First animating attempt

On his Mac, Jordan made a short animatic using iStopmotion. Although it looks very basic it gives a great idea of what we need to do to make it look professional. For example, make sure the print outs are of a high quality and the heads are in exactly the same place for each shot.

http://vimeo.com/17446550

Todays lesson

In todays lesson me and Jordan arranged to meet up on saturday and start recording the song for our animatic clip and final video. Also Jordan will be drawing the animatic and I will be researching different fonts that we could use for our music video.
We also agreed that Jordan will be making a DigiPak prototype and I will be designing a magazine advertisement page. This will hopefully give us experience and knowledge on how to make our final product look as professional as possible.

Prototypes for music video

This is one of photos that Jordan made on Photoshop to give us an idea what our music video will look like and include. For the real thing the heads will be moving and be miming in sync with the song.

Other backgrounds may include beach's, farm's, forests and also we have an idea that would consist of putting our mouths on pieces of fruit so it would look as though they were singing which we thought would quite a cool idea!

Camera angles

After watching some Fleet Foxes' music videos I picked up on the style of camera angles they use. For most of the videos, the shots consist of long pans, close-ups and overlaying shots when the song is slow which gives it a calm and old fashioned look whereas when parts start to speed up they add jumps cuts which gives it a more contempory feel.

Here is one of their videos that is a perfect example..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FQ8xk6XlMo&feature=fvsr

Folk Genre research

Folk music originated in the 19th century. It has been defined in several ways: music transmitted by word of mouth, as music of the lower classes and as music with unknown composers. As listening to recorded music was not possible, music was made by common people during both their work and leisure.

Since the 20th century folk music has become more popular and branched out into other genres such as folk rock, electric folk and folk metal.

Bob Dylan innovated the modern music world by integrating old folk, blues, and other forms of Americana into songs that were both timely and timeless. He was the darling of the folk revivalists in the early 1960s; but, after using an electric guitar in his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, his reputation came under fire from the folkies.

Popular folk instruments are Guitars, Ukulele's, Mandolin's, Bango's.

The song we are covering- White Winter Hymnal, is a folk song. The main instrument in the song is an acoustic guitar which makes the slow and calm and sound brilliant.

Next week's prospects

By the end of next week we hope to of finished our recording of 'White Winter Hymnal' where we will be using Garageband. We also hope to start recording some scenery shots and me and Jordan miming. We hope that by using a HD camcorder it will make the music video more high standard and will save us from having to re shoot the same scene over and over again.

Lighting

Lighting isnt really a key point that we will be focusing on during the recording of our music video. As we are using iStopMotion it will quite tough to portray the same lighting throughout the video! Even though it sounds pretty unprofessional, it also works really well for example, OK GO's- End Love music video is a perfect example of how having different lighting for each frame can look good. So hopefully it will have the same effect with our music video!

The music video...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2fpgpanZAw

Storyboard

As Jordan is a better artist it was one of his tasks to create a first draft for the storyboard. The ideas we came up with for the different backgrounds were completely random! E.g Forest, Beach, Brick wall, Fruit bowl etc.

The link...http://jordanbezantsa2media.blogspot.com/2010/11/quick-sketched-storyboard.html