digipak and magazine evaluation

I'm very pleased with how both our magazine and digipaks turned out. I believe our digipak and magazine advert worked well in several ways firstly as they display all vital information that they should for example the song name and band name the next way in which it worked well was through the way in which these details are displayed as we have chosen to use bright colours such as greens and oranges to contrast against the black and white background of the photograph this sets the composition of the piece perfectly as audience are drawn to the bright colours and take them in through the hypodermic needle theory (Adorno and horkeimer, 1970s)  as the model sees the digipak as injecting the idea and information of our piece directly into each individual who walks past and is drawn to the digipak. This is particularly useful in marketing our music as it will grab the audiences attention directly and make them want to buy the song. and finally i believe the digipak possesses great potential because we have stuck with our political them this is shown on the front covers as it shows me and Alex in our suits to stick with the mise en scene of our production but the inside covers have us all standing in front of our political parties colour for example i am in front of a yellow screen that has been photoshopped in and the yellow symbolises the liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg. This is particularly good as it fits in with what most people in the country are focused on as we did this piece in the 2010 elections The cultivation theory ( Gerber et al. 1986:37) fits in well with this analysis of our use of recent stories as it suggests that television and other areas of media such as music production and there repetitive pattern on stories begins to cultivate the audience to look into other media sources about this subject and creates a symbolic environment. This is good for us as with our political agenda put into the music video it creates a larger audience to consumer our music video through the digipak and magazine adverts.

star analysis

In earlier posts i have already looked at several professional musicians and described how they influenced our work, these have been musicians such as Rihanna and Fall Out Boy but I have decided to do a full analysis of two artists that have heavily influenced me personally for my piece the first of which is jay-z:



This is the video to 'run this town' in which rihanna and jay-z collaborated on the video shows a gang simingly lead by the two artist as they rise up to take over the town in which they live as they are pictured which bats and pieces of wood on fire and burnt down cars around them. This video in particular fits in well with our piece as this rising up is similar to the student protests recently as there have been pictures produced in the media of students starting fires attacking vans and carrying bats. The second way in which jay-z has influenced me is in the hand gestures he makes when rapping this is particularry helpful as i have to preform a rap using a variety of hand movements and through analying his work it has given me a better understanding of how to go about this task.

The second artist to influence me was eminem:


Although the video doesnt fit in with our choice of musis or issues in our piece i have chosen to anayse this piece because it taught me alot about the art and emotion behind the rapping which is shown through a simpistic mise en scene of a plain field which is symbolic of eminem going back to his roots as an artist.
Watching eminem taught me alot of how i should go about rapping in my main scene, through watching him it was clear that the movement of my body had to fit in well with the lyrics in the song to look professional another convention of rap music that i picked up from watching eminem is that i need to appear to mean every word i am singing this was best shown in how tense eminem looks when he is rapping about the couple shown in the video when there is violence shows it almost appears like eminem himself is boiling over with anger about what is going on like he is connected with the people in the video.

Windows movie maker

Windows Movie Maker is a video creating/editing software application, included in Microsoft Windows Me, XP, and Vista. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie. New effects and transitions can be made and existing ones can be modified using XML code. Windows Movie Maker is also a basic audio track editing program. It can apply basic effects to audio tracks such as fade in or fade out. The audio tracks can then be exported in the form of a sound file instead of a video file.


here is a review about windows movie maker i found at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/335710/windows_movie_maker_review.html


let's talk about the positives. Windows Movie Maker has a very easy user interface. Their windows are well place: collections in the middle, help bar to the left, storyboard at the bottom and video preview to the right. It has a simple look that is easy to adapt to for beginners.
Editing the movie is easy too. You can split the video via the video preview. To change the look of the movie, simply go to the tools section and select video effects or transitions.


However, the video effects are very basic; you can't change the options and parameters to make your movie look "just right." You are stuck with the preset settings for them. In addition, the program can only output .WMV videos. You have to convert with another program if you want another codec output.
Unfortunately, that's the least of the problems for Windows Movie Maker. When starting the program, it takes twenty seconds to load; that is a very long time for such a simple program.
The long startup can be especially annoying because Windows Movie Maker crashes frequently. In fact, it crashes ten folds more than any other programs combined in my personal experience. You would thought that Windows Movie Maker may still be in the alpha or beta stages of development but, unfortunately, it is fully developed; heck, even alpha and beta programs run better than this.
Basically, the program crashes every time you try importing an mpeg-encoded video. Even though Windows Movie Maker listed the codec as compatible, it just locks the program up every single time. Basically, you have to go through the hassle of converting your video files to either .AVI (non-mpeg encoded) or .WMV for it to work.


Since we have began editing our piece i can say although windows movie maker is ver y easy to use and does not take long to get use too i do have to agree with the negative sides of the review as it has crashed almost hundreds of times on me whilst ive been editing which is very tiring to keep redoing and saving every minute. Another down side we found was that windows movie maker does not support the grenscreen effect which means our group have had to replan the opening scenes of our media piece.

filming update and auteur theory

I'm happy to say we have officially finished filming and we are now well into our way on editing the piece together. we will be using windows movie maker as our editing software which i will expand on in the next post.


In 1954,  François Truffaut wrote an essay entitled A Certain Tendency in French Cinema. In this work he claimed that film is a great medium for expressing the personal ideas of the director. He suggested that this meant that the director should therefore be regarded as an auteur.  In fact, Truffaut once provocatively said that: "There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors" (this can be linked back to my earlier easter egg post)
The worth of this theory has been questioned by some critiques. But, it is particularly useful as a starting point for the interpretation of some films.

Auteur Theory suggests that a director can use the commercial apparatus of film-making in the same way that a writer uses a pen or a painter uses paint and a paintbrush. It is a medium for the personal artistic expression of the director. The film theorotician, André Bazin, explained that: auteur theory was a way of  choosing the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard of referencce, and then assuming that it continues and even progresses from one film to the next.
Sometimes this theory is useful when analysing the works of actors who are working within the ‘star system’.  For example, it is possible to interpret Terminator 3 in relation to the canon of films created with Arnie in them.

Auteur Theory suggests that the best films will bear their maker’s ‘signature’.  Which may manifest itself as the stamp of his or her individual personality or perhaps even focus on recurring themes within the body of work. Alfred Hitchcock plays this idea up in most of his movies where he makes sure that he appears on screen in a brief cameo spot. This became a game that viewers would engage in, waiting to find out when he would appear.

Alfred Hitchcock is one of the first names who comes to mind when talking about auteur theory. His most famous films are Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and Rear Window. Hitchcock’s story telling techniques were renowned for their intelligent plots, witty dialogue, and the smattering of mystery and murder. He has been attributed with revolutionizing the thriller genre. The reason for his success, however, was not the genre that he was working in, but rather the skill which he exhibited in the film-making.  ie his treatment of the subject in terms of the shots he uses and how he combines them are more important than the genre. One of Hitchcock’s best-known screen moments is the terrifying shower scene in Psycho. This shot features 70 distinct shots in less than 1 minute. They are fused together in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish between the Montage and the Mise-en-Scène.

Moodboard

This is the moodboard that i have created to show both the groups and my own personal inspiration for our music video. As you can see in the centre of the moodboard it shows a picture of the three candidates to be prime minster at the time of the video being made this signifies our political theme behind our music video and it also gives me a chance to show how we will be taking on these three different persona's me being Nick Clegg, Alex being David Cameron and Paige being Gordon Brown. I have then added to this political influence by putting other pictures that link to the election and a very big political issue going on at the moment, i choose to add to picture that have been published in magazines and online as they show how the media is portraying the current political affairs this is an example of two step flow as the media is relaying this sort of information about the protests with there own political agenda and the audience receiving this are then going out and talking about what has happened in the media increasing the popularity and backing of the media hype. On the left hand side of the picture you see a student punching David Cameron this is symbolic to the current affairs as the students are currently protesting about the raising of student fees for universities as shown in the picture above it.

However the song has other themes in mind as it is also a comedy this is why i have put picture of the animated series the Simpson's and the channel 4 comedy the IT crowd as these are two very humorous programs that are shown regularly on the television at the moment.

My other influence and probably the most obvious is the The Midnight Beast themselves and in particular Stefan Abingdon as this is who i portray in our music video, since Stefan and myself are very similar in personalities this was easy for me to portray however i did struggle with the rapping scene i had to do and so for this i watched several jay-z performance and so i decide to include a photograph of him in my moodboard as he was my biggest influence in this particular scene as i gained the knowledge of how i should preform such a task by using his movements and hand gestures.