Artist Website Analysis

I looked at several of my inspirational artist's websites and annotated them to point out the way they have choses to market themselves online.

Costumes, Billy & Jordan

Costume is important because it is the forst thing people see when they look at you. they make their first impressions based upon clothing, so therefore it must be representative of the appropriate style and genre.

Record Labels

We looked into record labels for both Woodkid and the Mystery jets.

Woodkid's label is Green Atlantic Records.

I designed a graphic in photoshop to avoid copyright.

Final Product: WOODKID: IRON - OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO

Location Shoot Journal

A quick video reaction upon unintentionally discovering the church while heading to the factory location! We decided to use this as a main location for our video.

These videos provide a quick insight from a few different angles about the safety and ambience of the church  We discovered it unintentionally and feel it is very well suited to our video.

Twixtor Slow Motion Software Tutorial

We knew we wanted slow motion in our video, so we contacted some people we met form the BBC and asked what would be best. They suggested using twixtor pro, a frame stretching program. We had no idea what this was at the time, so in order to be resourceful, we looked up a guide on youtube and learned how to use the software in 10 minutes.

Digipak Design

This is a standard digipak template what will help us to design and make an appealing visual graphics pack.

This standardized design template is the standard for CD case packaging and is widely used by all artists to package their albums.

We sketched up some designes suitable for our digipak layout. we found these to be the most successful. We used our research from existing digipaks in order to construct something fitting for our genre.

Digitized versions of our digipak photos.

Rough Draft Initial Storyboard

Billy and I discussed the storyboarding options for our video. We both brainstormed, and he produced a very quick, rough sketch of our storyboard to serve as an illustative guide.

Location Shoot Summary/Analysis

Analysis of Location Shoot

Location Shoot: Derelict Factory

This eerie and chilling location is our best yet! It's industrial nature and squat status mean that we have essentially no restriction ont he property. We plan to film a lot of narrative here, as part of billy's detachment from reality.

Location Shoot: M32 Underpass

This sinister location seemed ideal for some performance shots. It's low level of lighting due to the overpass means that we could film at any time of day.

Location Shoot: Old Swimming Pool Garden

This is another location idea for our performance shots. We though that if I stood at the edge with the torch in my hand, it would make for a strong combination and bring in themes of death and sacrifice.

Location Shoot: Skatepark

A very brief visit to a small skatepark. this is suitable for some long shots int he dark, to create mystery and suspense. The nature of the location is eerie and intimidating.

Pre-Filming Risk Assessment

It was our highest priority to create our work safely. We completed a Risk Assessment form, in order to assess how dangerous each location might be. Due to the dangerous nature of abandoned  derelict locations, we knew we could not mess around with this.

Here is a copy of one of our checklists.

Visual Storyboard 1

This storyboard was our initial shoot plan before we had obtained any footage, and was conceived as we were establishing our locations. We decided not to shoot here, but it helped us plan.

Guerilla Filmmaking

We looked into our genre and discovered that in order to achieve such a level of authenticity in the videos, many artists film without permission in certain locations. This is so that the company/individual does not have to pay an insurance fee. This behaviour was exhibited by the production crew of London To Brighton, in order to film in the train station on such a low budget.

For us, we didn't 'break in' anywhere. The locations we used were all abandoned, and classified as squats. This means that people are entitled to live on the premises, without being forced to move.

Evaluation Question 1: In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media?

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

The combination of the main task and the ancillary task comprise our overall product. The two should link well together and relate visually. The ancillary tasks (digipak / poster) are designed to promote the main product, so therefore it is essential that they are an accurate representation of our final music video.

The maint ask was of course the music video, with anciallirty task one being the digipak creation and ancillairy task two being poster design.

I feel that we have executed all three tasks fairly well.

I have uploaded a commentary of the video to partly answer this question.

Evaluation Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We conducted several surveys on audience feedback.

We had two screenings of our music video at 1/3 and 2/3 of it’s completion. We did this so that we could take in views and opinions of our target audience, find out what they did and didn’t like about our video, and then use that feedback to tailor and perfect the continued filming and editing so that we would meet our target audience’s needs and achieve a stronger, more effective final outcome.

We distributed feedback sheets and allowed our audience to watch the film on a projector in a darkened room to get a real sense of immersion in the video. We screened it twice, once to view, and twice to take notes and write feedback.

Here is a final survey we asked people to fill out.

http://kwiksurveys.com/app/rendersurvey.asp?sid=fr0aoe7rbktzuhq103392&refer=billychristensena2%2Eblogspot%2Eco%2Euk#.US9pEgC_Dcs.blogger

We used it's result data to pinpoint our target audience and tailor our production accordingly.

Evlauation Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used technologies in our construction by filming with DSLR cameras, a modern cheap and effective alternative to the more expensive professional film cameras produced by RED or Alexa. Our footage is recorded onto class 10 SDHC cards because they are a widely accepted storage medium.

In order to keep filesize down and our editing time short, we chose to record in 720p. this is because we did not feel 1080p was necessary as we are not a full scale production company and working to a deadline. 1080p takes three times longer to process and render, And not everyone can actually play it. 720p also gave us the extra ability to record at the higher frame rate of 60fps, which we used for three of our narrative shots that are in slow motion at the end of the video.

We did not see the need to use external microphones like we did last year because due to the nature of music videos, it is a rarity to use camera onboard audio in the final piece, usually because of the poor quality integrated microphones.

We used tripods to help us film the majority of our performance shots to ensure the camera was kept stable and still. It allowed me to film on my own when I needed to and granted us that extra flexibility of being able to record unaided.

We used iPhones in order to help us navigate to locations we had not been before, as well as to record videos, take photos for our preliminary shoots and to use as a secondary camera if needs be, as they have the capability to shoot in 1080p at 30 frames per second As you can see right now. We did not use these to film any of our shots, as we found that we would not need the second camera we initially planed to use after deciding not to shoot the ‘rave’ scene we discussed in our planning.

We used a variety of lenses to shoot our video. This was one of the main reasons we used a DLSR opposed to a camcorder; to give us flexibility in the effect we would achieve. This 70-200 was useful for some of the performance shots, as it gave us a better depth of field. This was used for my main performance shot in the alleyway, as it is an f/2.8 lens that has great low light capability. The 24mm lens I am using to record this video, was far too wide and not suitable.

We used Adobe software for the editing of our production. Audition was used to manage the audio you are hearing now, which we added to the video file recorded from this camera. If you were wondering why I clapped at the beginning of the video, it was to create a noticeable spike in the audio waveform, as well as a visual of my hands so that I can sync the two for perfect audio. This is good practice when recording from two different sources at the same time.

We used premiere for the main body of our editing. We used it for last year’s production and found it to be perfectly suited to our needs.

We didn’t use after effects this year, because we didn’t want to overdo our video. We planned to use twixtor for one shot, but it was omitted from the final cut of our video.

We have used blogger, slideshare, facebook, twitter and youtube to help us promote, document and showcase our video. Our twitter account was very successful and gained a substantial amount of retweets and followers as a result of sharing our video and images. This is an example of how well viral advertising has worked for us.

I feel that we have made good use of all of the technologies available to us. We ensured that we understood each one fully in order to use it to it’s potential and feel that our final video serves as an ideal demonstration of how well we have done just that.

WOODKID: IRON Video Analysis

Woodkid - Iron from WOODKID on Vimeo.

A few hidden meanings that I feel stand out in this video after a lot of thought and consideration:

0:03. Cross keys representing religious presence - the symbol of Saint Peter.

0:12. A lighted match - Revelation.

0.30. War drums.

0:38. The character holding the book - strong and objective religious presence.

0:40. Sleeping boy on the altar - the future or new messiah - hope.

0:46. Barbarian on horseback - Assault and Invasion.

0:54. The man with the torch could possibly represent the illuminati.

1:40. A rain of ashes, representing possible war or invasion.

2:46. The fall of meteorites, representing global catastrophe and loss of life.

Woodkid clearly thinks a lot about representation and connotations in his videos by using extreme stereotypes to represent meaning. Ex: The barbarian, a stereotypically violent individual representing  something much larger like war and fighting.