task 4

Pre-production

As we were looking for a band to develop or pop promo from we came across a band called ‘Now is Everyone’ we followed there link and found there Myspace page, after listening to there music and deciding its just what we are looking for we decide to contact them through facebook, we sent them an email organizing to meet up in Guildford, this was to discus if they wanted to make a pop promo with us, they were very willing, so we discussed the ideas that we had, we found a hole load of information on the internet through sights youtube, which is a user generated website creating a massive variety of videos, we came up with an idea from a clip called ‘the pen story’. After each of the group member had listen to the song about 10 time we all had to come up with ideas and images that went well with the song . For instance colored rain came from an idea to have some of the elements in colors such as to say at the end it starts to rain and during the majority of the promo for it to be in black and white because we thought this was a way of introducing their star quality (metaphor) which is “from the gutter to the stars”. To test on of our ideas I went out with a video camera and a tripod and making a puddle using a large drum of water then I would walk through it, I would then run it back to the editing studio then play about with the raw footage on final cut pro as part of my preliminary task planning, however unfortunately due to the lack of time we had to complete the hole video in time we had to cut toughs parts out due to a lack of time at it would have taken around about 5 months of constant adjustments to each shot and this was time we simply did not have.


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Through out the day I and a few other members of the production team were taking stills of the band as they set up played through there song. As well as taking different angles then taking multiple shots of the band, with a SLR camera, each of us had a go at making the poster and contributing to the digi pack, we ended up putting the pictures of the band all over the front, innards and back. This reinforces their organic nature. For the front cover we made the title bold this was to draw the target audience in, then scaling the band members larger than life to emphasize their importance. The color reflects both the mood of the song and band, tying it altogether. The poster creates certain enigma codes. The most obvious being the positioning of the lead singer. He is positioned in the background but is the only one giving direct address, just like in the promo, showing he is present but out of reach which relates to Richard Dyer’s theory of star image and reinforces that they are, as a band, different to the audience. When shooting the band in the studio we painted the walls green in order to use the technique of chromo-keying. To make sure it was as effective as possible we used specific lighting in order to eliminate shadows but also to light the band.
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Post-production




During our shoot day to film our pop promo we used an Mpeg 2 SD NXCAM which luckily had a hard disk, this enabled the hole of the editing process as when each shot is taken they go straight to a separate file, this allowed the editing time to less time, this also allowed us to handle the bins and manage the footage was easier to handle in the way of extending it and cutting it, this in retrospect enabled us to make marks at each beat of the song making quick shout clean cuts sinking them perfectly to the clips of the audio. Behind the band on the shoot day we painted the wall behind them, thus creating a massive green screen when it came down to the editing of the background we replaced the green with flooring and wallpapers from google images, even though I went on countless wallpaper sites trying to order some before the shoot day. When editing we placed an omni light into the composition in order to make the room look more realistic. After this process we had to key the band, using key lighting to get rid off all of the green, this made the flooring and wallpaper show through, this was the first layer, the second was adding the colored rain it was filmed using a black background in order to place the rain over the footage we used the blending tool ‘liner dodge’, which makes the black go invisible. This was very handy as this left the colored rain behind. Then we had to add the splattered effects, this was a little bit easier as we just had to repeat the same process over and over again but at a different angle, this made it have that real authentic look, although we did have to construct a different composition which used an animated splat effect from ‘riot gear’. I then used a similar blending tool to darken which thank god transformed the white into a transparent image. Ten placed this composition into the original and proceeded to edit it in the same way and do another set of keying to remove the black around the splats.

Finally we used the internet to promote the video and gain audience feedback by uploading the video to youtube, and my facebook site, although no one really commented except one guy, all feedback counts rite, then using a site called ‘surveymonkey’. By using this particular site it allowed us to create a questionnaire,


which we then got people who had seen the video to fill out, giving us our audience feedback. And that concludes our pop promo commentary.