So Far...

At the moment we are doing a practice music video to see the kind of things we can and can't do. We have made a few changes to the order of our video but we have kept the new concept of merging together various different shots. So far it looks really good and we may use some of the shots from the practice in our final production. I have been enjoying playing around with the editing system on the school Macs and I think that, even though it is only the first draft, what we have made so far looks quite professional.  

Music Magazine Cover Research

Some examples of music magazines:

As you can see from these examples Music Magazines tend to use the colours Red, Black and White as these colours stand out from one another and draw in the customers' attention.

They also (especially in NME) often use a bold skyline with band names or articles in it and colours that stand out.

All music magazines involve a picture of their main feature (a band or artist) with headlines of the stories going to be included edited on top of the photo. 
Out of these magazine's "The xx" would most likely be in  NME  or  SPIN which are both alternative, prestigious magazines.

Edits of Initial Album Idea

   

1)

2)

3)

 4)

5)

6)

Here are some example edits of our initial album cover idea. 

To get some audience feedback we printed these images out and asked a group of people which one they preferred  and what they would do to enhance them.

The majority of these people (including my group) agreed that  number 2  and number 4 were the best of the images. They also said however that number 2 was too dark and reminded people of a horror film cover. So we decided to plan around  number 4. We realised that we were missing "The xx"s trademark X and so we decided to see what number 4 would look like with the  Xand this is what we came up with:

Initial Album Cover Idea

This is our initial idea for our album cover. We decided to incorporate a crystal into it because of the song we have chosen "Crystalised", this is also because we noticed that many bands name their album after/include something to do with, one of their singles.

We used an eye in our initial idea because we would like to use various shots of an eye in our video. 

We realise that our initial idea hasn't got the same simplicity that "The xx"s album covers usually have but because we are making the video far more complex than "The xx"s original video we decided to carry that idea through to our album cover.

New storyboard

This is the storyboard for our new idea. I think this is better than our previous idea as there is a lot of Mise en Scene involved as well as different camera shots and different kinds of editing [e.g. slow motion, close up shots, tracking shots]  so it should be interesting and an audience will want to watch it all the way through.


Although it doesn't feature in this storyboard we will have various shots of someone playing a musical instrument so as to somwehat stick to Indie pop conventions. Other than featuring an instrument we know that the video doesn't go with the media conventions of the genre, however we decided to prodominantly go against the indie pop conventions due to the fact that "The xx"s music is completely different to any other band and to go against the simplistic nature of the band's music. 

Change of plan

We tested to see if our previous production idea [setting Steph's camera to a high shutter speed and take pictures of somebody moving] would work and we found that in order to make a video like this we'd have to edit every single shot separately in fear that this would take far too long we decided to change our idea completely.


We are now planning on creating an abstract video of short sequences including various slow motion close-up shots, as well as incorporations of crystals to link to the name of the song "Crystalised". We may even include a short section involving snapshots so as not to completely lose our initial idea. 


The following video is what inspired us to involve the slow motion shots 


Sunday Girl- Love U More

It also inspired us to include props falling into the frame from above e.g. Glitter.


Although this is more pop than indie pop we thought that this style of video would go well the changing rhythms of our chosen song as we can change how fast and/or slow the video the video is depending on which part of the song it is.