Budget

Camera - £1000
Props (clothing, things in car) - £300
Petrol costs - £50
Actors - £60
Location hire - £260

Total - £1670

Time management plan

19/10/2009
Media: Plan/put together presentation on the work of Michel Gondry and Lasse Hallstrom.
Graphic Design: Put together a poster advertising a surf competition.
Photography: Darkroom work, photograms and pinhole photography.
Music: Talking about how to promote an artist, look at different styles used to promote different people. Learn basics on Logic Pro

13/11/2009
Media: Plan music video, storyboard and get ideas, look at other artists similar to see how they our artist could be branded.
Graphic Design: Continue Photoshop work, edit portraits taken with the built in iSight camera on the Macs.
Photography: Start looking at taking actual photos, use a film camera to do a series of photos on shadows.
Music: Look at recording a song with an artist, learn how to set up the studio. In conjunction with Logic Pro.

11/12/2009
Media: Film music video.
Graphic Design: Using previously developed Photoshop skills, make a front cover for our graphic design folder in 2 different styles, organic and grunge/urban.
Photography: Write an essay on the history of photography, take pictures for album art for music video.
Music: Explore and experiment with different styles of music video shots and camera angles for use in the video.

18/12/2009
Hand everything in, finish all projects and complete all work.

Some finished album art

The top two pictures are the inside and outside of my booklet and the bottom one is the bit under the CD so you only see it when you take it out.

Music video reflection

So far we've finished the video and I'm pretty happy with the result. Ben edited it really well, and the mood is exactly how we'd imagined it to begin with. There were a few problems with filming towards the start, because the weather was too good for the mood we wanted to create, but in the end the weather unfortunately changed for the worse (better? depending on how you look at it). I think the strongest points of the video are the amount of footage we had to edit with and how quickly Ben picked up the capabilities of the editing software. Some of the potential weaknesses are some people might not like the amount of effects added, or the length of the video (almost 10 minutes).

Please leave and questions or comments below :)

Album design

Today I took the picture I'm using for the album cover. While I was researching what size an album cover is I found an interesting article about how designing album art has changed. In the past people had a larger canvas to work on, because the record sleeve would have been a bigger image (Vinyl LP cover: 153.1 square inches), whereas right now, most people will see album artwork on the screen of their iPod (iPod Nano Cover Flow icon: 0.4 square inch). Due to this, more and more albums have much more minimalist covers, with a simple design, usually using bold colours that stand out together, making them easily recognisable on a small screen. Some examples:






















































This kind of made me think about my cover design, and I think I'll definitely take this info on board in future projects.


The article in question.
http://www.wired.com/culture/design/magazine/17-03/dp_recordart

Album Artwork!

Our promotional material will consist of the main music video, a fictional album complete with artwork and a CD, and some photographs. Today in photography I was researching a technique to create "Light Trails", a concept I started experimenting with in the last post. My current idea for the art will be a young man standing under a street light next to a busy road. The man will be possibly holding a guitar, and there will be no cars on the road, just trails of headlights passing in front of him. There will be no other people in the shot, maybe faint trails of people walking past, to show the passing of time and the man's isolation, which represents the isolation shown in the music video.

The image I want to achieve uses a long exposure time and relys on the person (Probably my brother) standing still for the duration of the exposure, so he stays sharply in focus while everything else blurs around him.