Email to The Shape Of The Earth band

After The Shape Of The Earth email they replied to us from asking them permission to use their song Alone In This, we emailed them back.

After we finished our music video for their song, we emailed it to them as they asked to see our final project after we completed it. We let them know that the link to our music video on YouTube to watch and a link to our website that we created for their band and music video to their song Alone In This.

Complete music video on YouTube

We recently finished our music video and have exported it on to YouTube. This now allows us to gain views from everybody on YouTube and they have the option to leave us any feedback that they may have. This site will attract views as people can search for the song or the band and our video will come up as the search. Increasing our views on our video will help to see if anyone has some feedback as they are able to leave comments and like or dislike it.

The next step is to put the final video on to our blogs and on our band website for The Shape Of The Earth.One we have put the video on the website we will be completed it and be able to focus on little bits we can do in order to generate more marks when we hand in all of our completed work.

I am very happy with our final video and we have been able to complete it to the standard and with all of the idea that we had. The group overall was very happy with the outcome and the work we have put in has shown through our final music video piece.

Audience feedback; First look

We decided to show people who are similar to our target audience the rough cut of our music video. We recorded their reaction for our evaluation questions. At first we thought our rough cut was good enough to be our final piece. Upon viewing it again after hearing people’s views we have decided to make a few changes.

Here are some of the comments made:

§  The theme reflected the mood and lyrics

§  The video would have looked better in all black and white

§  It looked like a previous music video

§  Seemed like the character was just walking around

§  Very creative video which evoked a wide range of emotions in a short space of time

We took everybody’s comments into consideration and are planning to tweak the video before make it our final piece. Due to this we have had to film more shots to replace some of the scenery which has delayed the editing process once again.

QR code

We have created a QR code to put on the back cover of our digipak that links to the website page we have made for The Shape Of The Earth - Alone In This music video. We done this by using a website called www.QRstuff.com in which we was able to create this free of charge. We have put this on the back cover with the bar code.

Our digipak

We are now putting together our digipak for our music video and the band The Shape Of The Earth. We have used a picture of the main character from the front view and the back view for the front and back cover of our digipak. We thought that these images would look very effective as it is set in one of the locations that we see the character in within the music video. The rural woods that is the location, also adds to the fact that she is alone, gong with the title of the song and the digipak overall. There is a lot of area surrounding her within the photos and this also emphasises that she is on her own. For the front cover title, being Alone In This, We made it the same font as what is on the start of the music video. This shows that they are linked and really shows that the music video is of this song and from this digipak. We have also made the writing on the digipak front cover the same colour as the main characters coat in the image. This pulls the digipak together and makes the colours and images flow.

Filming completed

Today we managed to completely finish our filming and took pictures for our digipak front cover, back cover and disk.
We have done the handheld shots and the ones where the main character meets other people that show her glimpses of happiness.
We are now in the process of putting all of our final clips together and editing them into our music video for Alone In This by The Shape Of The Earth.

Website Research

We looked into websites in order to build up an image of the type of website we want to create for The Shape Of The Earth band we are doing a music video for.  We looked into websites of indie bands in order to make sure we was creating the right look and feel for the correct genre of our band, song and music video.







We looked at Kodaline's website and got an idea from this for our own website creation. We liked how they have done there headings alone the top of the page onto the other points of the website. An example of the headings are things like an about page. We have imported this idea into our band website.

Two Door Cinema Club are another popular indie band that we have researched into in terms of their website. We have taken the idea of their upcoming gigs being on their home age of their website as we feel it has more coming on when people first click onto the website itself.
We have put two of the most recent upcoming gigs on the home page of our own website.





Tom Odell is of the indie genre and there are a few elements we have taken from his website and put onto our own
We have placed our bands most recent music video (being the one we have created) onto the home page of the website. This is something that was inspired from Tom Odell's website.
We have also taken the idea of putting the CD cover on the home page also. This attracts the audience in and gives there more to look at when people first go onto the website. We have been able to do this on our own website by putting on our digipak front cover for Alone In This by The Shape Of The Earth based around the music video we have created.

Beginning editing

We have started to edit our music video together now as we have all the shots and clips that we wanted for the first half of the video.
We have had a new idea whilst we was in the editing process. We have put the music video in black and white whilst the main character is in the house. Once the character goes outside and starts travelling, the clips will go into colour. This helps to show her unhappiness at home as it is in a black and dull setting, being the black and white effect. The colour when she goes outside hints to the glimpses of happiness she sees when she is not at home and is travelling.

Putting the music video together, we have realised that we filmed enough shots and scenes to put things together in the right way to make it look the best it can, This is one of the problems we had last year as we didn't film enough clips in order to put together our film opening for our AS media project. This is a problem we faces last year that we have worked upon and changed this year to make it better than before and make the editing process run more smoothly.

Filming Update

So far we have filmed the first section of our music video. This is where the character is in bed and can't sleep because her parents are arguing. We have created the packing and leaving the house shots so we can focus on the main part of the music video, being her travelling.

We have also filmed some of the travelling scenes, being around Werrington. We have chose this place for the first part as this is a council estate area and we can show her going through where she lives to get to the nice places where she meets people and they show her glimpses of happiness.

We chose a part of Werrington that had a grass field with a bench that the character can sit on in order to emphasise the fact that she is alone.

Meet the Actress!

Name: Sky Croxford

Age:18

We had to change the actress in our video due scheduling conflicts. We have now chosen Sky to play the main character. Sky is a part of our media group therefore we all have the same free lessons in order to film making it a lot more convenient. She also has drama experience like the previous actress, she studied GCSE Drama so she’s used to taking direction. By having a group member as the actress has many benefits, the main being she can portray the image we are all imagining. it also helps that she has free time the same time as the rest of the media group, so the timing to film is always convenient. 

Final costume

We changed our outfit idea from the last one due to the change in character and the new ideas we have to make the storyline clearer to the audience.

We have changed the outfit to leggings, a parka and a back pack. We felt this was the right thing to do in order to add to the season at the start of the music video. A back pack helped us to show to the audience the travelling aspect of the storyline and show set them up to show them what is going to happen throughout. This costumer/prop was used as an indicator and a main focus for the audience. Having the parka in green was a move we made intentionally as it links in with the surroundings of the outdoors. This was done to emphasis the fact that the main character is alone; linking in with the title of the song being Alone In This by The Shape Of The Earth.

We chose leggings because we thought this was something someone that didn't have a lot of money would wear rather than jeans or a skirt for example.

Update of our music video

Due to our main character who was going to be in our film, not having enough spare time the same as us, we have had to change our main character. This will just make it easier for us and let us film more as were going to use a person from our actual group. Since this we have filmed a lot more and can maybe start editing our film clips that we filmed a few days ago.

Our digipak so far

This is what we have created so far for our digipak. We have included a spine to the digipak and the six sides that the album will have. We are having a front cover, an inside image page, a lyric page of the song that the album is promoting the most (being the 'Alone In This' song that we are making a music video to), the CD case, another image page and the back page for the list of songs that the album includes.We have decided to use the colour grey as the band uses dull colours on their other albums and this has the feel that the song 'Alone In This' has and helps us to create it for the audience. The white writing over the top of the grey helps to bring out the writing more and clearly show the importance of the lyrics within the songs.
The image we have chosen for one of our image pages in our digipak is of the girl in the music video we are making to 'Alone In This' because it has clear emotion and really shows what the song is about and how it is going to make the audience feel when the listen to the song or see the music video. This also shows that there is a music video and make the buyers of the digipak watch the music video if they haven't done it, so there is an element of advertising in the album also. This is a good way of advertising as it is targeting the customers directly as they are the people that will definitely want to watch the music video as they are a fan of the band or the particular song. We haven't got any further with the digipak at the moment as we want to include more images once we have filmed all the footage we want to capture for our music video so we can create it around that and add the best image to the other image page as possible. This will also help us to make the front and back cover of the digipak properly and in the best way we could.

We are having the first page of it as the front cover and having a hand drawn image on the front as this is the same concept that runs throughout all of the band 'The Shape of The Earth' album covers.

We are aiming to create a hand drawn image to go with the song we are doing the music video to, as this what we are calling the album as well. We have the idea to draw a crowd of people as rough drawings in all different, dull effected colours with one of the people just in black. This emphasises the fact that the person is alone compared to everyone else and is one there own even when they are in a crowd of people. This is something we are now aiming to create as our next task in order to get further with our digipak and really make an album that the band 'The Shape Of The Earth' would have created themselves.

Digipak ideas from The Shape Of The Earth

Above are some of the CD covers that band 'The Shape Of The Earth have used'. By looking at all four covers you can see that they follow some sort of pattern in their CD cover designs. Each cover has the look of being drawn or painted through the aspects of their pictures and the font that is used. Their designs are very basic, therefore we have ensured that the images we use follow their conventions of being simple. For our production we have kept the shots all very simple but effective with a strong storyline. 

Below are some of the ideas we have come up with to follow. We decided as the song is 'Alone In This' and the story is about a girl who has a hard upbringing and feels constantly sad and isolated that the idea of having a crowd of colourful people with one blacked out person shows that whilst everyone who is around her is happy, she is the one that stands out, the one who cannot find happiness. Below are some images that we found interesting and throught we could work with and make it our own. They are all full of crows of people and we thought we could stick with the idea of having everyone colourful, and as I said, there will be one person who is just blacked out which will feature our main character.

Digipaks

I have been researching all different digipaks with different genres just to see what theme each one goes with. Having a look at different digipaks will help us to make our own, as all of them have re-occurring parts. 




My personal favourite is Elvis Presley's digipak. In this digipak its for his top 40 greatest hits. The colouring on the front is black and gold, this links in with the style of the actual disks themselves. The disks are made to look like vinyl records which also links in to the time Elvis was big which was in the 70's, this was when vinyl's were big. Inside it involves quite a few pictures of Elvis and also has some paragraphs written about him. the writing is written on a yellow background which matches with the gold nicely. The front has a big picture of Elvis's face and his name isn't that big this is purely because as soon as people see his face they know who's digipak it is because he was incredibly famous.

The Whos digipak has a theme of the pointing up arrow. This is on the front and also pictured on the disc itself. This follows the typical conventions of a digipak, it has the songs on the back with the discs and pictures of the band. The pictures of the background are made to look like the writing is stuck on a wall which is to go with their look which is a mod theme as they were a massive band in Britain.









Another digipak which is from the indie genre that we are going for is The Maccabees digipak. The album is called Given In To Wild, this is a theme on their album as they have pictures of a plain landscape on the front which is to indicate the wild. Then the inside of the pack is also rocks which is also to do with the wild and that picture is also a scene out of one of their videos. This digipak is made out of cardboard. 

A digipak is a special CD album that is a folded book-style album. Sometimes the album has a CD and a DVD within the digipak that has many folding panels. Some have a minimum of one, up to four folds that contain elements of the digipak of the band/artist of the album. They are normally made of card instead of the normal plastic CD album cases. Digipaks used to be very are whereas now they are very popular and used by many bands and artists.

The font

This font is called Lithos and we like it as it is very plain and in capital letters which is what we are aiming for as the video will then stand out more against the font of the title before the video begins. This font is different to an average style capital font style so it goes with the indie band and how the a different to others with their songs and their CD covers.

This font is called Orator. This is another font idea that we had in mind for the beginning of our music video for 'Alone In This' as it is again, a very basic font but is very effective as it looks very serious and the type writer styles shows that it is like a document by someone which goes with the way we are shooting our music video as we are doing many shots like a handheld camera from our main characters point of view so it is her documentation which links in with the font style perfectly.

This font style is called Nueva which is a very small basic, capital styled font for our title. This is a cool font style for us to use because it is very basic but has a unique twist on it which is what we are showing our main character as, a basic family living in poor conditions, but a unique twist of hope.

Permission to use the song 'Alone In This'

We found an email address on the bands website, and we wrote to them asking for permission to use their song - 'Alone In This'. This can be seen below:

 

 

Not long after sending the email, we received a reply. They went on to state they were happy for us to use their music and would love to see the finished product. The reply email can be seen below:

Meaning of 'Alone In This' lyrics

'All these names and people places, oh I’m not that sure, I’m not that sure, am I alone in this?
All around the world they tell us oh we’re not that sure we’re not that sure, am I alone in this?
I don’t know how to breathe oh I’m not that sure, I’m not that sure, am I alone in this?
I always try and work on this a lot,
What I have I’m sure you haven’t got,
I can only, only tell the truth'

These lyrics are going to work really well alongside our video because its going to link together. As the lyrics are saying 'all these names and people places' this links in with her feeling alone even when she's with people as she its saying that she doesn't know how she feels when she's has the company of other people, she's unsure if she likes it or not and by the look of our video were going with the idea that she doesn't, that's why she wanted to get away.
It also says that ' I always try and work on this a lot' were linking this in with the video when she's sat on her bed at the beginning as it shows she's thinking about leaving her home or not. Its indicating that its been playing on her mind for a while now and that she may not want to feel alone when she's with people but she cant help it.

Film inspiration

This film is called Into The Wild. this film inspired us as its all about one person travelling on their own as they don't like reality and will do anything to get away from it. We like the idea from this photo as it is a good picture to show him travelling with all of his belongings. We want to show our character travelling with all of her things too, but she'll be travelling through streets not the wild, but we want her to be walking through all different things to show she'll travel anywhere to get away from where she
came from.



This picture is a great shot as it shows the audience that the character hasn't got anywhere to go so they will literally sleep/stay wherever they can. This shot is him on top of an abandoned van, in our video we will change this to our character sleeping on a bench or something like that just to let the audience know she hasn't got much else. When we video her sitting on something higher, we want her to be admiring the scenery that she can see so we can tell she loves where she is and that she finds comfort in it.

We love this shot as it shows the main character from the movie doing something he admires in a place that he loves, this inspired us to do this in our music video with our main character. We want her to be sat somewhere alone, reading also so it shows the audience that she has a peace of mind where she is and that she is relaxed and happy. In the shot we want to capture a good part of the scenery to so we can fully portray her happiness now that she is alone and far away from her home.




In our music video we want a shot exactly like this where it shows a closeup of the characters face to try and show all of the emotion they have. In our case we want our charcter to be looking out to an open field or scenic area and have tears in her eyes to show that she feels like she is where she belongs. We want this shot to be at the very end of the video, so we can show her looking a little scruffy from where she has been travelling for days, but we want her to be smiling and feeling like shes finally got to where she has always wanted.