Media Studies Blog - Jonty Harrison: 2017

WEBSITE
Internet Sites
Google is a web surfing platform that has allowed us to do in depth research into the websites/home-pages of current pop music stars that dominate in our chosen genre. It allowed us to easily find other artists that make similar music to our chosen song using search filters and different types of links (images, videos news, etc.)...

We were then able to easily find their websites and explore them...

The exploration of multiple example sites gave us inspiration and allowed us to understand the conventions of websites for this genre of artists.

Blogger has allowed me to compile my research and note down certain conventions that we needed to include in our own website.

The combination of the two uses of these platforms gave us the direction for our website design, helping us to produce one of a professional look and coherence, that also included the specific conventions in order to promote our artist attractively and relevantly.

Facebook

This social networking platform allowed David, Ed and I to easily communicate with each other about our promo products when we weren't in the same room. We created a group chat where we shared links, photos, notes and other ideas/info.

Canon 5D Mk. II

We used this digital still camera to take shots of our artist in the studio and on stage while performing.

This is a high fidelity camera that takes professional quality photos, at a consumer product price. It is an example of prosumer technologies used in the production stages of our website - production of content for our website.

We used the standard Canon 50 mm lens with a shallow depth of field to add an epic look to the stills, and a low shutter speed and a low white balance to add a darker and warmer shot.

PhotoScape X

This Mac application is the software we used to edit the still shots. Its an example of a free photo editing software that allows you to format images changing their size, rotation, exposure, saturation, etc, and the addition of filters.

This meant that we could correctly format our pictures in various ways to stylistically fit the pages/arrangements where they would be inserted on our website. For example, I added various duo-tone filters to add more colour and to each picture, and give all the photos a similar style.

This meant the photo gallery on our website would have a coherent style across all the photos incorporated. The filters help to present the artist and his music as bold, modern and colourful, and add a pleasing aesthetic to the stills which make them more memorable.

WIX

For the production of our website/homepage, we used Wix - a free internet-based website builder. It allows you to either select a template and edit certain texts and images that suit you, or start from scratch and insert different pages, images, widgets and text boxes etc.

From...

to...

to finish with...

I chose to start from scratch which gave me a clean canvas, in a sense, giving me the space to insert anything I wished and manipulate and edit each page however I wished, with ease. It was very effective because it had so many options and different areas that I could customise, while still being very intuitive to use. I could add multiple pages to the website and place a navigation bar with links to each page at the top of every page. This helped the user to easily navigate through the website. On the home page I used a gallery-type widget, similar to Disclosure's homepage design, with 6 different images, linking to each other page of the website. I was able to change the fonts across all sections of texts, whether it was a text box or a title button, to give the website a coherent style. WIX allows you to make each page scrollable - I decided to drag the footer of each page to the bottom of the screen to remove the scroll-ability. I felt this simplified the navigation of each page as I felt the other websites that scrolled were easy to get lost in.

VIDEO
YouTube
This internet based platform allowed us to do a lot of research into other pop videos of a similar style in order to gauge what kind of elements we needed to include. We were able to search for our related artists and find multiple examples of their music videos. We could also use the view counter, like counter, and comment section to look into the popularity of each video to judge on which concepts worked the best at presenting the artist to the public, therefore giving us an even better idea of which elements to include.

iPhone
Our mobile phones are examples of portable multi-media digital technologies that we could use during the planning stages of our video. For example, we could use the 8 or 12 megapixel rear camera (with added image stabilisation) to shoot multiple test videos...

These videos gave us the opportunity to bring our concepts to life and practice them with real life actors, sets and lighting, giving us an idea of how challenging it may be to get good performances from the actors and to shoot the action. We could then change the cast/ideas for the actual shoot. For example, some of the original dancers didn't suit the style of our video. Some were amazing at ballet, but couldn't freestyle with urban moves well enough, so we searched for others that suited our video better, and re-cast them. The fact that this technology is so portable also allowed us to test shoot in any location we wished, without having to bring and set up all the equipment we would need for the full shoot.

iMovie
This free video editing software (included in all Apple Mac computers) allowed us to compile all our test shoot clips and easily cut them all to the music (our chosen song). This gave us the opportunity to practice syncing our editing/cutting to the track, as well as other editing techniques like graphic matching and colour grading. We could then show the test videos to focus groups and receive feedback on the concepts, shot ideas and editing, before we even finalised them for the actual shoot. From this feedback, for example, we decided to scrap multiple video concepts including the concept featured in "Test Shoot 1" above.

BlackMagic Cameras

These are portable professional industry standard film cameras. They film in 4K which are far higher quality than DSLRs which is much more pleasing to the viewers eye. The peak analysis mode allows you to easily know which part of the shot is perfectly in focus as it glows green (red) on the monitor.

This saves a lot of time of trying to judge whether the shot is in focus, especially for amateur cameramen like myself and my group members. A correctly focused shot is far more pleasing to the eye than one that is not.

We used an 18mm prime lens to give a wide angle look and long depth of field for wider shots. But we used a 50 or 80mm prime lens for the closeups that have a softer and more cinematic focus with a shallow depth of field to give an epic and more artistic/stylised look.

The Dolly

The dolly is a movable, rotating, sit-on stand for the camera. One lays out two rubber tracks that the dolly slides across.

Someone moves the dolly along the tracks, following the shape of the tracks (curved or straight) while another sits on the chair and operates (pans and focuses) the camera. The moving shots that we were able to get using this are smooth and looks very pleasing to the eye. We used a 25mm lens on the BlackMagic, while using the dolly, in order to give us a wider shot with a deeper focus, making it easier for the cameraman to stay focused on the subject, while the camera moves around them, as they don't have to focus in/out as much.

Above is what I believe is the most effective dolly shot used in our video. It gives the otherwise flat subject (performers in front of lights) some 3rd dimension, while creating a smooth moving, and therefore visually stimulating, shot that subtly excites the audience.

Adobe Premier Pro

We used this professional editing software to cut all our clips to the music. It allowed us to easily sync the shots to the music as we could move frame by frame to land on the beats of the music. The feeling of the beat is the key part of the music to cut to - editing a music video to the beat makes the finished product a much more coherent video as the viewer will naturally enjoy cuts on the beat, instead of off the beat.
We used a technique called "graphic matching" where we switched between shots that show a similar image. In this case we switched between two dancers doing the same choreography. Adobe Premier Pro, again, allowed us to move frame by frame and cut at the exact moment where the two shots match.

This technique is an example of how special editing techniques can be more visually stimulating to the viewer, and makes the video more interesting and less repetitive than the continuous cuts between different shots. As well as this, this section makes the dancers look like they are more of a unit/crew. We have received feedback from viewers saying this section (above) was their favourite part of the video, and that that's what they remember the video by, therefore showing how effective this technique was.

DIGIPAK
Google
This time we used the internet to do research on the digipaks of related deep house artists.

We noticed, from all the artwork we collected, that the conventions of EDM/Pop/Deep/House digipaks included bright colours, clean and straight designs, graphics or shapes, and modern fonts.

These are some of our favourite digipak designs from current artists. We noticed the use of paint and also a thick black or white border around the graphic/design.
From here we looked for inspiration for vibrant paint designs and found this design which we would the try to replicate...

We replicated this design with the help or an Art student by using a marbling ink technique with blue, red & white coloured inks and water, layered onto A4 paper. We mad many versions and picked our favourite 6 designs to scan with a printer.

Apple "Preview" and "Pages"

We used Mac's standard photo viewer/editor to make adjustments to our photos. "Preview" is a free program that comes with all Mac products by default, and it allowed us to crop the scans of the paint designs, as well as easily tune up the exposure, saturation, hue, highlights and shadow levels. This was very effective as it made the colours more vibrant and the designs looked far more professional.

To arrange the design along with other logos, barcode, track list, title etc. we used Pages. This is another free Mac program based around Microsoft Word. We could easily format all the designs, logos and text during the post production stage of our Digipak.

It a very effective program to use as we could make our digipak arrangement look very professional with such ease (shown above). We could also then export the finished designs into any format we wished; from PDF to JPEG.