CALIFORNICATION MUSIC VIDEO - FINAL

Californication vimeo from Elliot Hogan-Keogh on Vimeo.

Here is our final music video - Californication by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers - the video on Youtube was taken down due to copyright, therefore I uploaded it on Vimeo.

Welcome Moderator to my A2 Media Studies Blog!

The below posts contain: My music promotional video, magazine advert and the album artwork (digipak). The posts below will visually show my thought processes as the product developed from the initial idea, to final products. My evaluation questions are on 4 separate pages which can be easily seen at the top of my Blog.


Elliot Hogan-Keogh 9106

Claremont Fan Court School: 64680

OCR A2 Media Studies

April 2014

Video Brief:

To create a music video along with its ancillary products.

FINAL PRODUCT - CALIFORNICATION MUSIC VIDEO.

Here is our finished music video - Californication by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Please click play on the embedded video or click here.

FINISHED DIGIPACK

Finished album

 Front cover

 Track List

FINISHED MAGAZINE ADVERT

CONSTRUCTION: DIGIPACK

-         - Use of screen shot of a band scene showing two guitarists as album front cover.

-         - The band image is editing on iMovie using the effect: Cartoon – which makes the image look glossy and glowing.

-          -The two guitarists have been edited out of their original surroundings in order to be placed onto of a new layer for the album cover – this being the logo of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers – which is red on a white background which makes it stand out and also pronounces the image of the two guitarists.

-         - The song title ‘Californication’ is placed down the side of the front cover in red to highlight the colour of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers logo.

- The function of the magazine advert

- Video, mag ad and front cover what do they all have in common

-         The video, magazine advert and front cover of our Digipack all have similarities in common, mainly the imagery. We used a screen shot from the video for the Digipack’s front cover and magazine advert of the two guitarists and the surrounding backgrounds. The front cover and the magazine advert all have the effect from iMovie called Cartoon. We also use the same font for the title of the song, on the magazine advert and the front cover – which is a bold red font. We also use the Red Hot Chilli Peppers logo in both the magazine advert and the front cover in order to make it more recognisable. However we split it halfway across the magazine advert and in the front cover of the album so that we could see it wasn’t purely a Red Hot Chilli Peppers production – in the video itself, the logo pops up at one point on the television.  

CONSTRUCTION: DESIGNING THE DIGIPACK AND MAGAZINE ADVERT

Designing the Digipack and Magazine Advert

TRELLO

I began to use  the website 'Trello' to create a to-do list associating with my media work. Trello allows you to create lists that are labelled 'To do' 'Doing' and 'Done'. This is very useful for planning my activities associating with Media A2 as I can keep on top of my work, whilst being organized and keeping records of everything I am doing for future preference.

Q.1 SECTION A - DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

Before starting our productions I made a preliminary video to get used to the equipment necessary to film and edit such as the Canon Camera, the different tripods and lighting and iMovie. The preliminary was named 'Blood Lotus' and was about the Vietnam War and two lovers involved within the conflict. 

At AS I made a short thriller film opening called 'An Eye for Danger'. 

At A2 I made a music video for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Californication. 

Blogger + Presentational tools were an essential part of the production process as I researched, planned, recorded and sought feedback for my production using tools such as Pinterest and  ScoopIt! to collate research which shaped my decision making and helped me organize my creative decisions efficiently, especially the access to professional examples that I intended to emulate. Communication tools were already part of my everyday working methods (Facebook, Evernote, Skype, email, BBM, Instagram) so that I could work effectively with my group and these I developed and extended during the 18 months to include Twitter as a research tool (following Alan Rusbridger’s advice that Twitter as a search engine rivals Google, and acts as a news aggregator for relevant information). In order to create evidence supporting the creative decisions that lay behind my productions at AS, I used digital presentational tools like Slideshare and Prezi embedded in my blog and by A2, I was using New Hive (an interactive infographic) to collate my work.

From the start, I used digital equipment to film my movie work using a Digital camera Canon 550D to make 'Blood Lotus' ( a practice film opening) and my preliminary piece of work. I also made ancillary products: at AS, I made a set of marketing tools to promote my film using the digital camera (film poster, webpage design) and online digital tools such as Facebook and Twitter to market and distribute my film. I created an audience profile in Photoshop based on NME’s.

To edit my film work, I have used Apple Macs both at school and at home I quickly became very competent editing in Adobe Premiere, learning to make our thriller opening using audio, soundtrack, colour correction etc. Later I moved to iMovie to edit my music video where laying down the soundtrack was easy but the lip-synching in the editing much more challenging as it was very precise work with a huge number of edits and transitions. As Heidi Peeters asserts, music video is all about spectacle, so linear narrative gives way to a succession of visual codes, leading to the interweaving of genre conventions (such as performance, close ups of the star, some illustration of the lyrics) with spectacle that is cut to the beat. This meant a huge skills development for me as I sought to depart from the simple narrative structure of my thriller film opening, which was more or less a series of brief scenes with music and titles punctuating the visuals, to an explosion of visual spectacle that should withstand repeated viewings.

Another challenge was creating a unified whole out of three different products: I had to incorporate visual elements of the music video into  the digipack design which in turn had to feature on the magazine advertisement in order for the three to work as a synergistic whole promoting the album.

Using Photoshop,  I designed the layout of the digipack and magazine advert, bearing in mind the need for clear visual codes, as I had learned from Roland Barthes.

DIGIPACK DESIGN

During today's lesson we began designing our Digipack for our Californication music video. We began focusing on the front cover of the album - therefore, we went through all of our filming to date, as well as stills to find original images suitable for the front cover of our digipack. On a piece of filming where the film scrolls across a wall with the words 'CALIFORNIA' gratified on it, we decided that this would be appropriate for our front cover as we would have the CALIFORNIA in graffiti in the centre of the digipack and above and below the CALIFORNIA graffiti we would use other images and designs suitable for the front of the digipack.

Max began designing something else to add to our digipack. He took the shape of California on the map, coloured it in red, on the program Paint and added a green stem to it, to make it look like a chilli pepper, after the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. This was a very unique idea, that provides something different to our digipack. We haven't yet decided where this is going to go yet on our digipack.

PINTEREST

Click here to see my Pinterest on Music Magazines

EVALUATION Q.4 NEW HIVE

CLICK HERE TO SEE MY NEW HIVE

CONSTRUCTION: EDITING PROCESS

In today's lesson we made use of the photos of the snap-back scene that we took on Tuesday afternoon.

We began by selecting all the best photos from our various shoots and cropping them all down to the same size, making sure to cut out any unnecessary background. These pictures will form a montage in our music video so it is important that they are all the same relative size.

After they had been cropped we put the images into photo-shop to be layered and defined to bring out better colour contrast and lighting effects. The end results have been put into a Flipagram slideshow.

CONSTRUCTION: SNAPBACK SCENE

On Tuesday 14th January, Elliot, Max, and I went to Esher and location scouted for possible places to shoot our snapback scene.

The idea behind this shoot was to emphasise the American and Hollywood obsession with product and materialism that is referred to in the lyrics of Californication. This ties in with Adorno's theory of a culture industry that is designed to feed the general population petty materials and products to keep them happy and brain-dead.

After location scouting, we now had three locations that were ideal for the scene - a small common, a private road and against an all white wall. The shoot consist of us three standing in different locations in a profile position. To represent the materialism we decided to use snap-back hats because they are currently a very popular fashion item and are quite an expensive item of clothing that is not a necessity. The scene features us all wearing these snap-backs, but in every photo the position of the hat will change while we remain still. The photos will form a montage in our video to represent the materialism of Californication.

EDITING: FLIPAGRAM

Flipagram

For our latest shoot, which involved us taking many shots of the group wearing snapback hats at different angles, we used the new app Flipagram, to make a stop motion video of all the shots that were taken.

Flipagram allows you to add as many photos as you like to the video, as well as editing how long each transition is.

A music feature is also available for background sounds, and you can chose from a wide range of tracks, old and new, to play in the background - although these are only 30 seconds long and to use the full track you must pay the usual purchase price with ranges from 79p-99p.


Here is an example of the stop motion video we made using Flipagram for our music video - Californication.