'Everywhere' probably has a deeper meaning than what you might think. She's a serial stalker.

The title doesn't bear much connection to this post, but it's 1:11am, so you can't expect wonders.
It being 1:11 am makes this Homework 1 Hour, 11 Minutes late, which isn't a big deal I guess, but when you consider that I've had nine days to do it, it shines a whole new light on the situation. You could say I'm 'Digging my own Grave' here, but I'd say that's too harsh for what I'm doing. I'd call it 'Locking the Padlock on my own Stocks', or something. But the fun Stocks, where they throw Sponges of Water to raise money for charity, not the old school ones, where they'd throw rocks if you're lucky, and kick your face in if you're unlucky.

And I've gone so far off topic it's staggering.

I'd like to work into the paragraph above that I'm eating an Easter Egg right now, even though it's nowhere near Easter. It's an easy adrenaline rush, along with eating After Eights at half past Seven, but I guess writing it here will have to do.

Okay, for the homework I did a very rough mock up of my poster idea, that I probably wrote down on a previous post. I took some screenshots along the way, but they don't reflect just how slow my computer was. It made me want to smash it up, but I finished it all because I had literally nothing better to do than do this work.
also i would have felt bad if i didn't do it

So I started off by taking my two pictures. I used Simba in Michelles place, and Gromit in the place of whatever person we also use in our Music Video (See, I'm linking the Video and the Poster together. marks, kthx.)
I also took everything out an Xbox case and used that as the place of the Poster, which gave me a really small and what turned out to be pretty rubbish greenscreen, but I was able to work around it, as you'll see below.



That's the very best I could do with removing the green from the original picture. As you can see, it picks up the green in other places in the picture, so it wouldn't work so well.

So, I came up with a new idea. I'd have the same picture on two layers, and cut around the green box on the top layer, and remove the green on the layer below. Below is a picture of me cutting out the green, and it working.



I went ahead and adjusted the colours on the picture to make it slightly more appealing. I chose to add a small amount of light blue to the picture with Simba, and red to the one with Gromit, so show some contrast.

I then changed the size and cropped the picture of Gromit to fit into the one with Simba, shown below, and did this twice more. I would have done it once more, but it was so agonizingly slow by this point, I thought my computer was going to implode.



Finally, after all that, I placed text over the top, and exported the image. Two things about that, I know the text looks ugly, and I know I exported it out small.

The text looks ugly because I thought my computer was going to implode if I did anything fancy, and I exported it out small because I didn't want my computer to implode. The final poster can be seen below, and I think it turned out well for a rough draft.




And because of my inability to just focus and get on with blogging, this Homework is now 2 Hours, 13 Minutes late. I guess you could throw one rock.

Yes. I can totally forget the awful things you've done, now please, stop playing that song.

-It would seem we're all pretty sick of our song choices, or at least getting there. It was always going to happen, but we're a way off from finishing the project.

-In 1901, a scientist called Ivan Pavlov developed the idea of 'Conditioned Reflex', in which he fed his dogs food, and when he did this, he rang a bell at the same time. After a while, he removed the food, and rang the bell. At just the sound of the bell, his dogs began to salivate, and it was this which lead him to publish his findings as a Conditioned Reflex.
-Although the sound of a bell may not be the best sound to hear, the same idea applies to when I wake up in the morning. Although for the last year and a half, the noise I wake up to is part of a song by one of my favorite bands, it took only a couple of months to get angry, simply by hearing that same excerpt, no matter how awake I was.
-Creative and Media, five days a week, the same song, every single day. It's becoming more and more tedious to listen to it, and anyone elses song. It feels like the rest of the class hasn't heard of the idea of headphones, or that touching them would bring about an allergic reaction or something. If I could make one rule in this project, it would be when editing, but your freaking headphones on. I do it so you don't have to listen to my crap over and over, and I sure as hell don't want to listen to yours.
-It'll make us all sick, eventually. Songs stop becoming songs, they become pieces of sound, visual material made up of words and notes. Waveforms to be dissected and mixed around, just so you can put it back together with visuals while only listening to the song, only REALLY listening to the song, subconsciously. Consciously, you're very aware of how sick you're becoming of it.

And just like Pavlov's dog, we'll feel sick and annoyed at the sound of it. I know this all too well, because I did this last year.



And I guess this is the part where I write about what I did today.

Sven and I took the camera out along with a wider, telephoto lens to try out some practice shots with it, and to judge the diffrence. We shot some bits in two locations, a stage, like one we would like to use, and a open room, purely for shot varietys. We took a lot of footage with both the stock lens and the telephoto lens, and for ease of editing, I took the camera with the wide lens, and Sven took it with the stock lens.
We totally had some pictures of the diffrence between them, and of us recording stuff, but I guess we forgot to upload them to flickr. I'll stick them on when we get back, if I remember.

This was a good test overall, and I got a lot out of the test footage week. I took out the dolly, and got to try out the telephoto lens, which is what I wanted to do. We also got a performer, Chloe, and two videos of test footage are on Vimeo. The test footage fror today can be seen below.

L3 TEST FOOTAGE - Everywhere Test- Elliott and Sven (Different Lens types) from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

'It's like a CD case, only with way more to think about'/' Design a poster, Link it to the Digipak, makes a Campaign that's 'Everywhere'. How ironic.

Linking 'Em together is apparently a 'Campaign' to marketing folk, but to most people it's 'That twatting advert that's all over the place nowadays.'
(That was actually a Title idea, but I thought it would make a good opener)

Being someone who wants to go into Media, I understand that if that's the effect my campaign gets, then I've done my job.

Take the people that go on Big Brother for example, they're looking for a boost that will start their media career, (that will undoubtedly short lived, best case scenario they get a late night reality show on ITV2) and yet the majority of people watch them and wonder how they fit their ridiculous ego through the front door.

It's the same principle, marketing folk want to create original campaigns that'll sell truckloads of product, and probably bump them up a notch in their career. Whilst everyone that sees it gets sick of seeing the promotion day after day, getting it stuck in their head and buying product.

A bit like the DFS sale.

For my Digipak/Poster campaign, I am going to expand on the idea of the Music Video, that this man is everywhere, and explore the ideas of that further on both the Poster and Digipak.

Rough idea for Poster, this might be a little tough to describe, so I'll do my best.
The performer in the Music Video is standing in front of the same poster that she's in (that the audience will see), but in the poster that she's standing in front of, it's the man in the music video in her place. He's standing in front of the poster as well with him in, and this continues. It's a lot like when you have two mirrors facing each other, or when you point a camera at it's own monitor.

Rough idea for Digipak- I'm still working this one out, but when you open the whole Digipak, it'll be one wide picture of the performer, and everyone around her being the same person. I think this could be done in a street, in a park or somewhere, but i haven't totally thought it through yet.

I'll come up with some sketch ideas.

Test Footage, all edited up

Here is the Test Footage I shot and edited on Tuesday, I just rendered it and uploaded it today though.

Everywhere Test- Elliott and Sven from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

Test Footage for 'Everywhere'

I only blog when I have no other option, or something close to that effect.

Well, that's not entirely true, I've the gospel of luke sitting next to me, but it's not like i'm going to read that anytime soon.

I set up email blogging, neat! I can now blog what I did from the bus home, which is usually extended due to traffic, so I've time to really make these posts good(ish).

So today went well enough, I managed to get the camera dolly shots in and filmed my friend chloe singing in two diffrent places, using camera shots like what we would use in our music video. Later in the day I edited these and put it to the chorus to the song, and I will upload this on thursday.

Today is the second day without Sven at college, and even though it has been more difficult, I think I've been able to take the test footage well without him, though I did have to adapt some shots, however these also came out well.

Also I got mcdonalds and chocolate fingers, but that's not relevant.

Any excuse to move things around quickly.

I have the camera dolly booked for now, and will soon be picking it up, and taking test footage with it, I will also be seeing if I can borrow a microphone stand from the Music department, to use as a point for focusing on.

I intend to go somewhere open, such as the main hall, because it is like the location we will be using for the actual music video, open and wide, with lots of room to move the camera dolly about.

I had hoped to use one of the wider lens from Coleridge today, but because we are at Long Road all day, this is not possible. I hope to use these on Friday.

Also later on i'm going to edit this, and post it here.

A little bit of optimism never hurt anybody, probably.

We came up with three things about the Music Video project that Sven and I are looking ahead towards. The first thing is something we're excited about in the project, the second is a problem that might arise in the duration of the project, and the third thing is a solution to that problem. We find this is effective in our planning and thinking ahead stages.

Something we're looking forward to- Seeing the video completed. It's far ahead, but we're very much looking forward to seeing the end result.

A Problem- Finding convincing performers, as this will MAKE OR BREAKKK the video

How to combat that problem, like listerine combats plaque- We will hold Auditions, so we can make sure we've got the best people we can get.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then why did we have to write a treatment?

As we have the song 'Everywhere', we were given a stills camera to try out some framing, seen below.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4031/4313386637_eed02abedb.jpg
Used as one of the shots for the canvas scene, nice focusing

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4009/4314109538_bbe083ea30.jpg
Shot type for acoustic performance

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2684/4313372659_c719beb340.jpg
If we could get this kind of weather, i'd be thrilled

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4005/4314107160_6015f8db24.jpg
Like above, but with a load of grass (refrence to the park scene)

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4042/4313369541_7e6f7c7bd9.jpg
The performance will be filled with close ups, like this

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4025/4314105542_1fbb30ce2a.jpg
Acoustic performance example, would like to go much wider though

We pitched for '1234', and got some feedback.

Here is the feedback for the pitch we did for '1234', as we pitched for both this and 'Everywhere'

Don't understand switching idea

Difficult to lip sync
Placement might be tough

What costumes would we use?

Tough to understand
Location ideas?

Like the concept

Might get repetitive
Where would we find the band?

Guess what, we got Everywhere

Our pitch went well, and we got the song we wanted, thankfully.

The Class gave us feedback on our ideas, which we intend to work with when creating our final piece

FEEDBACK:

The concept is obvious

What are your location ideas
Dream idea is good, overall idea is good also
Effective idea with writing on wall
Strong plot
All a dream ending is preferred
How to get water dropping from ceiling?

Good to have two ideas for a song

Linking lyrics with video is good

Sven and I are happy with this, and are happy to push forward with our concept

Storyboarding, with Post-its

For our draft storyboard, Sven and I drew it on Post-its, and stuck them on top of a timetime of the first 30 seconds of the video that we drew out. We are using this to draw out a bigger, final storyboard, and finding that the post-its are good for referencing with.

Ideas, and a Moodboard.

Sven and I decided to listen to 'Everywhere' through once, and write down whatever came to mind for creating the music video. I feel this was a good way of getting down ideas as they flowed, and was very productive in further creating ideas.
It can be seen HERE-http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2774/4295731540_aa41f7f854_o.jpg

We also decided to create a Moodboard for Everywhere, which can be seen HERE- http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4005/4295731532_baf9f0e3b0_o.jpg

Picking a mad tune.

From the inital list of songs, Sven and I have narrowed our song choices down to four songs that we feel would make a strong music video

Everywhere- Michelle Branch
Shadows- Au Revoir Simone
Number One Enemy- Daisy Dares You
1234- Feist

We were able to take this list down from four to two, and have decided that we will write treatments for the songs Everywhere and 1234.

These are the songs we will pitch for.