Jimi Hendrix - Bold As Love Analysis

By James Raison

Snow Patrol - Fallen Empires Analysis

By James Raison

Digipak Moodboard

By James Raison

What is a Digipak?

The DVD DigiPak is a modern, stylish alternative to the standard DVD case. DigiPaks have been a popular choice in the retail industry for packaging DVD box sets and CD Albums and give a product an expensive professional look and feel.

CD Digipaks

CD Digipaks are a printed card packaging that can hold one or more CDs which are held in place with plastic trays which are glued into the digipak. These cases are designed to firstly hold more than one CD and secondly promote a set design of a certain artist.

In a CD digipak there normally contains four covers. The front cover most certainly always publishes:

• Artist's name.
• Album name.
• CD brands.
• Sponsors.
• Picture representing the album or Artist.
• Year or date of release.

The middle two covers contain:

• Plastic covers in which both CD'S are held.
• Lyrics or pictures of the artist/song.
• Bonus/special features disc ( this isn't the case all the time).
• General information about the artist, the album.
• Artist notes on the album, his/her inspirations, possible favourite tracks.

The fourth cover which is found at the back of the CD contains:

• Songs listed and numbered.
• Date in which the songs produced / released, number ones.
• More pictures/ lyrics of the artist/track.
• Setting/theme which can be linked to the nature of the album.

Film/DVD Digipaks

A film digipak is very similar to that of a CD one; however the product and layout may differ. Inside a DVD digipak there is normally a copy of the original film, a Blu-ray version, special features disc and sometimes the track played throughout the film.

Here are some of our own photographed digipaks from our artists genre. Two of them are 6 paneled and one has a book inside it. These digipaks my influence our own designs.

By James Raison

Getting out to our Audience

Our target audience mainly consisted of those who were computer literate, and so marketing our music video using technology would prove effective as our target audience is largely technology minded, and would use some of the same technologies daily. This is why the decision to make Facebook and Twitter pages was a must, as it could get our products out to a huge audience whilst being accessible ourselves. Within minutes of setting up the twitter page, we already gained a follower who was a DJ in Spain, not only getting our products on the web but them being viewed by people all over the world who were directly part of our desired audience.

Both Facebook and Twitter being accessible to anyone and everyone does the same with our products, and through Facebook's sharing option and Twitter's retweeting, products on both sides can reach massive audience incredibly quickly, allowing us to gain a greater insight  on audience feedback and see how well how product did and if we achieved a dominant reading with our audience.

By Tom Beal

Finalised Props and Costumes

We decided for jeans and a hooded jacket for our costume. This showed the character to be indifferent and insignificant on the world and no different to the next man. We also decided to have him with his hood up in the majority of shots, to add more suspicion about him and to show the character as to tyring to keep his head low, particularly in his location and area showing that he does not want contact with people, and when he does its brief and does not look up.

Our other characters wear similar clothing with heads low and again wearing jeans and hoodies, also to show a stereotypical man from the area and to be slightly intimidating towards our character.

The drug dealer wears a thick Ralph Lauren coat, showing that he is fashionable and has money, but again has his head low and his hood up so that the audience never see his face and arouse suspicion about him and do not trust him. The money and the bag of white flour was used to demonstrate a drug deal. These were important props and they showed our character's struggle with drugs in his area and again show the character to be an insignificant nobody.

By Tom Beal

Rough Cut

This is the first attempt I had at editing our footage we had collected. The brightness a lot higher from the finished product and is less synced with the song. In the rough cut, I wanted to test out colour correction, borders (whether they are needed or not and whether they look professional) and render settings. For a first attempt, as a group, we thought it looked of a good standard, so in our final product, the initial 45 seconds hasn't actually changed too much.


By Charlie Head

Editing Diary

The editing software we used to edit our music video was Sony Vegas 11 Pro. The main reason we used this software, rather than Pinnacle Studio which the school provided, was simply because some of the members of the group are a lot more familiar with Sony Vegas, rather than Pinnacle.

The initial start to editing was simply just cutting down the clips. This is what took most of the time as cutting down 10 second+ clips into the 'commonly used' style of rapid editing takes a lot longer than we thought it would. Although our song is quite slow, we still initially wanted to use rapid editing as most music videos tend to have this style of editing. As we started to edit the music video, it was slowly becoming clear that rapid editing really didn't fit with the slow song we had chosen. After some trial and error, we then went with the slower editing which almost told a story within the video. This was easier as its what we originally wanted to do with the shots we got.

Overall we used barely any effects in the video because as a group we decided effects in a video where it's supposed to tell a story wouldn't send out the right image to the audience. We used one effect where the bass dropped at the beginning which was just a simple flash. It was used as a transition from the main character walking past the underpass with the two hooded figures, to him walking in it while it's clear. The flash was used to show time has past and that he's waited for the two boys to move before getting to where he wanted to go.

One shot at the beginning was of a basketball backboard with council flats in the background. This originally was a still shot. I simply just added a pan effect in Sony Vegas so it wasn't just a still shot which didn't fit with any plans we had made. At the time of shooting this basketball backboard, we did actually want to have a shot where we manually pan the camera but with the tripod being unstable, it was quite difficult to get what we wanted. We just stuck with the still shot and then did the pan on the editing software.

To make sure the song was synced in with the clips, I played the song on Sony Vegas and used markers where there's a kick drum. This made the clips easy to place on the timeline as we didn't film any singing so there wasn't any lip syncing to do. With music videos that aren't professionally choreographed, it's hard to get lip syncing perfect. We thought that if we avoid it, we can't then get the lip syncing wrong.

Finally there was a clip of traffic which originally we didn't actually plan to capture. It was just an idea of which we had while filming on our third day. It represents time passing by as the the clip is sped up. It originally was 1 minutes worth of footage which was sped up to the quickest possible, which we thought, still wasn't quick enough. So once rendered, the sped up version was then sped up even more to get the 5 second clip we wanted.

The whole music video is supposed to be edited in a way, that shows the main character is 'getting nowhere'. It simply starts of with some shots of his local and everyday surroundings, then started to show little parts of his life. These being, him walking in the underpass, the drug deal, waiting for a bus, in the basketball court and other clips of him. It then towards the end, looks as though he could be making small improvements as he walks past the two boys in the underpass, which previously in the video, he didn't do. But then as the song title says, he doesn't get anywhere and goes back to drugs and then eventually lives on the streets.

By Charlie Head

Third Day Filming

During our third day filming, we was aware that we still needed around 1 minute of space to fill in our music video so what we filmed on our third day, had to be of a good standard.

We started filming around 10:00 am and had a detailed plan of what we wanted to film. We originally planned that we was going to use the influenced ideas from Example's music video, 'Change the way you kiss me'. The scene at the beginning where he is washing his face in a bathroom, we wanted to re-in act it as it could be seen as though he is washing away his sins. As we got to Woodford, we roamed around the council estate to check if there was any locations we could use to fill gaps. We found the basketball court on the side of the estate and decided to use it. We thought we could film Tom standing in the middle of the basketball court and then rotate the camera 360 degrees around him so he would look alone and isolated.


Once we had finished filming at the council estate we then went of to find some lunch in the local high street. Once there, we all thought that we could actually use the high street in our music video. We got Tom to just casually walk along and then filmed him using a mid shot. Once looking back at the shot, we then thought that we couldn't just use the one random shot of Tom walking so we went back to the council estate and filmed Tom walking again. This shot once again, shows that he is isolated.

When we was in the high street there was an alley way and we planned beforehand that was going to shoot a drug deal to show the downfall of the main character. When we saw the ally way, we thought it would be perfect. We quickly went down there and tried to shoot the deal. With the alley way being more popular than we thought, there was quite a lot of waiting around for people to walk past. Eventually after a lot of takes and waiting, we finally got the shot we wanted. This was probably the most stressful part of the day as we had to literally do a drug deal in broad day light down a public alley.

After a long day filming, we finally got about 10 minutes worth of usable footage. I then took it home to check if it was what we actually wanted/planned.


By Charlie Head

Second Day Filming

After our first day of filming, we collectively decided that a change of location was needed. We felt that our first location was good but only for some establishing shots and tracking shots, as the road wasn't busy or uneven. We also felt that the location didn't give a strong enough urban feeling, and so we decided to go out of our local area and into Woodford where we had researched a very urban looking housing estate that we felt would give our video the urban feel that would appeal to our intended audience and suit the songs tempo and feel.

Our plan for the shoot was to finish all establishing shots and work on the story of our character "Getting Nowhere". We had looked into a lot of music video's in the same genre as our song, and noticed that very little of the shots were still, and that the camera would move with the character and that many shots looked handheld. We chose to adopt this idea and only used handheld camera shots for our entire shoot, which gave us freedom to mix angles, shot lengths and focus. We tried also to frame our shots well, so that the shots were not boring and too central with no background.

I feel that the days shoot gave some very good usable footage, and now we have the majority of the establishing shots and have started good work on the outline of a story into our character. I do however feel that there will be one more shoot needed as we did not gather all of our footage we wanted. In our next shoot we plan to show the characters struggle with drugs and to get more footage on his attitudes and frustrations with his life in his area. We also want to film footage such as 360 degree pan of the character and traffic to edit and enhance for the video to change up location slightly and not make the video so one dimensional. Our second day of filming was much more successful than our first as we had a solid storyboard we could follow. However when on location we saw certain mise en scene that we felt would be good to film without it being included on the storyboard, including the cat, dump the knife bin and hand print on the wall, as well as rain dripping down a window.

By Tom Beal

Filming Plan 2

Our first attempt at filming didn't quite go to plan, so we have arranged to film on the 23rd and 24th of November. This time around, we have a better plan and new locations which hopefully should be successful. If unsuccessful, we can always film again on a different day, but seeing as we have planned to film for 2 days, it should be ok.

9:00 - 10:00 - Pick everyone up

10:00 - 10:30 - Breakfast stop and pick up spare batteries for the camera

10:30 - 11:15 - Find the location in Woodford

11:15 - 1:00 - Film as much footage as possible

1:00 - 1:30 - Lunch

1:30 - 4:00 - Carry on filming

4:00 - 4:30 - Quickly look over what we have filmed

4:30 - 5:15 - Drop everyone home


The diary above will be repeated on Thursday as well. Due to certain unexpected problems we have to allow for, the times may change, but that is the schedule we plan to go by for the day.

By Charlie Head

Finalised Storyboard

Here is our final storyboard which we will carefully follow throughout our re-shoot. Having not actually been to our location yet we will probably still make slight adjustments to our shots and improvise as we may have better ideas while actually there. This is because we have only seen the area from google earth, so have purely planned our shots from images of the estate.

Below is a video explaining our storyboard and what shots we hope to achieve and explanation of our decision to choose the shots we have done.

By Christian Sheen

Finalised Location

After our first day of filming we decided that we needed a better location to shoot. An urban estate we discovered in Woodford fitted perfectly for the setting of our music video. Vaguely knowing the location already, instead of going out to explore the location we used Google Earth in our lesson to further investigate the area. From this,we gathered several screen shots and were able to plan beforehand the shots we could use there. By using Google Earth we could also come up with ideas of how we could frame the environment in captivating ways to make it look more interesting. This also saved us plenty of time which we needed.

By Christian Sheen