Filming Schedule

To help us with our planing and time management I created a filming schedule.

History of Music

Overall the years music videos have developed drastically, from just watching images with music in the background to music video created with hi-tech equipment. Below is a prezi I put together to sum up the history of music videos.

History of Music Videos

New Digipak

Here is an update version of our Album - Melanie Fiona - The MF Life 

Album Cover Pictures

Here are some of the images taken to create the album cover:- 

Font

In order for our group to understand what fonts would be best for us to use on our album, I decided to research different type of fonts which are use on albums. Below are three of the fonts which stood out the most for me. 

As our the artist of our music video is female I decided to look at a variety of fonts which are used on female artist album covers. For example Beyonce, the font she used for her latest album Beyonce 4. From my research I found that the name of this font is Dream Orphan. What I like about this font is that it gives a sort of vintage, posh  look to the album without taking away the fact it is an R'n'B album. Also the colour black (even though it is plain) gave some type of bold statement, which I believe represent the genre R'n'B. Additionally the contrast between the colour black and her complexion, gives the album a rich look 

Unfortunately I were not able to find that exact font, however a font which I found similar to this font was Apple Garamond from dafont.com. 


Using Adobe Photoshop I experimented with our artist name Melanie Fiona, both in lower case and capitals; to get an idea of what it may look like if placed on to the front of our album. 

Another female artist which I analysed the font on her album cover was Kelly Rowland. This album in particular is an R'n'B album which includes a lot of dance. Research showed this particular album was nominated for International Dance Award. Moreover as you can see the font  in which she used is very thin with both inner and outer glower. This I believes represents the type of music included in her album - dance music; the type of music which you would hear in a club. Nonetheless the font illustrate or 'paints a atmosphere' of a club.  As you can see below I attempted to find the closest font possible to the one featured on Kelly Rowland album:





This font is called Good Times also from the dafont.com. Unlike the font featured on the album this font is much thicker and bolder. This font in particular only has uppercase letter, therefore I was unable to see what it may look in lowercases. In order to achieve the similar font on Kelly Rowland's album I had to manipulate the font in Adobe Photoshop. Below is an image stating the quick steps I took to achieve this look.

Additionally another album font I looked at was Keyshia Cole - A Different Me, compared to the others I have reviewed, this font in particular was quite soft with a slight ombre effect. The swerves gives a gentle touch to the album. In someways the font gives the impression that the album will reveal a softer side to Keyshia Cole, therefore reflecting the name of the album 'A Different Me'. 

Using the font MTF Under Your Skin from 
DaFont.com I tried to recreate the same font, to understand what the name Melanie Fiona may look like in a similar font; however I used the colour grey. 

After reviewing several different album cover fonts, we decided to take ideas from all Beyonce and Keyshia Cole albums which lead us to the font Apple Garamond. For example what we liked about Beyonce Album font is that the font looks bold and stands out, it also looks classy and vintage; additionally the font makes her name looks like a statement which is how we wanted our artist name to come across on her album. Furthermore what we liked from Keyshia Cole's Album font is the ombre effect, in which the colours used to create the ombre is based on the background. Nonetheless we have come up with a font which we believe represent our artist as bold and fearless.

CHANGES 
We had made some minor changes to the font of our album cover. We found that using the gradient overlay with the colours black, white and pink contrasted greatly with the chosen image, therefore we changed the colours to pink and white. Below is our now chosen font:-

Evaluation - Question 1

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of a real media product?

There are several ways in which our music video develop, as well as challenged the forms and conventions of a real media product. First and foremost as a group we established out music video must contain similar aspects as other established music video in our chosen genre, to attract our target audience. Nonetheless in order for our group to produce a successful music video we established we would need understand all the forms and conventions of a R'n'B/Hip Hop music video, to then decide on whether or not to challenge these forms and conventions.

Below I have created a video to highlight how we have develop challenged the forms and conventions of a real media product.

Album Cover Research - Melanie Fiona and Others - Sath

To begin creating the digipack for our music video for the song 4AM, we needed to look further into digipacks. The best place to start was by looking into album covers for the artist Melanie Fiona as she is the artist of the song 4AM.

Melanie Fiona's fist album was called 'The bridge', it was released in 2009. The album cover for the album consists of a close up of the artist's face, the picture seems to be a side portrait shot with Melanie facing the camera but looking past it to the right. It gives us a sense that she is looking back at something which could be her past. The photograph is presented in a grey scale format and shows a lot of the shadows in the picture. There is very little highlights shown but gives there is enough which helps define the face of the artist as well as parts of her hair. There is also a white spotlight on the wall behind the artist which goes with the colour scheme of the album cover which is black, white and grey.

Melanie Fiona's next album was called 'The MF life' and it was released in 2012 which is a three year gap between her two albums. At first sight when you compare the two album covers, you can notice that her second album cover has a lot more colour than her first album cover. In this album cover, the picture is a long shot which shows a side view of her leaning down against a lamp post. The picture is taken on a sunny day and has a lot of bright colours as well as a purple heart in front of the lamp post. Since this is titled the MF life, i think that the warm bright colours and the atmosphere of the picture is shown to put across the nature of Melanie's life and her personality. 

The next album cover i am going to be analysing, is the album cover for '4' by Beyonce Knowles'. I chose to analyse an album cover of Beyonce, as she is another R&B singer and that is the genre of music that 4AM is from. For this album cover, the colour scheme consists of black, yellow, and pale green. The black and yellow is shown using Beyonce in a medium shot showing her with both of her arms over her head. The idea of Beyonce having her arms over her head, it looks as if she is relaxing without any care for what she is doing. She is shown to be topless with a long black furry coat hanging over her shoulders to cover most of her torso but leaves her belly showing. There is a lot of golden jewelery used in this album cover, it is used to show the wealth and status of Beyonce as she is a well paid artist.

The next album cover i will be looking at is for the album 'Talk that Talk' by R&B singer Rihanna. This album was released in 2011 and was the singer's sixth studio album. This album cover consists of a close up of the artist's face. She is shown wearing an sleeveless top with a lot of eye make up and lip stick. She is also shown sticking out her tongue which shows us the nature of Rihanna and her personality in the album. There is a big 'R' on the top left hand corner of the album cover in grey which is used to represent Rihanna. The album name is written on the wrist of artist almost making it look like a tattoo which helps it blend into the photo and makes it look natural. 

Miguel - The Artist (Seun)

MIGUEL
For our media project we have decided to do the song, Adorn by the R&B artist Miguel.
Miguel's Website

History

Miguel Jontel Pimentel was born on the 23rd october 1986. he was first signed to Drop Squad Records after graduating from high school in 2000, due to a change of image he signed to Jive Records in 2007 where he released his first album All I Want You. although the album wasn't successful immediately, it became a sleeper hit and gradually went up the album chart in the Billboard 100 until it reached certified gold, selling 404,000 copies in the US alone.

Image

His image is very prominent and is often seen as the first indicator to his music. He is all known to have a smart hipster style. He is known for having tight suit with quirky accessories. The colours he usually wears are either bright and bold and black with a futuristic.

The first image displays Miguel signature style by having the qurky bow tie along with the suit like cardigan. As well as this he also has his staple futuristic glasses, which are seen in alot of his looks.
We would be taking inspiration of this by using both a bow tie and a pair of Ray-Bans, taking inspiration from his glasses.

This is another one of his looks where he uses the glasses again and he has more of a rock edge.

I alot of his clothes also consist of leather jackets, which  we would also be adapting for our video .

Albums

All I Want Is You 

Kaleidoscope Dream

Animatic For Our Music Video - Construction (Seun)

Jessica and I had left Sath and Prince in charge of the animatic and this is what they came up with. I felt that this was successful because that got the shot in time with the lyrics and I felt that the shots were carefully thought out.

This is what they got up to behind the scenes:

To begin with, Prince and Sath started watching the official music video for our song choice 'Adorn'. As they were watching the music video, they wrote down the different shots and angles in the music video.

  They wrote down every single shot that was used in the entire music video and the length of each cut. By the time they had finished the entire song, they had a couple pages of shots to group and analyse.

After they had all of the shots, they started analysing them to show which shots were most used and how effectively they was used.

Once they had analysed the different shots used in the actual music video, they started to write down shots for our own music video.

Once the shots were written down, they drew them out so we can put them onto our animatic.

Once they finished the drawing, they had uploaded them onto the computer and cropped them out into smaller pictures of each individual shots.

Once all of that was done, they opened up 'Final Cut Pro' and inserted all of the pictures and the song.

Once they had all we needed onto final cut, they started putting pictures onto the timeline according to the song.