Magazine Advert

Here is Noah and The Whale's album advert for "The First Days of Spring".

Image: The image used for this advert covers the entire page, rather than in a box and is of the four band members. However, three of them are out of focus and the main singer is in focus and in the foreground of the image. The image is very natural and doesn't looked staged with no special effects or editing.

Font: The fonts used on the advert differ between two. An Edwardian Script like font is used for the title of the album and then a very simple and plain font is used for the band name and all the important information like release date and where you can get hold of it. Reviews are also featured on the advert as a recommendation of the album.

Colour: The colours used within the advert are very natural and this fits the image of the band. They are very simple and produce "pure" and acoustic type music. The colours are very earthy, e.g, greens, blues, skin tones, yellows, whites etc. The soft black writing is then used over the top to stand out but still seem quite natural.

This is Thirty Seconds To Mars magazine advert for their album "This Is War".

Image: There is no real "image" within this advert however there are symbols and shapes used. A faint triangle is used in the background under the writing and then three circular symbols follow this. These four images are associated with the band and are used for familiarity. 

At the top of the page, the album title takes up the majority of the page and it is clear that the band want the word "war" to be the main focus. This could be for many reasons, including that the may want to cause controversy. The image is also boxed perhaps suggesting that the idea is "closed" and there is no room for discussion that there is no war.

Font: A strong and simple font is used in this magazine advert. The writing, band name and album title are all capital letters. The most important things are larger in size, e.g, when the album is released and what is included. There is no reviews on the advert amd this may suggest that the band are so well known and successful that they don't need it.

Colour: There is a clear theme of red, black and white in this magazine advert. These are very strong colours that perhaps illustrate the "war". Black representing death, red representing blood and anger and the white representing purity and innocence. These colours are also commonly used with the band so it offers a sense of familiarity to the audience.

Here is a Marc Jacobs advert that I am using as inspiration for my magazine advert. I really like how it is extremely simple and the colours are plain and not too fussy.  I also like how the writing stands alone and that there isnt too much going on in the advert itself where as in the Thirty Seconds To Mars advert it was quite busy and "in-your-face". The Noah and The Whales magazine advert was much closer to what I wanted to achieve with the simple ideas and also the two different fonts. 

In the Marc Jacobs advert I also liked how the picture stood alone at the top of the page. I also felt the image was strong enough to use by itself and I am looking to create this by using a strong image in my advert. 

Coldplay - Charlie Brown

Here is Coldplay's newest video - Charlie Brown. I really liked this video as it contained the scenic shots which we tried to achieve. It also plays on the idea of youth in an urban world which we wanted to show aswell. I also really liked the neon/UV performance scenes which was one of our original ideas but proved too hard to do!



Digital Technology Essay

Describe and evaluate your skills development in digital technology from AS to A2

From AS to A2 it is evident that my skills as an individual have significantly improved in the use of digital technology. This is due to my increasing confidence and also development of technology within the industry and what is available to us at school. At AS I produced a two minute opening of an indie/alternative film and have carried this through to A2, creating a promo music video of the same genre.

At AS for my film opening the cameras we had avaliable to us were Sony video cameras with DV tapes. These cameras had a long battery life which was a significant advantage when shooting on location - for our group in a sweet shop. One of the main disadvantages of these cameras were that the footage produced was quite "grainy" and I personally believe this made some of the shots look unprofessional - for example our second shot, a panning shot of sweet jars, looked dull and it was for this reason that the majority of our film was recorded on the Flip cameras. The Flip cameras are HD and this enabled us to obtain much clearer and colourful shots. We also used the camera for the opening shot which was a panning down of a building. It produced a clear and professional opening. Moreover, the Flip camera has a much more efficient uploading system - a simple USB port, which saved time as uploading the footage from the Sony camera involved using a firewire which took a significant amount of time to upload to the computer.

At A2, we have now been given Panasonic HD SD90 video cameras which I believe has massively contributed to my development in digital technology. The Panasonic cameras produce much higher quality footage that looks clear, clean and professional. The option of uploading the footage through a USB lead is possible however, the cameras have an SD card in the bottom which is a much faster way of uploading our footage. We filmed our whole music video on these Panasonic cameras and solely used the Flip for documenting our filming and progress.

This year, I have also used the growing popularity of social networking sites to my advantage. In AS, for audience feedback, we had to arrange to meet up with people to either record their feedback and opinons or take a written record. However, this year at A2 I used my Facebook and Twitter account to do this. Using these sites meant I was able to log on as and when I wished and could quickly obtain responses as there was always someone logged on to respond. For my digipak, I uploaded five possible front covers and got friends to comment and "like" the picture they thought were best. As a group we also created a Twitter account for our band "Hunt The Noise" where we posted "tweets" asking "fans" for their opinions on music video ideas.

Focusing more on the digipak, another development in digital technology this year was my use of Adobe Photoshop. Last year for AS I didn't get the chance to use this software as the coursework did not require any still images that I could edit however this year I used it to edit photos for the front, inside left, inside right/CD and back cover of my digipak. Photoshop enabled me to use the transparency tool to put an image on the CD that was different to the image the CD was placed on. The software also allowed me to change the colouring of images, add text and create a boreder. I also used Youtube tutorials to teach myself more complex tools within the photo editing programme which can be argued as independent research.

Last year for AS, the editing of our film opening was basic, having only just learnt how to use iMovie 09 on the iMAC computers. However, we also kept it basic due to the fact it was a filming opening and of the genre "alternative/comedy". The conventions of our genre didn't contain transitions, special effects and so on but this however was applicable to the genre of "indie/alternative/house" for our A2 music video. Moreover, this year we have also paid attention to the colour grading of our footage. We played around with the saturation and 'exposure' of the clips to create the muted colours we thought would fit our music video. We also used Final Cut Pro this year for our production. This software had been newly installed and we used Youtube tutorials (another development in my digital technology) to teach ourselves to use green screen and split screen which was another convention in our genre of music video.

Another development in digital technology this year at A2 was my increased used of the tripod. This hardware enable extremely steady, smooth and professional shots. At AS the majority of our shots were freehand, for example the shots of our main character dancing. However this year we have taken advantage of the simple yet effective equipment and utilisted it well. For example, our establishing shots in our music video look exceptionally professional and as a group we were very pleased with them.

This year at A2, I have also developed my digital technology in that I have used Excel to create graphs and tables recording audience feedback and shooting schedules.

To conclude, it is evident that my skills in digital technology have dramatically developed since AS to A2 through development in the hardware avaliable to us, the software we have and my confidence within the course. The result of this is a more professional piece of coursework.

 

Group Meeting - Production Journal

In Friday's lesson (03/01/12) we had a group meeting where Yasemin, Lana and myself finalised our music video ideas. We have known how we want our music video to go however we never really planned the video shot by shot. Also, we didn't really have a clear definite ending however we now have an ending we are all extremely excited about.
Our filming should be finished now in the next two weeks and then we will be using the final 4 weeks to edit our video to perfection!

Lyric Video

After looking at the All of the Lights video again by Kanye West, we decided to try and recreate the clips of the lyrics, however obviously apply to our own lyrics. 

Here is Kanye West's video:

 And here is the video we created:

 

Colour Change - Redlight

After watching Redlight - Get Out My Head we immediately tried to re-create the colour change effect we all really liked. 

Here is what we created:

   

 I think this effect worked really well and we will definitely be using this in our final video.