BW: Print-work Step-by-step

Step 1

Shown here is the original paper design of my digipak. The original idea for the front cover was to have our protagonist, the crocodile, inside a cage which provides a visual link to the theme of our music video and to the name of the single, 'Escapee'. The drawing was, at first, designed for the single 'Escapee' although I later changed the design to be for the band's album 'Moment Bends'. The band's name was to be written vertically next to the cage. I imagined the front inside cover to have a real crocodile's head poking in from the side on one half, while on the other half of the page there would be a montage of pictures from the locations we filmed at. The third page, where the disc would be placed, was going to feature a picture of each of the real band members. Finally, the back cover was going to be entirely black except for a picture of our crocodile running into the sea. The picture would be enclosed in a circle similar to the way the Looney Tunes cartoons end, and also matching the way our music video ends. Also on the back cover there would be the record label logos as well as the legal small print.

I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 to make the digipak, but I decided not to re-create my original design as I thought it would be better and more conventional to make the digipak for an album rather than a single. I also believe that the final product turned out better than how the original design may have looked. Along with this, it was revealed to me that we were only allowed to use our own images, not ones taken from the internet.

Step 2

One third of the way through I had completed the front inside cover and the back cover. The inside front cover showed our crocodile inside a cage with the track listings alongside him. This is conventional because digipaks tend to show the track listing either on the back cover or the front inside cover. However, I faced a problem with the image because when it was put in un-edited and stretched to fit the space, the crocodile's proportions were wrong, in essence, he was too tall and too thin. To resolve this problem I used the rectangular marquee tool to cut off about one fifth of the image, so that when the image was re-positioned into the space the proportions were correct.

The second issue arose from the colouring of the text. I experimented with black, white, red, blue, and yellow but neither colour was very suitable. White showed out the best but to help make the words clearer and stand out more, I used the stroke effect to outline the letters in black and set the size of the outline to 7px. I decided to use the font 'I hate Comic Sans' because it seems like a fairly childish, or playful, looking text, which fits in with the band's catchy songs.

I didn't experience any problems with creating the back cover. I opened the picture in paint and made a circle around the crocodile and the ocean. I then filled the rest of the image in black, saved the file, then brought it into Photoshop and fitted it into the space.

Step 3

By this time I had finished making the digipak's front cover, for which I used an image of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, with our crocodile in the foreground. I used this image because it partly tells the story of our music video, with the crocodile running through London in his attempt to escape, and also because I think it aesthetically works. The way the image is framed provides a clear area for where the album title should be because the top-left of the image has a lot of empty space.

The words 'Moment Bends' are slightly curved which was made to create a visual link to the word 'Bends'. To make the curved writing I used the warp text tool which enabled me to adjust the type of curve, in this case I used the wave effect, and also to alter the amount of curviture vertically, horizontally, inwards, or outwards. I found blue to be the colour that stood out the clearest. It is also conventional for the album title to be high up on the page and for the writing to follow the dominant reading path. The words 'Architecture in Helsinki' had no effects on them other than the stroke effect to outline the words and make the white writing stand out more. Once again I used the font 'I hate Comic Sans' for the same reasons stated earlier.

Step 4
Here is my final product. The inside back cover was problematic because similarly to when the inside front cover was inserted un-edited, the crocodile looked too tall and too thin. I used the same process to correct this; using the marquee selector tool to remove about a quarter of the image so that when the image was reinserted into the space his proportions were correct. The inside back cover is convential though, as digipaks usually only have a picture for where the disc would be, since it's useless to have writing when the disc will be in the way.

The final stage was only to add the company logos, websites, company address, copyright statements, and a barcode, which is all conventional as the record labels wish to protect their productions and promote themselves through displaying their logos and website. An issue did arise with the Universal Music Group logo because when I inserted it, it was originally in black - an obvious collision with the background. To solve this problem I used the paint filler tool and changed the colouring to white.

The digipak clearly relates to our other print-work since all of our productions feature the crocodile. The productions are also fairly simplistic which coincides with the band image.

Group: Progress

This is a screenshot of the ending of our music video, which has been completed now. We created an overlay in photoshop which was a large black square with a circle cut out of it on a transparent background. This meant that when the image was imported, the transparent circle would reveal the protagonist in the background, as shown above. We have used motion keyframing to make the circle shrink into the postion seen above. We made it so at the beginning of the shot, the back is out of the screen, and it slowly shrinks towards the middle before stopping. We encountered a problem where when the black square shrank, the edges weren't long enough to cover the whole screen, so the edges of the shot were still visible. We combatted this by creating a plain black rectangle in photoshop and motion keyframing it to move into the screen when the background becomes visible, covering it up and keeping the background black. We did this on both sides of the screen. We decided to include a dip to black right at the end of the music video for effect. We have done more work earlier in the video, including cross dissolves and just lining shots into time and lip synching with our performance shots, but our main focus has been on the ending, which is now done.

Group: Editing Update

In a free period today and also during our lesson, we have now successfully, fully edited our first 35 seconds of footage. As well as these shots, we have reviewed the performance shots we filmed on Thursday 15th November, and have cut it to ensure the lip syncing is on time. Furthermore, we have created the split screen shot of the band, which was one of our original ideas. We had to see where each member was the only prevalent person in the screen and used that as their corner. Our split screen shot looks very effective because despite it going against conventional Indie Pop videos, we believe our shot fits in with the track. Another shot edited today, is the lead singer is in rule of thirds, and the other two thirds of the screen is filled up with the protagonist watching the horse racing amusement on Brighton Pier. We have made it so the horses are moving to the lyric 'taking you for a ride', as this can be seen as disjunctive, yet there is still a relationship between lyrics and visuals, a convention Goodiwn put forward in his theory. We should be able to complete our whole music video by the deadline on Friday 30th November, but to do this we must make sure we edit efficiently in all of our free periods, and Media Studies lessons.

Group: Update

Above is a screenshot of some of the work we are currently doing in Premiere. We have been focusing on the title screen, with two shots of wheels (London and Brighton) spinning in a time lapse effect, split screen. There will be a title overlapping this printscreen shot, with the title of the band in the font that the band use on their official website. We have been investigating different editing techniques such as crop and time stretch to create this shot. We have matched it to the music, so it matches the beat of the drum. The title lasts the whole of the shot, which is 4 seconds, long enough for the audience to read the title and notice the background. A problem we encountered was that the shots, when cropped, did not quite reach the top and bottom of the screen when matched together, and we simply added a small black border to combat this, which we do not believe looks unprofessional. We took the font from a screenshot of the bands official website, where we then cropped it down, removed negative white space and added a colour overlay of white in Photoshop. We believed this would not be clear enough on the actual video, so we also added a black border to the text to make it very obvious. We then imported it into Premiere and overlaid it on top of the splitscreen shot to create what is shown in the printscreen. We have also imported more footage to edit on when this shot is done, and we have created another splitscreen of Toby singing overlaying on top of the crocodile at the tube station, which we again used the crop tool for. We animated the crop tool so the shot of Toby singing slides over the top of the crocodile, which we believe is lively and fun, the theme we hope to convey throughout our video. This progress is shown in the screenshot below.

TF: Printwork Step by Step

Step 1:

Here is the hand drawn rough copy of my advert. Originally, I had planned to include the band members standing together in the clothes they wore in the performance, with the crocodile laying down in front of them. My font type in this copy was very simplistic to emphasise the meta-narrative of the band 'Architecture in Helsinki.' I have included the exact same titles in this rough copy as I have the finished product, however the overall layout is completely different. I chose not to re-create what I had drawn as my advert as I don't believe the end product would have been as sucessful as the design I went for.

Step 2:

After my first go at producing an advert, this was the finished product. I decided to remain with the simplistic style, however the design is different. In this advert, there was just 5 layers. One for the background, one for the band name, and the other 3 were the logos of the Web 2.0 applications. My background for this advert has been filtered to the patchwork effect. I believed at first, this looked effective, however after reviewing this, and advice from peers I changed it. I am happy, I chose to start again, as this poster for me, wasn't very easy on the eye, and I could most certainly improve it.. The image for the background is a piece of actual footage, which I acquired through taking an export off the editing software Adobe Premiere Elements 9.0.

Step 3:

The background for my finished product is not a part of our footage but a photo we took on one of our film shoots in London. I believed that because the London Eye is featured in our opening and is a very iconic attraction then it could be used as a background to a sucessful image. I have included the crocodile in the photo as it represents what our song is all about. The colours are very dull in the background to represent the meta narrative of the band. I slightly altered the brightness of the background to try make the crocodile look as if it was in silhouette, however I didn't want to make it too dark that consumers of this text wouldn't be able to make the image out.

Step 4:

In this step I am going to tell you about the titles in my advert. Similarly to the hand drawn copy the only titles are the band's name 'Architecture in Helsinki' and the album's name 'Moment Bends', and also included the date of the release which is the deadline for all of our production. My font type for my titles is 'All Hooked Up' at size 65.63 pt. I looked in to 5 different fonts, however this to me stood out the most, yet still represented a simplistic band image. I did look into making the font have gradient on it, and changing the opacity so the background filled the font, but due to the darkness of my background it was hard to make out what the titles read. To make the title 'Moment Bends' around the London Eye, I used the Elipse tool, to create a bend to the text. I thought this could be seen as a word pattern, which to me has come out very effective. I chose to create this style because it's a basic technique, which further represents the meta narrative.

Step 5:

To complete my poster, I had to erase any imperfections in the photo which were present. To do this, I used the clone stamp tool, to hide the overhanging trees. I clone stamped the gradient of the darker grey and went over it so it looked natural, and improved. In all our adverts, and digipak, we have tried to show the simplicity of the band's meta-narrative, and the protagonist in the video. We have shown the crocodile in locations that are featured in our video, as the audience a real sense of the video's narrative.

Group: Filming Update

At the weekend, we visited both London and Brighton to finish off our filming, and managed to do this successfully. We believe we have got all of the footage we need to create our music video now, and editing will now be our main concern. We have imported all of our footage into Premiere, and will be editing in lessons and in free periods. 

Group: Filming update

On the 15th November we completed filming for our performance shots in the school drama studio. Today, the 16th November, Jake is editing our footage while Toby and Ben continue work on the advertisement and digipack.

BW: Digipack paper design

This is the original design I created for the digipack. The front cover shows our protangonist, the croc, in his cage which fits nicely with the song title 'Escapee' displayed in big letters on the front page. The band name may be written vertically next to the cage. The back cover will simply be entirely black except from a closing circle in the middle, identical to the one seen at the end of our music video, and song titles. The second page will have a crocodile's head sticking in from the side, whilst on the other side of the page there will be a collage of pictures of the locations we filmed at. Finally, the third page where the disc will be slotted, will feature pics of all band members with the croc featured with them.

JP: Printwork Step-by-Step

Step 1.

The first thing I did when creating my digipak was to draft an idea of what I wanted it to look like in my exercise book. I used a pencil to draw my idea, and I believe that my final idea was quite similar. I immediately decided I would be making it A5 size in Photoshop CS3, and decided to use the font 'Star Avenue' from Dafont.com. I decided to include small symbols that show where Architecture in Helsinki can be found, ie Twitter, Facebook. I also wanted include a QR code that smartphone users can scan to get to the band's official website. I wanted the print to mostly consist of a sunrise background, with a small crocodile in the foreground, with the band's name and album name the main point of interest, however I discovered that we were not allowed to use found images as the main focus of our work, so instead I decided to use a still from the actual footage we obtained in Haysden park in Tonbridge.

Step 2.

I began to create my piece on Photoshop. The background used was a still from a video taken by myself in Haysden park in Tonbridge, and I have used an image of a crocodile found on the internet in the bottom centre of the image. It is shrouded in darkness because of the lighting of the photo, and I believe it creates enigma. The only real problems I encountered were the size and shape of the crocodile not fitting into the background properly, by I effectively combatted this by making it smaller and darker, so it is slightly less noticeable. I used the magnetic lasso tool to remove the background from the crocodile, so it would look more real in the background. I also used a translucent colour overlay over the crocodile to make it look darker and more natural in the environment. I also colour corrected the background by using a pale blue overlay on a very low opacity, making the image seem colder.

Step 3.

Next I decided to add the main title of the print. I used the font 'Star Avenue' from dafont.com for my main font, and I typed my words into the website then print screened and imported the images, cropping them down and using the magic wand tool to remove all background from the text. I then put a colour overlay over the top of the text to make it white, and included a shadow on all text to give it a slightly 3D look, as if it is coming out of the page, a very eye-catching feature. I used a thin black shadow at an angle of 107 degrees for each piece of text for continuity. I put a translucent grey rectangle behind the text to make it stand out even more, and create a simplistic style. I had to ensure the fonts were central and lined up with each other, so it would not look uneven. I decided not to abide by the rule of thirds, as the band's name is far too long to include in either third of the print. I decided that if I were to put any other titles within the rule of thirds it would look messy and unprofessional, so I centralised them too, and fortunately Photoshop automatically snaps different layers together in central positions.

Step 4.

This is my final printwork design. I have utilised many of the skills learnt earlier in the year when creating this A5 piece, and I believe that they have been very helpful in creating this piece of work.  I have included several logos at the bottom which symbolise the band's integration with social media, showing that they are on Facebook, and Twitter. I created and included a QR code which can be scanned by smartphone users and will redirect them to Architecture in Helsinki's official website. I used a mixture of the magnetic lasso and magic wand tools to remove the background from the Facebook and Twitter logos, and to create the date of release title I used the same technique as I did when creating the other titles, except I did not centralise it due to the crocodile being in the centre bottom of the image. A problem I encountered was the twitter logo being very pixellated. I combatted this by just deleting the layer altogether and creating a new one with a different twitter logo.

             I decided to relate my print to some of Architecture in Helsinki's real work, including their official website design and layout, and the actual digipak for the 'Moment Bends' albums. They both have simplistic themes with cold colour schemes, which is what I hope to have acheived in my final print. However, it does not relate to AIH's earlier work, such as the images of them with colourful blankets, as instead of going for a colourful theme, I have decided to use fairly dull, cold colours. We all decided to use the recurring theme of the crocodile as a kind of visual link between all of our different texts. It has been included in all of our prints and the digipak, and is the protagonist of our music video. We hope this will create a band image for AIH. It does conform to some generic conventions of indie pop, as artists within the genre often use dull colours or cold themes, as it matches the type of music.

JP: Printwork Update

Below is a draft idea of what I would like to make my print advert look like. I will be making it A5 size in Photoshop CS3, and have already decided to use the font 'Star Avenue' from Dafont.com. I will be including small symbols that show where Architecture in Helsinki can be found, ie Twitter, Facebook. I may also include a QR code that smartphone users can scan to get to the band's official website. The print will mostly consist of a sunrise background, with a small crocodile in the foreground, with the band's name and album name the main point of interest.

TF: Progress Update

In today's lesson (12/11/2012), I volunteered to be the editor of the group. I reviewed all of the footage we had shot so far, including the recent shoot in Hayesden Park, Tonbridge the previous day. My job wasn't to include transitions and specific SFX, but to cut out all the bad footage, or where no action is going on. Our footage turned out to be very good, because the lighting was at the level we wanted. However, one slight problem when reviewing the footage was that some shots were filmed slightly out of focus, but on the contrary the shots that were out of focus are shots we aren't including as we have better takes of the same shot.
Then as a group, we decided that our next film shoot is going to be on Thursday 15th November, where we will be shooting our performance shots. We are going to need to arrange our band members to get to our location (the Drama Studio in our school), and be as productive as possible. We are aiming to get all our performance shots in the one shoot. As well as the shoot on Thursday, we are going back to London on the Sunday of the same week where we will need to film all our footage from this location in the one shoot.

Group: Filming Update

On Sunday 11th November, as a group we went to Hayesden Park for a second shoot. I personally believe that this shoot was very sucessful, as the lighting was at the level we wanted, and we made excellent use of our time there. We will be reviewing the footage in the lesson today, and editing what we need and don't need. We didn't face many difficulties, unlike our other shoots, however, the park was fairly busy so we had to film a lot of the shots a couple of times, and also wait until the location we wanted to use was clear. We took the school camera out as well to film people's reaction when they see a crocodile walking through a park, and will watch the footage back to see if this was an effective decision, and also to see if there is a noticable difference between the quality of the footage in both cameras.

TF: Printwork Update

Here is a photo of my advert so far. As it is my first attempt, I have included a font type that we will potentially use in our title screen at the start of our opening, with the layout of the poster being similar to how I see my advert when it's complete. I have included the band's name in the advert, and also the album name our track is in, 'Moment Bends'. Finally, I have drawn in the five band members that we will be using, as well as our crocodile protagonist. I am trying to show that the crocodile is laying down in a typical male model position as if we were presenting the crocodile through voyeurism.

Group: Progress

Below is a screenshot of the work we have done in Adobe Premiere so far, as you can see, we have not progressed very much, we have just been experimenting with different techniques and ways of editing videos within Premiere. We have tried using the time stretch function to create time lapses, and slow motion shots. As is evident from the screenshot, we have not put many of our shots in any real order, and they are not in the correct position. This is mainly because we are just trying to edit them how we want them before worrying about order or positioning. We have imported our track and it is good quality. We have not tried using colour correction or any advanced editing yet, as we are making it our priority to get the simple editing and cutting rate right. We have tried creating a jump cut shot, but it did not turn out very well, so we will probably scrap the idea, use it on a different shot, or try it again.

Group: Concept Development

As a group we are putting our footage in to the editing software Adobe Premiere Elements 9. Once we have done this, we will save our files into the Data Disk. Also, we are producing our printwork of two advertisements, and one digipak. We have decided that Toby and Jake are going to be creating a printwork, and Ben will be producing the digipak for the group.

After reviewing our footage, we believe we have 30-40% of our music video, however we will need to go back to the locations we have been to previously to capture more footage, and footage to a better effect. Our next shoot is in Hayesden Park, Tonbridge on Sunday 11th November where we will be shooting our performance shots. We need to make sure we organise well, to ensure our band turn up on time, to give us enough time to make our shoot as effective as possible.

The problems we are currently facing are the protagonists costumes' head is very loose, and shaking around the whole time. To counteract this problem we are going to make a slight alteration to the costume. Another problem is we haven't got enough movement shots, and a lot of our shots are static shots on a tripod, so when we go and film again, we will be using a lot more handicam shots, to go with the fast, upbeat tune.

Group: Filming Update

During Half-Term, we conducted three film shoots. One in Brighton, one in London, and one in Hayesden Park, Tonbridge.

We went to Brighton on Monday 29th October. Our main problem of this film shoot, was our battery didn't last long enough to make it successful. We only managed to film in the Sea Life Centre, even though we had a lot more planned shots at this location. However, what was successful is we went round Brighton looking at different locations we could use, such as the pier amusements, and the laines. We plan to go back to Brighton at a later date.

On 31st October we went to London. This had its sucessful moments, but we also found some difficulties. The protagonist we had hired to use, turned up a lot later than we expected, so we had to be quick to get the most out of the lighting. Also in our reversal time lapse shot, the protagonist's head was moving too much, and wasn't looking forward, so the shot we had planned didn't come out as effective as we would have liked. However, on the contrary, the shots we did come up with were very creative, and we believe will look effective in our music video. We have a particular idea of filming both London Eye, and the Brighton Eye in a split-screen shot sped up, with them both rotating opposite ways.

Thursday 1st November was our shoot in Hayesden Park, Tonbridge. This was an effective film shoot, however we could have done better. We are including a shot with our protagonist running at geese, and catching the geese flying away in slow motion. However, we will need to shoot this shot again as we were unable to see the crocodile in the shot. On the positive side, we produced an effective handicam tracking shot which we will use in our video.