive. There was also a criticism of the way in which the guitar shots were used, and how perhaps they were too dark. Furthermore, we cut too often between the shots of Glenn singing against the tree, and when he is playing the guitar.

There is no variety in the way we filmed and this has lead to us planning on how to add more variety into the video.
To do this, we have planned to increase the relevance of the girl in our video (Lucy Fry) to the storyline, and to build the idea of them [Glenn and Lucy] being together. We thought of perhaps different locations to film it in, as well as what the storyline would entail. We decided on elaborating on the idea of Lucy dying as we used some imagery in the mise en scene to show this. The red ribbons symbolise depression, and the rose is a traditional symbol of death. We therefore elaborated on the idea and plan to introduce the idea of Lucy has died, and we see Glenn reliving memories of times with her, but she almost fades from view.


The other main criticism we had was at the beginning of the video, when Glenn begins to lip sync it is out of time with the vocals. This of course needed to be changed, and when we watched the video through afterwards, we began to notice a few more places in which the lip syncing was slightly out of time. Changing this was easy to do and makes the whole video seem a lot more professional.

Magazine Advert for Digipak Final

To begin with, we took the picture from our rough-cut attempt of when we wished to use an overlay of Glenn above the right shoulder of Glenn singing. To do this we had to first crop a shot of Glenn looking down. This shot was then feathered and the opacity was dropped so that the image sat nicely on top of Glenn’s shoulder. However, this shot did not make the final cut.
Yet when attempting to edit this, I saw the shot as it was without it being overlaid onto the other image of Glenn. I then performed a screen grab of this and it ended up looking like this:

I then had to edit the purple mark on top of Glenn’s hood out of the picture, and for this I used the patch tool. This allowed for me to remove this blemish and it then seemed as if it was never there.

I then went on to choose a font as this is key to both this ancillary task, and the CD cover as we wished to create a house style. was lucky seen as the first font that I saw on dafont.com was in fact 'Sweet Confusion', which I believe suited the purposes of this very well. I then downloaded this to Photoshop, the program used for the design of the magazine digipak.

I began to type out the text for the first draft, alongside and around the image. After typing this out, I decided to try and attempt to put an outer glow on the text, as it seemed to plain, and after a while of testing different settings, I settled on:
Opacity: 100%
Technique: Softer
Spread: 0
Size: 6
Range: 50%
Jitter: 0%

Furthermore, I downloaded a star font to use in the creation of the stars for the reviews of the album. Unfortunately, the stars were not very attractive so I had to edit them by adding a 'Bevel and Emboss' feature. I also added a contour to it. This left me with a very satisfactory shape and look to the stars, which I believe fitted in with both the piece and other real world adverts.

However, as mentioned in an earlier blog post, I discovered that the magazine advert had to be designed for an A4 piece. This proved to be a hindrance as the picture would not stretch to an A4 piece of paper without looking obviously stretched, so I had to redesign the cover.
I used almost all of the same text, having to edit the settings for the outer glow as the font size had to be increased.
This left me with this draft of the advert:


However, after receiving feedback regarding this, I discovered that it was too empty and did not have enough on the page. Due to this I added in a picture of the CD cover, which I went on to add an outer glow to. I then rearranged the layout of the page so the CD cover fitted in better. Finally, I added in 3 logos at the bottom of the page to authenticate the advert more. These were the iTunes logo; the logo for Joshua Radin's record label, Mom and Pop records; and the HMV logo.
This meant that my final draft was:



I believe that our group's magazine advert has turned out very well and that it represents a very standard representation of real media adverts. Furthermore, I believe that is a piece that attracts the viewers eye with its simple layout and colour scheme and that it would encourage many people to purchase the album.