Digipak Ideas- Rihanna

Rihanna's digipak for her 'Loud' album is a good example of a successful digipak because it's eye catching, follows a continuous theme and well made. The audience will be able to tell that this album features the song 'Only Girl in the World' because in the music video it's got the same edit over the tip with the hue's of navy blue and lots of reds and pinks. The music video also features a red wall of roses which is on the digipak too.  

Me and my group thought this was a good example of a digipak because this has the conventions which we're looking to use, the theme and making it easy to know who the ablum is by and what single is on the album. However, on our digipak we'll only have 4 sections and  have the song titles on the back. 

Digipak Ideas- Starboy

Starboy is the Weeknd's new album. We decided we wanted to do the same as what he's done and relate the CD cover to his most popular song and it's music video. 

The themes which are in both the cover and music video, is the featuring of a cross, he carries a glowing one around with him in the music video whilst wearing the same one he has on in the cover. He's also wearing the same leather jacket in both too. They've even used the same sort of lighting, in both it's quite a low light with a hint of blue. As an audience you can feel/see the same mood between both by his facial expression and the lighting, in both he look's very serious and maybe you could say annoyed also. I think this looks effective because it shows the audience a clear theme throughout his album and they'll be able to recognise that it's his song/album through the particular themes. 


Another example of him carrying along the theme, is in his other song's music video; Party Monster. Again he's wearing some sort of leather jacket, with blueish lighting & it features a cross throughout.

Digipak Ideas- CD

Before beginning to create our digipak, me and the group discussed what ideas we could do for the CD cover & we all agreed on using colour powder paints or neon paints on our actor/s because it links with our music videos theme but also looks effective. We thought it was important to stick with the theme of our music video because the  viewers will be able to tell the CD is for our music video. 

                                                       

Development of Idea on Feedback

Because the feedback we got from our peers and teacher suggesting to film more extreme closeups of our actors face to show emotion, we've come up with the idea of using neon paints on Phoebe's (actor) face and hands to still go with the theme of her partying and the disco lights. We'll also use the paint to represent messages, for example, we'll have her smudge it below her eyes like she'd been crying or have her drag her hand down her neck like she's been strangled. 

 We took these test shots of using the neon paints on our hands and putting them next to the UV light to see what it looked like on the camera to see if we liked it. When looking back at the pictures we then came to the conclusion that we're defiantly using this idea because the paint shows up really well on the camera and we think it'll be effective in our music video. 

Me and the rest of the group wanted to do something with neon paint but coming up with the idea & to see if we think it would work we watched 'Super Bass' by Nicki Minaj which at the end of her video features her and some dancers all in glow up outfits and makeup. After watching the video, we thought it looked cool and we then decided we wanted to use the paints, however, even though we used Super Bass as inspiration we'll be using the paint in a different way and for it to represent different meanings because the context of both of the songs are completely opposite from one another. 

Feedback on Rough Cut

Once we had our rough cut of our music video finished, we pre-viewed it to our teacher and peers to receive their feedback and to help us develop our music video further. This was their feedback: 

• Teachers feedback- He said our ideas and what we already had was good and had potential but due to lack of camera shots and emotion it came off as boring and slow paced. He suggested to watch the Miley Cyrus 'Wrecking Ball' music video to give us inspiration on what to add to ours. At the start of the music video it was an extreme closeup of her face and she was crying whilst miming the lyrics for 30 seconds and this gave emotion and drew us in to watch the rest. 
• Peers feedback- More variety of different shots, for example; extreme close ups. 

Overall the feedback we got from our peers and teacher shows that we defiantly need to do some more filming and the content we will need to film is close ups and extreme close ups of our actors face to show the emotions of the song, which will add more depth to the music video but also make it less 'boring'. 

Problems & Solutions

Editing Music Video

Before we started to edit, we imported all of the clips we had filmed in the abandoned building onto Adobe Premiere Pro. At this point we haven't filmed our 'clubbing' scene yet. Once all the clips were imported we watched through them all to see which clips we liked and which ones we didn't and started to begin the editing process. 

Once we had looked through the clips and imported them all, we imported the song 'Chandelier by Madilyn Bailey' (cover) so we had it on the pc and Adobe Premiere Pro. 

Firstly, we put the over 3 minutes worth of footage of our actor dancing to the song with a long shot because it made it easier for us to then put the other clips over the top where we thought it worked best. To help with putting clips in certain places we put the music on and matched it with the first clip so she's not dancing out of time. Some of the clips we edited on top of the video, for example, was a close up of the actors feet whilst she's performing a pirouette and then edit it back out to the long shot of her pirouetting because it gave a good effect and the audience will be able to see what dance move she's performing up close.  
We decided not to change the contrast or lighting of the clips we've gotten because we felt as a group the natural lighting was enough and we liked how it looked. 

Once we decided that we had finished the dancing section of the music video and placed the clips where we wanted, we then filmed our 'clubbing' scene and uploaded it to Abode Premiere Pro. We watched through the 6 clips we managed to film of Phoebe (the actor) and discussed what parts to take from them and which bits we didn't want, this made it easier for us to then know what clips to transfer onto the music video and find a place to put them. 

The only editing we did on all of the 'clubbing' clips was cropping the bottom of clip because we wanted the effect of her looking naked but whilst filming she had a sleeveless top on so in the clips you could clearly see she had a top on, hence why we had to crop them. To do this we used the 'Crop' button under the 'Transform' tab, after clicking on these you go onto 'Effects Control' which comes up with the option of 'Scale' enabling you to zoom in or out on the clip; we zoomed inwards. 

Again, we decided not to change the lighting or add an effect to these clips because we thought the colour lights were bright enough and liked how they contrasted with the black background.                                                   

For our final bit of filming we had the same actor in the same back ground (black back drop) but instead of disco lights we've used UV paints which represents the pain and hurt she's feeling. Like the other clips we downloaded them to the computer and transferred them to Adobe Premiere Pro and together we decided where they'd fit best; some related well to the lyrics. 

After uploading the clips, cropping them down and placing them in the appropriate place where they work best, we decided that you could see too much of the hand held light on our actors face so we wanted to turn the lighting down to make the UV paint look brighter and her face darker. We did this by clicking the clip we wanted,  then on tab which is labelled 'Video Effects', then 'Colour Correction' and lastly 'Lumertri Colour', which we had to drag onto the clip and this enabled us to change the brightness to how we wanted. Too change the brightness we used 'Exposure' and 'Contrast' and fiddled around with both of the levels to get the perfect brightness for our music video.

After we changed the brightness on all of the UV paint clips, this made us want to also change the brightness on some of the disco light scenes to enhance all the different colours. This was done through the same process as before but instead of going onto 'Exposure' and 'Contrast' we went onto the 'Colour Wheels'. The colour wheel we used was 'Highlights' because we were wanting to highlight specific colours in scene, for example in this screen grab we highlighted the dark blue because this was the colour the disco light was at the time. The other people in the group and me were happy with the results of editing the clips and thought it made the music video more effective and stand out.