Digipack...CD Covers

The CD cover/poster is an essential part of poduction for a band so for my Digipack, i looked at other album art that i was interested in. Ladyhawke's album was released in 2008 and by the same record company as my band, The Crimson Cucumbers. I really like the colourful artistry on the front. Its very playful and looks hand drawn. I also like the simplicity of the typography.


Passion Pit is the band who produced the record sung by my band, Moth's wings, and is the title of the album i'm currently making. This is Passion Pit's second album Chunk of Change. I like the abstract geometric lines which i may use in my cd cover or poster. Apart from that, the cover is rather simple :)It important that i look at cd covers of a fellow Indie band to make my own realistic as possible.


Elton John is another great artist who has a very colourful and arty cover. These wacky images run right through his "Captain Fantastic" album into his book inside. As an a member of the public, i like owning this cd because of the music and interesting artwork. It wouldnt be the same if i had downloaded it which is what is happened in this day and age of music.

Our ideas on screen

The pop up style beginning is finally finished !the whole process was done photoshop, finding images of london landmarks, shops, people, objects etc, filtering them onto cut out and layering them ontop of one another.


The umbrella sequence starts at the end of the pop up and beginning of the photo animation.The cardboard cut out look shows james standing on the bridge which then cuts to james (in real life) like this



An additional thing we added whilst on photoshop was a colour fade on James walking. The photo starts in black and white and as he moves across from left to right, the colour moves with him. its as if he brings life to the shotThe sihlouette effect we wanted didnt work out to well but we tried out an effect on imovie which we think works well. You can still see the outline of George.
And adding to that we made george x5!

IT'S ALIVE!!

Weve got quite far with the video now. Ive finished creating the instrumental scene, on photoshop where moths fly onto the screen and fly around in circles. It took a while because there was so many moths at a given time and these moths had to be moved onto the every picture and put into a different position each time to create flowing animation. Each moth was put on one at at time and moved. Eventually i found a way to merge the moths toegther as a group and move them as one layer; it saved me some time :)

Silhouettes?

At the moment it is still unsure whether or not the band members can be blacked out from the background. Jerry the great is experimenting with what we have on a different program and if possible we are going to use it. Alternatively, we can use effects on final cut. They may not be able to darken the whole person( which wont look as convincing because george Kirsty and Ross weren't singing along to the lyrics) but we will play around with what we have.

Re-shoot!

Yesterday afternoon we shot the band section of our music video with George, Kirsty and Ross who are our "Crimson Cucumbers!"
We would like to have the band silhouetted so we found a white screen to use behind them. Later we will play around with the clips on final cut pro to do this.
George Kirsty and Ross each individually stood in front of the screen and sang along to moths wings while singing in my singstar microphone.
At the end the 3 danced around together in front of the camera and we hope to use that also.






we will take profile pictures of the band and combine them together in photoshop. We are originally going to use split screen, but its easier for us to do it this way. Like the the pop up city at the beginning, there will be effects on these pictures and also we might use this effect on the pictures of the band when they are dancing together.

The day went successfully, but now we need to transfer the footage to final cut where we can play around with effects and to see whether we can use silhouettes.

noooooo

On Friday, we shot one of our filmed sequences for the beginning. The original plan was to project our film onto James t-shirt which would link into the start of our video. We found an empty room in the school where no one can interupt and it isnt so obvious we are on the school site. Imstead of projecting onto James shirt was thought we could project onto the white wall behind him.
We took this time to also film the ending. once the photo animation stops we come out from the projection back into the white room where James is standing,making full circle, and now Sarah is standing on the other side of the projection. Sarah is another actor in our film who James passes in the video and at first she wasnt going to be a main element in the film but i started to think that if she wasnt in it, the video wouldnt have much point as it is just James wondering around the city. The short subtle story is that they meet on the bridge briefly at start of the video and they finish by walking of together. Its not a storng story but its something to add to the video rather than just having a technique. But

DISASTER.................
The taped we have filmed on has crashed so we've lost our footage

HOWEVER......................
There was only around 4 minutes worth of filming and it was shot in the school with school students so hopefully we can get that done as soon as.
We are also planning to film our band shots either this week or next week. :)

quick pic of what we are trying to do. James standing with the white wall behind:

Pitch

Today we gave our pitch to the class....

these are a couple of slides from the pitch.

we briefly explained who our band members are and that this would be one of their 3rd releases, because they do not feature in the video. Themes of the video also featured in the pitch.In Half term we filmed up london on the south bank and it was quite a sunny day which was handy! We asked our friend James to act in our film, by walking along the embankment while we snapped our photos. Our other friend Sarah(james girlfriend) also appeared in the footage, and now we are beginning to piece together a narrative involving her. Once we've uploaded the photos we are going to add in moths to follow James,which tie into the title of the song. We are pondering whether the moths will bring colour to black and white photos.

These are a couple of photos from the day of James walking across a bridge and along the embankment.