Final Video

So we've added a few shot so get more lip sink (to make seem more like a music video) and less 'samey'.

This is also the insert that went on the inside of our digipack, which we made to add more industrial information (like producers and copyright etc).

Audience Feedback - CD Album Cover

After I created the CD Album cover for Pixie Lotts single, 'Here We Go Again', i showed it to a number of people as a focus group to get some feedback on how it looked.

• Most agreed that they liked the style as it was a lot like Pixie's actual CD designs with the large white font in front of the her. This was what i based my idea around as i wanted to get it as close to the artist as possible, as well as reflecting our earlier work

• Some said that they would have preferred an actual plastic CD cover instead of a digipak, but liked the design that was printed. The digipak was easier to work with in terms of creation and getting the design to print onto it, however the plastic CD cover would probably have a longer life span that the card digipak, and might have appeared better quality.

• The back cover featuring the show was generally liked as it was similar to the party video, but said that they would have liked a different background, of maybe some bottles or "party mess", which were part of our other drafts for the album covers. I used the shoe so that it would fit the party genre and reflect the video that we have created so that our ancillary tasks and main tasks fit together as a collection. Though they weren't sure about it, the brick wall was used as a background because that was specifically used in one of Pixie Lott's CD covers 'Boys and Girls'. This was so we linked it to the original artist.

• Some noted that the front cover wasn't totally clear and a bit fuzzy, which didn't look as neat effective. This was a problem that i encountered on photoshop. When imported, the pictures were a smaller scale than ideal, so i had to stretch them slightly to make them fit the digipak measurements. Though fuzzy, i put up the contrast to try to stylise the product and get around the fuzz issue.

Evaluation!!

Its all edited and finished with examples, pictures and clips from the entire project. We also burned our DVD today and that will be in a case tomorrow to hand in. Its all coming together :)

A smaller version incase the top one doesn't work or crops the image.

Evaluation - Goodwin Six

Andrew Goodwin identified six features of a music video. This evaluation will look at how we have used these features in our own music video.

1. Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics (e.g. stage performance in metal video, dance routine for boy/girl band). - 'Here We Go Again' is a pop song. The videos for a pop song are usually quite relaxed and have a fun feel to them. Quite a lot of pop videos are party based, e.g. 'Boys and Girls' by Pixie Lott, 'Stomp' by Steps, 'I Kissed A Girl' by Katy Perry, etc. Our video is party based and has a fun, natural feel to it.



2. There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting). - The relationship between lyrics and visuals in our video is obvious when Lucy is singing to the camera. The idea that the she is at a party, then goes to bed and gets up the next day ready for another party fits in well with the lyrics "here we go again" because it is like an endless cycle. The party repeats itself and we wanted to give it the feel of, "here we go again". We also have a shot of an alarm clock as she sings "sleep through the alarm".



3. There is a relationship between music and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting). - The feel of the music at the beginning of the song seems like a carnival tune, which is why we put carnival masks into the video. The music is slower at the beginning of the song and at the end, so at those moments the editing isn't as rapid. In the middle it picks up speed and the shots are cut together much faster and the visuals give you a feel of a fast pace.



4. The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close-ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work (a visual style). - There are a lot of close-ups of the actress we have portraying Pixie in the video. On many occasions she is the only person in the shot and at one point there are three of her in one shot.



5. There is frequently reference to the notion of looking (screens within screens, telescopes, etc.) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body. - For Example the pan up from the feet at the beginning starts with just a shot of her feet and slowly encompasses her whole body, and close ups of her face help to create a story. But other than that it wasn't a major part of our work.


6. There is often intertextual references. - Our main use of intertextual references is to Lady Gaga's poker face with the two fingers over the eyes. This would be reference our audience could relate to and it would then feel as if Pixie was one of them.

Audience Feedback Evaluation

Last week we showed a focus group of the same girls we used before, our completed project. We asked them to write down what they liked about the video and what they thought could have been better.
A lot of people mentioned that they liked the contrast between the black and white shots and the colour ones. Some people commented that footage matched the beat of the music and liked that Lucy's miming fit in with the song. They were pleased that we had taken in to account their thoughts from the first focus group by incorporating aspects of "Carnival" by using the masks. They liked the use of "short snappy shots". A lot of people liked the ending, saying it was "a really cool effect". They thought the dancing looked natural and it made it look like a real party in the video. They liked the shot where there was multiple Lucy's and thought that it was a good piece of editing.
Some people wanted see some more shots of Lucy singing, however we felt that a performance based music video would look unnatural, especially if the actor didn't know the words to the song very well. A few people commented that it would have been better if there had been more people. We would have liked to have more partygoers in the video, but unfortunately things didn't ork out that way because it was very difficult to get lots of people together at the same time.

Filming the evaluation

Yesterday in the lesson we filmed our evaluation. We answered the following questions; In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? What have you learnt from the audience feedback? We gave detailed answers for the questions and the film will be put on the blog at a later date. We filmed the evaluation using a tripod and video camera. We used a mid-shot as we had to fit in all of us in the group.

Completed Video

Here is our finished video. We have got rid of the sound at the end and added in the title card.

CD cover - Final Piece

The Final Piece for the CD Album Cover.

Website 3

I've made a few changes to the page concerning fonts and links.
There are now three fonts on throughout the website :
-Honey
For anything that says Pixie Lott or links to the home page.
-Holla
For the Links at the top and the links to Facebook and Twitter
-Androgyne
For almost everything else.
Other fonts that are used were chosen to represent a brand or company name.

I've added 2 links in the bottom right corner to Facebook and Twitter to be more conventional with this genre. I've also made it clearer on each of the black page how to get to the home page and also on the 'latest pix' and 'videos' pages.

Website 2

So this is the published website!!
www.wix.com/ACGL44/Pixie-Lott

-The bow is our own imagery, which i used Paint-Shop Pro to edit and Kodak to upload it.
-All the links work, including adverts and info boxes, although most links go to blank pages. On every page 'Pixie Lott' in the top left corner will link you to the home page.

This is the video page. Once we have completed our video and commentary i will add both onto here. I've put the picture of Lucy (our Pixie) on the left hand side, with a similar border (Me and Lizzie agreed the 'real' border looked more appropriate for the picture) and font as the home page, in the same way Duffy does on her webpage, as a way of filling the space.

Website

This is our website progress so far. We used Wix.com as we thought it looked more professional than iWeb and there was more variety of effects, layouts, backgrounds etc. I've also put a poll up so you can decide which website you prefer.
1 Home Page.
-Black background, links to gallery, news, tour etc. The carousel at the bottom is moving.
-I'm going to put a slightly faded box behind the left hand column in order to make that clearer (much as pixie does on her website). And maybe put a line to define the top row aswell.
-I've tried to match the fonts, and where they don't they are in a similar style. I think this matches the imagery, however, my only concern is the website doesn't quite capture the message of the song. So i might have to change the imagery.
'Latest Pix' Page
-Its the same format as the home page and i have also moved the album to the left to be further compliment the format. This will also make room for some adverts i have mocked up. One being a Pixie Lott fragrance we named 'Daydream', the other for Next (although I'm not sure this clashes with copyright laws so we may need to come up with our own store name).

2 After this i made some changes and asked my family for their opinions.

My sister (who would be in our target audience) suggested putting a bow on the main picture, however, i would need to do it with our own imagery. Consequently, I've made a prototype with imagery taken from the web.

Semi- Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? What have you learned from your audience feedback? How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Our research stage included a focus group of about twelve people. The aim of this was to help us decide on a song and style of video for our music video. Although we did get a lot of feedback from this as to what song would be best for our music video, we only used one specific type of audience for our focus group; year 13, females, all friends. It may have worked better if it was a random group. Saying this it was a success and it would have been hard to find different people to be all free for the time slot we had to carry out our focus group. The people in our focus group also gave us ideas on how to present our music video and how to shoot it. We got the ideas for our costumes from audience research aswell. The music videos we chose to show the focus group were Cheryl Cole 'Fight for this love', Christina Aguilera 'I got trouble', White Stripes 'hardest button to button', Katy Perry 'Waking up in vegas', Pixie Lott 'Boys and girls' and 'Here we go again'. We gained further audience feedback through polls on the blog; we asked which music video the audience prefered and the majority prefered 'I got a feeling' by The Black eyed peas which is a party based video. We gave them a choice of two website designs and asked them to vote which one they prefered. Website two got 100% of the votes and so we chose that one as our website. Then we asked whether the audience prefered a bow on our webpage or not. Although the majority of the voters voted against the bow we chosed to keep it as we thought it was in keeping with Pixie Lotts style.

On our website we have included advertisements like Pixie Lott does on her official fan site. There are boxes to create a clear format and a black background to highlight imagery. However, the imagery is less urbanised as it wouldn't match our video and we've used less vibrant to attract a slightly older audience i.e. our peer group.
We have less lip syncing in our video as we wanted our video to be a little more concept based. We took inspiration from the Adidas advert when we used drawing on the paper on the wall. We also used the fonts styles from Cheryl Cole's webpage and a combination of styles from Duffy's website for our website. We have used ideas from the Keisha 'Tik Tok' video suchas waking up in the bath, paper cups, and people slumped over sofas. We got our idea for the dramatic low angle and pans from the Florence and the machine videos.

For our research stage the only forms of technology we used blogger.com to keep a record of all our research and pictures of our progress. For our editing we have been using a mixture of Imovie and Final Cut. Last year Ayesha used Final Cut but it was too complicated therefore we felt IMovie would be more beneficial. We have used Paint shop pro to edit photographs and Wix.com to create our website, although we did use Iweb briefly. Apart from that we used the usual HD camera, tripod and digital stills camera.

As well as making the music video we had to produce two ancillary tasks. We chose to create a webpage and album cover for our artist. All the parts of our task are interlinked and we go into more detail in our evaluation which will be on the blog at a later date. The three fonts we used for the website were all similar and they all matched the country theme of the video and images. This runs throughout all the tasks. The props we used were used in all parts of our tasks. So if we put something in our video it would most likely appear somewhere in our ancillary tasks aswell e.g. the shoe and the countryside setting. Our final edit of our music video appears as a link on the website and the imagery from the CD appears on the website.

Photo Shoot Inspiration

We are in the process of uploading the photos form our photo shoot so here is some pictures from Glamour that we took as inspiration. We wanted to catch the relaxed, happy and fun characteristics, that make artists appealing, in our photos, much like the ones of Dannii Minogue. The countryside setting will also link to our video, which is set in a country house.

Photo Shoot for the Website

As Georgie has already said we did a photo shoot for our website when we were re-shooting. Some of the photos will be used on our website in the gallery and some will be used for the CD.
On Pixie Lott's actual website she has adverts featuring herself down the side. When we were taking pictures by the lake we thought that it looked a bit like a Next catalogue photo. We decided that our advert would be for Next and by chance the dress Lucy is wearing in those photos is from Next.

Update

We've done the re shoot now and mostly finished off everything. The final things we need to do are the smashing of the vase for our final shot and i thinks that's it.

We've started using a new programme, wix.com, to do our website because it looks more professional and i will upload some print screens of that asap. We also did a photo shoot, using photos from Glamour as inspiration, when we re shot so we have loads of pictures for that and can begin to put them on our website. Finally, I've been testing out a few basic logos on Photoshop although they need a lot of work:

Webpage design

For our webpage we used the theme colours of black, pink, white. At the top we used the wording used from the front cover of Pixie Lott's album. The main focus for the page will be a picture of Pixie Lott on the left hand side in colour. At the top, under the title of the webpage are the links to other pages on her fansite i.e; Bio, News, videos etc. On the right hand side there will be some adverts for things like single downloads, Itunes, and Pixie merchandise or Pixie ad campaigns. In the middle there would be a a scroll bar with a place where fans can give feedback and where they can next see Pixie live.

Cd cover - Pictures

For our CD cover we are creating a digipak, for this we have looked at a few pictures of Pixie Lott posing, and we recreated one pose of Pixie with her arms above her head, possibly for the front or back cover. It looks quite good. Hopefully Georgie's dad can help out with the actual printing of the of the CD cover too.









Also we like the 'boys & girls' single cover shown below, and have particularly wanted to use the brick wall behind her for both her website background and CD cover. This is also convienient because Charleys house is old and has brick indoors which we can shoot our Pixie infront of.






When filming Friday we plan to take some more pictures to use for the creation of the CD album covers. Also we can use some pictures for the website's link to the picture album, similar to the one on Pixie Lott's actual website.

iWeb

So i spent today trying to figer out iWeb and it went pretty well. The pictures bellow are just what i've managed to do using pictures taken from the web etc. The only thing i haven't managed to work out is how to change the background but i'm going to look in the tutorial and see what i can find.

Reshoot!

Although we got a great amount of filming done wednesday night, we still have a few more shots to get and after uploading the shots we realised a couple of parts we need to reshoot. We are as yet to set a date for this, but here is what we need :

• The overlay shots of Pixie, dancing on the table, sitting on the floor and dancing were too close together losing some of her arms etc so we need to leave a bigger gap between the shots
• A shot of pixie dancing on her own
• A bigger cast so the idea of a house party looks more effective
• Laying on the sofa, original shot too obscure and needs too look more party like
• Mirror reverse shots
• Dancing in the line, look a bit fake, which will also be helped by a bigger cast
• Extreme close ups of pixie singing
• Writing on the face shot
• Vase smashing shot
• Alarm clock shot
• Getting up and walking out of the bedroom for continuity shot
• Spinning disco ball / light shot
• General party shots are needed to create more of a sense of a house party.

Hopefully these can all be obtained on the next shoot, we got loads done on the first shooting so i think we can.

Filming Pictures

Here are some pictures from last night. The individual pictures are so that we know what everyone was wearing, so they can wear it again on Sunday to keep with continuity.



Sophie



Ayesha



Emma



Georgie



Alex



Sam



Lucy (Pixie)



Lucy's Eye Make-up


We will have some more photos to put up after our filming on Sunday!