Ideas for new locations

We have taken photos of the winter market in Nottingham City Centre because we would like to film here as one of our memories. We will film at night because it is less busy at night and the darkness will bring out the christmas lights around the stalls and we could create effects from these lights. 

 These photos are of Emma's living room and we feel that this would be a good location for another memory. We will film the couple opening up presents and one will be the camera (one of the props). We think that this room is traditional and it will go with our vintage theme in the video. It is also decorated with decorations and a tree so it will make it obvious to the viewer that it is meant to be christmas.

CD Cover Ideas

We decided to develop our ideas for our CD cover as we were adjusting our idea for our music video and we also weren't happy with our first digipak idea. 

For the front cover we looked at other artist's CD covers such as Ellie Goulding and we found that most of the CD covers were closeups of the artists. We liked Ellie Goulding's CD cover because of the wind swept hair look and we sketched an idea of this for our CD cover. We also sketched ideas of closeups of Joy and you see her guitar in the background. Another idea was to have a table with a teacup and a cake on it to relate to one of the songs on the album called 'Cake & Tea' and we wanted to follow the cafe theme.

We still had the cafe themed idea in our heads, so for the back cover we wanted a table with a tea cup or maybe some of the props on the back and then have the track list either at the side of these objects going down the table or over all of the image still going down the table.

One idea for the inside cover was to have a table with fallen rose petals on it but when we put the picture in black and white in photoshop, we didn't like this idea as it didn't convey the themes of loss, love and memory and it also didn't look very much like rose petals. 

We explored using the petals on the table on photoshop but didn't like this so we tried using a cup of tea  from above as this relates to the cafe theme and is also in the music video and it relates to her song 'Cake & Tea'. This is a tested version just to see what the image would look like so we will take the picture in the cafe thinking about the composition and lighting more professionally. This image could either be for the inside cover or maybe for the CD.

We tested out some of our ideas in photoshop from our sketches and tried to make the front and back cover look professional and similar to what we have in mind for our proper one. We used a closeup of joy that we took on our first shoot and we used this because it has her guitar in the background too. We added a lens blur in the background to make Joy stand out more and we put the text on top of the image to see what it would look like. We will take a photo of Joy looking at the camera and take a photo of Joy with a slight wind swept hair look to let the viewer engage with Joy more. 

We used a photo we had of the items on the table for the back cover so that we can see what our objects on the table looks like as a back cover. We added a lens blur to the background of the table so that the objects stand out to the viewer and then we put the track list on top and we liked the look of this. However, we will take a more professional photo and more thought about photo for this back cover and we can think about what objects we use and the composition of the photo so that the track list looks good with the objects.

First Video Edit

Here is our first music video edit. We felt it went quite well for many reasons such as; lack of continuity errors, consistent storyline, ranges of shots and angles & a good final colour correction.

However, there were a few problems with the final edit. We showed this video to multiple friends, classmates & teachers and this was the feedback they gave us:

-  Too much rack focusing

- Handheld effect was shaky at parts

- Emotions from actors were hard to get across

- Storyline was predicted, half way through

-It needs more footage of the couple in love together and then more of the actress upset

We have taken this feedback into consideration and we will film lots of close-ups of our performer so that we can engage the viewer with her and also to convey her emotion throughout the song. We will then work on our narrative and we will make sure that we capture lots of footage of our actors and clearly show their emotions and portray the themes and moods that we want in our video. We are also going to reduce the amount of rack focusing so that our video will look more professional and also we will be able to  highlight the important parts in our video from the use of this focusing.