Dominic Crewe's Music Video Blog

Initial research for me mainly consisted of listening to lots of tracks on Spotify and YouTube to find songs we could have used. Then, for inspiration concerning music video, I watched some on TV channels.

Once we started learning about the theories, I analysed some music videos from YouTube to get a further understanding of how they were applied in industry. Research into album covers and websites meant using the internet a lot as well to find out what was typical of the industry.

When it came to planning, we used considerably more video than last year. Whilst I was still developing ideas for our music video, I wanted to see how practical my idea to include stop-motion was. So I used my own camera, a printer and Adobe Premiere Pro to make a short stop-motion video in a few hours. This is explained more in this post.

As well as sketching shots onto Post-Its to make a storyboard, we also took it upon ourselves to go around London in pairs to film every shot of the narrative we thought we wanted. When we came back, I spent a couple of days editing it into a visual storyboard. This was the first time we got to film footage in HD which showed us a lot of the issues that this caused despite the advantages of higher quality. More information about this can be found in this post.

When I was initially considering what our record label could be, I made some logos to go with them at home. This was done with Techsoft Design Tools, design freeware to render bitmaps in quality of 300 dpi. The colouring in itself was actually done in Microsoft Paint.

Screenshot of how I constructed the logo using lines and geometric shapes.

This was also the technique I used to make the logos for Cracked Headphones and No Inclination before we settled upon Erwin's Felicide as a name for the band.

Over the half-term, I had used the internet to set up our band's three social networking sites; YouTube, Twitter and Facebook however they only really started to look professional once they had some content in the form of videos, photographs and news.

The next week mainly involved shooting the narrative on our HD camcorder, capturing in school and finding the best takes in Premiere Pro. We couldn't produce our music video much without having filmed the performance.

When we did the film the performance, we did get to use a lot more technology. For a start, we used the computers and specialist software to control the studio lights to create the blue background seen at the end of the video and to generally illuminate the band. We also made use of two floor lights to make bold shadows on the walls.

Something closer to what we actually wanted to do

Also, during the performance, I took a few photographs for the website and Facebook but also I spent time operating playback which meant using my MP3 player with the track loaded on with the overhead speakers in the Seaward Studio.

During post-production, it was initially very similar to last year's post production except it took more time because:

The sequence was longer
There are more cuts
Using HD footage slows down the computer's rendering abilities

After a few weeks, we had a finished music video but the performance was all in colour. To get the video to look as it does now, with Angus in colour and everything else in black and white, we had to learn and do rotoscoping. Here's a short video explaining how we did it:

In the production of our ancillary products, we sketched Erwin's Felicide's logo, used Paint Shop Pro to make several versions of our logo and finally exported it as a jpeg image. So that we wouldn't lose image quality in making it larger, I personally used Adobe Illustrator to convert it to a vector image. This was particularly useful in making the inside of our album cover as each cat had to be about 400 pixels wide and I would have had to extract the background manually if Illustrator hadn't done that already.

The evolution of our logo

For the album cover, we only used the logo for one page but for all the others, we used photographs of our band members. During the photoshoot, we set up a three point lighting system in the Seaward studio with floor lights. By using floor lights, it was easy to illuminate our band effectively whilst creating controllable shadows on the wall behind them which we decided not to edit out of the album cover.

To ensure high quality shots, we used a 9.1 megapixel Sony camera on a tripod which provided us with pictures of about 4 times higher quality than they needed to be. The main problem that we had on our shoot was the actual subject of photography. Either band members facial expressions changed too much or the action was too fast to time properly (this was definitely the case with the back cover). As a result we used continuous shooting mode or the 'burst' setting on the camera to take shots in rapid succession until we got the right one.

The burst setting capturing Tom performing a forward roll.

With the best photographs chosen, I touched them up in Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop with these 6 steps:

Crop down to approximately the right size.
Change curves (as seen below) to make the wall 100% whilst trying to brighten everything else up minimally.
Use a clone brush to edit out the darker shadows in the wall created by extruding bricks, etc.
Increase brightness and contrast to make the colours 'pop'.
Use a noise reduction filter to smooth out textures such as peoples' faces.
Touch up any small areas (such as Angus's cheek) with a paintbrush set to a low opacity.

The unedited photograph used for the front of the album cover

For the rest of the album cover,we arranged the touched up photographs, logos and text over the digipack template. The text took a little bit longer because we had to find suitable free fonts on DaFont.com. We eventually settled on Underwood Champion and Bicycle although we had to edit the text in Bicycle because the original font is outlined. As for the Live Records Ltd logo, I made a digital version of a sketch that Claire made in Microsoft Publisher because it only had to be about 100 pixels wide.

The logo for Live Records Ltd.

With the album cover finished, I started working on the website. This was done on the new platform, Wix. Because Wix is flash-based, we were able to do so much more than on a HTML site such as Myspace:

There was no need to scroll down the page itself to find out information.
There are links to everything (music video, album cover, behind-the-scenes video, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) which can be seen without leaving the site.
We could add special beahviours to items on the page; such as the 'About Us' photographs expanding when somebody clicks on them and text being circled or glowing if the mouse hovers over them.

Just a few of the behaviours on our website.

In our evaluation, we also used a range of hardware and software to make it more interesting than an essay.

For Questions 1 and 2, we used our camcorder but set to film in PAL DV because we didn't need to be high quality. In a couple of days of cutting out parts and adding print screened pictures, we just had to export it, put it on YouTube and embed it on our blogs.

For Question 2, I also made a flowchart into Microsoft Publisher which I saved as a gif and also uploaded to the blog.

For Question 3, I first used the questionnaires and Microsoft Excel to collect the information and summarise some of the questions in graph form. After print screening the graphs and cropping them in Paint Shop Pro, I made a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to present the trends I found and uploaded it to Scribd.

For Question 4, we had to use CamStudio (video screen capturing freeware) to capture the process of rotoscoping before Claire and Wanda helped me to complete the video by narrating and acting for it. In the end this post used 3 videos that had to be embedded again and 8 pictures including the one below.