-Extended- 3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To see what the audience thought we made a simple but effecting questionnaire asking the audience questions about the video. This questionnaire helped us out alot because in the end it convinced us to re-shoot the final scene. Everybody liked the shots which we had added some human input and they all said we should add more shots like that to improve our video. Here are some examples:

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

In terms of filming there wasn’t a lot of technology used other than the essentials, our aim was to make a video that goes crazy but keep it looking realistic so rather than using a lot of green-screen to place our actors in extravagant places and make it look flashy we just took a camera and filmed in various places in town, its what we did with that footage that makes the video look good.
Final Cut Pro was our main instrument for our video where we edited it, editing was the biggest choir as we were aiming to get a jump-cut for almost every beat but we managed it and also put in various effects, adjusted the speed of the video and colour i.e. the saturation, we wanted to make the video dark to make it fit with the theme. We stacked some clips adding an edit to one of them and then reduced the opacity so it gave an edit over the top of the main clip, an example of this was the effect ‘Bad TV’ and ‘Strobe’.


Along with using Final Cut Pro, which was a necessity to edit the video, we also relied heavily on Photoshop CS3 to work on the posters and CD covers. We gathered images, ideas, and skills to create our final finished products for the digipack. After hard work and dedicated time to the CD covers and posters we had a magnificent result. What really made our group work great was that we all had different strong points, such as story telling, planning, editing, graphical and artistic skills. We all worked together and listened to each other and took each others opinions about our work where we all contributed. Photoshop CS3 gave us so many tools and effects to manipulate and have total control over the designing process of the poster and CD Cover. W e used tools such as desaturate (removing all colour from objects), the filters fresco and grain which gave it a more a vintage look and alot of the movement tools to put the CD cover and poster together.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Even to people who may be listening to The Prodigy for the first time its fairly obvious that they portray that rock/electro underground rave scene and that’s most likely their intent appealing to young audiences of teens and young adults and, as we were attempting to keep to the formula The Prodigy has, we kept it rather ominous and foreboding. The CD cover and poster was also kept very close to their theme, we decided in the end to keep it similar to The Omen itself simply because it would be easiest and would also fit in well with the song and video.
In particularly the CD cover itself is a reference to the very end of the video, on the CD cover you’ll notice and “Danger of death” sign because that’s our central theme, the Omen possessing you and eventually killing you, and if you watch the end of the video, before the character passes out or presumably dies, the last thing he looks at is a danger of death sign, the sign symbolising what the video is all about.
We had a little trouble with an image on the CD cover because it was an image of a woman in a bikini but it wasn’t our own image rather it was taken from a magazine and we are only supposed to use original images. However, we believed it was best to get an image that wasn’t our own because we were fairly certain some issues would be raised by the college if we asked a woman we knew to model for us and besides which the image has been heavily edited on Photoshop so her face is unrecognisable as well as her body and so it shouldn’t raise any copyright issues, an issue that could be raised on the other hand is one of sexism, obviously its not our intent to merely expose a half-naked woman on the CD cover rather its what it implies, as mentioned the face was heavily edited so that its just a grinning, messed up, face and is supposed to imply things are not always as they seem and how someone can so drastically change in terms of personality by this I mean in the video the main character is just a guy having a quiet drink and next he’s running about town causing trouble.

Evaluation

Once we had the Video and Digipack complete it was time to evaluate it all. This included 4 questions asking us what our video was inspired by, how effective we thought our products were, how we learnt from audience feedback and how we used technologies to construct our products.

By Christopher Mckeeney

DigiPack Complete

After several attempts and many changes being made, we finally had our Poster and CD Cover complete. The poster was advertising the "Invaders Must Die" tour which is the name of the album and one of the hits on this album was Omen. The CD Cover included the front, the back and two inlays. From the research we realised most CD covers were very good but simple which is the look we wanted. It seemed very difficult to pull off "simplicity" but we eventually we got there and it was all complete.
A problem arisen whilst creating the front cover of the CD because we wanted to get an image of a semi-naked woman which we could later photoshop. Our teachers thought it was inappropriate to get this picture from one of our friends so we got the image off the internet and edited it to be sure we didnt infringe any copyright laws.

By Michael Sabti

Starting the DigiPack

We looked at previous CD covers and posters and used these as inspiration for ours. We all went home and because the deadline was nearing we decided to throw together some ideas and we each made rough versions of the CD cover and poster. When the next lesson came around we talked about all of our ideas and after comparing ours to other Prodigy print based work we knew what we would create. Chris then started on the the print based work while myself and Michael updated the blog, including videos and pictures.

By Christopher Mckeeney

Video Complete - Time to edit

Happy we had all the shots we needed we spent the rest of our free time and lessons editing the final shot and touching up on edits earlier in the video, as the character falls to the ground at the end we show a shot of the Barman who served him the drink which caused all of this to happen, this then fades out and the video, along with the song ends. Finally we had the video complete, it was now time to create our digipack.

By Paul Strafford

Human Imput 3 with Ending

After looking over it again we decided we wanted the extra human input for the ending so we re-shot the ending and this was my scene. The idea was for me to walk past the character whilst holding a drink and just as im about to take a drink; the character takes it off me and throws it on the floor. Unlike the shot with Michael, this scene we decided to make me react in a harsh way so after the character throws the drink on the floor. I spin him around and head but him, this time the character retreats and we continue the scene and film the ending. The character goes around the corner and ends up at a “Danger of Death” sign; the character starts to shake and eventually falls to the ground.

By Paul Strafford

Editing the ending

Although we planned on having another human input we realised the original ending we made without the human input started off at a car park which is where the scene before ended. We managed to make it look as though it was all one shot and after adding some small effects the video seemed complete.

By Christopher Mckeeney

Editing

When we edited this shot we added a lot of effects over the clip because of the beats in the song at this time and then the song completely slows down with lots of short beats. For this we reduced the speed of the shot and did a jump cut for each individual beat. Because there was so many small beats this took a long time but eventually we got it how we wanted it and it looked very good.

By Paul Strafford

Human Input 2

We continued with the filming the following lesson and this time it was Chris’ scene. In this shot we made it look as if he was homeless on the floor with money in a hat, the “possessed” person then comes over and takes some of the money and carry’s on and ends up in the car park, unfortunatly because of the increased speed of the video, it was very difficult to get a shot that you clearly see him taking the money. We got a lot of strange looks from people doing this shot but we just re-assured them it was just part of the video and we wasn’t actually stealing.

By Michael Sabti

Editing

The next two lessons we spent editing these clips but it was clear it made the video look more professional. We had to make a lot of adjustments to the restaurant shot because of the time it was shot, it looked a lot darker than the other clips but eventually we got it close to the colour of the other shots.

By Christopher Mckeeney

Filming with Human Input

With all 3 group members available we decided to film the shots which had a human input, as there are three people in the group and no “main” character we all played a part as the human input. The first was Michael, his scene was to knock into the possessed person and shout at him/her for not watching where he/she was going, the character doesn’t respond well to this and hits Michael and he quickly leaves the shot (We use jump cuts on this to give the same effect as the first ‘Bar Shot’). After shooting this it started to get dark so we decided to shoot one more while there was still some sunlight, this shot we used a takeaway. We took this idea from “Smack My Bitch Up” as in the video the character entered a fast food restaurant and eats a kebab very fast and leaves. We decided to use the same concept but with chips. This was actually a lot more difficult than we first thought; we wanted to make it seem as if we were eating the chips extremely fast while keeping a steady camera, after several shots we finally got it right.

By Paul Strafford

Delay

This week, unfortunately we couldn’t film because two of our group’s members were unavailable with the flu and the other on a college trip. As we are a 3 person group we couldn’t add the human input. This was a little set back but when we returned we knew what had to be done.

By Michael Sabti

Editing

When it came around to editing, the shots looked good but after watching the whole video over it looked very boring because of the POV aspect and the shots just consisted of going around town “possessed”. It was very repetitive and we knew we would have to add something to give it an extra edge. We finished off editing the clips we had and knew the next couple of lessons we would have to film more with some human input.

By Paul Strafford

Shooting & Editing

At this point we knew what had to be filmed, where it had to be filmed and how we were going to edit it. The next lesson it was dry so we continued to film and we got a lot more footage, we got back with time remaining and put the clips on the timeline, ready to be edited the next lesson.

By Michael Sabti

Editing Bar Shot & More

We put all of the clips on the timeline and edited the bar scene aswell as some of the main scene. Whilst doing this it was clear we didn’t have enough clips for the main scene so we would have to go out and film again. At this point it was November and the weather was pretty wet, all of our other clips were in dry conditions so we had to wait for these conditions if we wanted to film. Because of the situation we were in we put all of our effort into editing when it was wet outside.

By Christopher Mckeeney

Bar Shot

Thankfully the next lesson we knew the bar would be open so we went to film the first shot. The bar was pretty empty so it was a perfect time to do it, we did multiple shots to be sure it was perfect and eventually we had it finished. Because the weather was good and we had some time left of the lesson we decided to film more of the main shot around town as we knew we didn’t have enough to fill the whole timeline.

By Paul Strafford

Re-Shooting with Fig-Rig

Knowing the bar wouldn’t be open at this time we decided to edit. When we put the clips together we realised the tripod on wheels didn’t give us the realistic effect we wanted, it just didn’t look human. This was a problem because we had done so much with the tripod but we spotted the problem quickly so we decided to go back to town and re-shoot it with the Fig-Rig. We did a shot and played it back and thankfully it looked a lot better with the Fig-Rig so we re-shot the 40 minutes we had shot previously with the tripod on wheels.

By Michael Sabti

Catch Up

That weekend we decided to go to the bar in our free time (knowing it was open) because we had missed out filming in the previous lessons but unfortunately when we turned up there was a football game on so the bar was extremely busy and they told us to come back next week. We understood and because we didn’t want to waste a trip we decided to skip the first shot and start to film the main clip while we had the chance and the Weather was good. This involved the character going around town after being possessed by the “Omen”We thought the area was a good place to shoot this because there were a lot of back alleys and not crowded unlike the rest of town. We had the tripod on wheels with us so we used it and filmed about 40 minutes worth of shots which we thought was a very good start to the video.

By Christopher Mckeeney

POV Shot Video

Unfortunately the next lesson we couldn’t go back to the bar because of the opening times on the day so we decided to make a small video showing the progression of our testing. When we were trying out techniques for getting the POV perspective we filmed each shot so we put all of these together to show the progression we had made. This includes the camera helmet and the Fig Rig.

By Michael Sabti

Filming the First Shot & Editing

The next lesson we went out and after searching around town we found “Dry 201” a really good bar and they gave us permission to shoot in.As it was going to be the opening of the video we listened closely to the song and because there were a lot of single beats at the start, we decided to incorporate this into the video. When the barman was walking towards the character, we decided for every beat, there would be a small jump cut so it gave the effect of the barman coming closer without actually walking.We went back to edit the clip and after looking at edited clip we realised there was a lot of movement in the background which made it look unprofessional and when the barman was coming towards us, we didn’t allow enough of a gap to add the jump cut so the picture looked distorted so we decided to re-shoot it.
We also used a programme called Motion which gave us the ability to make an introducing title which we also edited to the beat of the song.

By Paul Strafford

Narrative

Now we knew how to film it, we started to think of the narrative. Our idea for the video was to get the character to be possessed by the Omen by taking a drink. This is when the video starts to change, it will speed up and we will add jumps cuts to show how ecstatic and crazy things are.With this song, there are a lot of different significant beats where we can introduce these jump cuts. Hopefully it will be a good addition to the video and give the effect we are looking for.For the opening scene, the character will take a drink (mentioned above) so we decided to do a recky, looking for a suitable bar with a good surrounding to film later on in the video.

By Paul Strafford

Techniques

We began experimenting with ways of achieving the first person perspective that we desired for the video, our original idea was to attach the camera to a helmet and film PoV shots, this concept is also used in the comedy programme “Peep Show”. We began testing this technique but we soon found we had little control of the camera and it didn’t look realistic. We replaced the helmet with another piece of equipment called a Fig-Rig which gave us control over the camera and enabled to put the camera at eye level to give us the PoV perspective we desired.

By Christopher Mckeeney