Throughout the whole of our production period, we have had to consider health and safety issues. In many cases we have had really good ideas that werent safe such as using our artists on the school roof to show a high shot to show his power  and in some cases have made scenes safe to use such as the river shots in our video. Firstly we have not filmed ny shots that would be of risk to anyone involved in the video and have only really used one shot in where we had to be safe. This was the river shot and here we had to make sure the stones were correctly placed in the water and wouldnt move to be entirely safe for filming.

We also had to take in consideration of normal filming shots like roads for cars etc so that our artists was safe at all times. The rooftop shot we wanted to do however was not safe for filming after we decided that firstly we wouldnt get permission and secondaly the risk was too high to take. This shows that we have took health and safety extremely seriously in our production work.

Here is my completed website in time for my deadline:

http://bradleystokes10.wix.com/ed-sheeran-webpage

All of the pages on my webiste are active links as I have completed not only the front page but the whole website as I wanted to create a more professional website and wanted to link all of the site together with both my video and my digipak. Please feel free to look around my site at my finished site.This is my overall completed ancillery task and I have now completed both ancillery tasks as well as my video with all being completed on time.

With the deadline coming up tomorrow, I decided to try and add anything extra to my website that would make it even better. For my video page, I had planned to upload my youtube video that as a group we had created. I did this by using the template already provided and changing the thumbnail and the link to the video I want rather thanthe templates. As the page was still really bare, I needed to add something extra and decided that I would research the lyrics of the song Grade 8 that we did and put these onto my video page. I found the lyrics and copied these onto my website either side of the video. This was perfect as it completed the page and looked good especially with the text being in Yellow to stick with the theme.

This was my website completed and just as I was about to finish I noticed that I could add a song over the top of my website. As I did the song grade 8 I decided to use this song over the top. I went on my itunes at home and uploaded the song from my itunes library onto the website. The music player symbol I also changed to be multi coloured to stick with the 'live' colours I used. As I viewed my completely finished website, I changed the playing of the song to repeat as if not the song would only play if you pressed play but now it plays as soon as you go onto the site. My website is now finished.

I went back through my website with most of it completed. I decided that I wanted to stick with the same colour scheme of my digipak which was red, yellow and blue. I started by looking at the text boxes and what ones I could fill and also changing the text colour of these. I changed the colour of the title to red from white. As I had no colour scheme, everything apart from my images were black or white so by adding colour it made the site more appealing. I then changed text to different colours of red, yellow and blue on all of my pages apart from my contact page as I wanted to keep this page simple. In some cases like the tour date pages, I coloured the writing in relation to the countries such as the writing for europe as blue as their flag is blue and red for the US. I filled the boxes in different colours however mostly kept them as black or white as I thought that it looked good. I only need to add in a few more photos and complete my video page and then I am basically done.

As I have started my other ancillery task my digipak, I realised I could use many parts of the digipak on my website. Firstly I started off by changing the website background. I used the same image on my digipak and didnt want to use the same one on my website. I went on photoshop and edited part of another photo and used this on my website. Here is that photo:

After changing my background photo, I could use my digipak front cover on my website to not only lnk the 2 together but promote the new album. I used this image on 2 different parts of the website firstly on the front page so that this was the main headline and also on the release page as it is the new release of his album. As I havent previously worked on my release page, I started working on this. I added 2 headings so that 1 was for the album release and the other was for the song itself Grade 8 release. I added some information on the release date and also came up with a good idea of includng the itunes download images so that it looked like you could download the music straight from the site itself. I was nearly done with my website however I needed to stick with my colour scheme of my digipak too.

I have decided to make changes to my CD digipak. I realised that the template I used meant that both parts at the top were meant to be upside down. This meant I had to rotate the image around. I did this so that if my digipak was produced it would look the same to similar ones on the market today.

Here is my finished digipak after rotation of my CD:

Here is my CD Digipak:

I realised that I hadnt added my CD, Inside page or my spine to my Digipak so had to do this first. I copied them onto my template so that I had a complete CD Digipak. The photos I have used in my digipak have also been used by my group members alex and darren. We decided after discussing what we wanted to do with each photos that as a group we would all use them wherever we wanted too, because we wanted to keep continuity amongst our groups but also, personally I wanted to keep continuity with my other ancillery task my webiste so that both together looked good, but as a group we all looked similar so that the theme of continuity was carried out successfully.

The only thing I needed to finsih on my digipak was the actual CD cover itself. I looked at my template and noticed that the shape was quite difficult. I decided to create my own template to put over the top as it allowed me to save time but also look similar to the template. I started by creating a new photoshop using the measurements again. I then started creating my template by using the shapes toolbar. Here I added a circle for the actual cd, a circle inside this for the ring in the middle of the circle and also added semi circles at each side for the extra parts in CD's. I started by having the inside circle and the background the same colour as all my backgrounds. This is because the inside circle in all CD's are 'cut out' and means that if the CD was produced, you would see the background colour. I then picked a photo I wanted on the CD.

Here is the original photo:

I only wanted the main charcter in the photo (on the right) so I had to carefully crop the image so that I only got him in the shot. I wanted to create an effect where the same image would be used twice on my CD, but coming out of the middle of the CD back to back. The effect would look like the character would be back to back with himself. To create the effect I had to use the eye dropper tool again to get the colour of the background of the image above. This colour I would fill for the CD itself as then the whole CD would be the same colour. This means that when I import the image onto the CD, the whole colour would be the same.

The next thing was getting the image onto the circle with no extra parts coming off. As I created my own template I had to select the image by the eliptique marquee tool. This is where you select the image in a circular way and can edit it from this shape. I tried this many times as I couldnt get the curve correctly with the circle I had created. This was very time consuming as the image would either be too small and not fit the curve or would be over the curve. Finally after many attempts I got one correct and put this onto my CD. I then used exactly the same image as the curve would be the same but flipped the image horizontally. I positioned this iamge the same as the other side and it created the effect I wanted. I then added text to the CD with the artists name and album name again in the red colour font whilst filling the extra parts of the CD in the other two colours, blue and yellow.

Here is my overall CD:

From my template, I realised I needed to do a spine for the digipak. I got the measurements of 125.5 * 6 mm and created a new photoshop page. I had taken a photo especially for my spine which was of a guitar as I couldnt use an image off the internet as this wouldnt be my own work.. I wanted to put a guitar in the middle of the spine with both the album name and the artists name on top or beneath the guitar. Here is my image of my guitar:

I firstly had to crop the image size down and then to just get the guitar had to use the magnetic lasso tool on photoshop to cut only the part I wanted. This took some time as I wanted to make it look perfect. After this I added it onto my background. My background was the same colour as my front and back pages to keep continuity and I did this by using the eye droper tool from the front cover and using the fill tool.  I then added my original plan of having the name of the artist and album on the spine, whilst using the red font again to stick to the theme I ahve used.

Here is my Spine:

Here shows the guitar cropped and cut out from the image.

After completing both my front page and my back page and adding them to my template, I started on my inside page. Looking through my pictures I had taken, I noticed that my character was facing in different directions. I came up with the idea of each photo looking at one another. I originally only had 2 photos that did this however in this lesson I went out too take 2 more photos in the remaining directions I needed. Here are the 2 photos I took this lesson:

With the other 2 photots I had already taken, I had my charcter looking at all directions. I cropped the photos and added them into each corner of my page. The page still looked a bit boring so I added lyrics from the video I created Grade 8 in the same colour scheme I had already used. I decided to use red because it stood out more over the darkish background. Here is my back page:

As you can see the images I have used all look at a direction, in which the way they look will always continue to go round. This is the effect I was looking for and I am very happy with my work. The only thing I needed to do was flip the image. This is because the 2 upper parts on my template need to be upside down because if the album was produced, then they would be upside down.  By flipping them to upside down, if you folded the template they would be the correct way round.

After completing the front page, I started doing my back page. I firsty started off by researching Ed Sheerans album song list. I went onto google and searched for the song list and then added them to my back page. I changed my backpage background to the same colour that I used on my front page so that again it was kept the same. After adding the song names I decided to stick with my colour scheme of Red, yellow and Blue by putting each different song into a different colour. I split the songs into half as I wanted to positon them differently than the normal position of the middle of the page. I then added some of the photos, I had taken to the back page. I decided I didnt want all of the photo so firstly cropped them and edited them to what I wanted. I then copied them onto the back page I was working on. From looking at my CD's at home the other day, I realised that all CD's have a barcode too. I asked my teacher if I was allowed to use one off of the internet as it wouldnt have been oour own and that was the ONLY thing I was allowed to use. I opened it up and coloured the background to match the background colour of the back page and inserted this onto it. Here is my back page completed:

I then had to copy this onto my template. I hadnt copied my front page either so I did both at the same time. Here is how it looks currently:

I had started my digipak, however didnt really have an idea on what to include on the front cover. I went how and looked at CD covers I had at home, to see what kind of things they include. I noticed that on most new CD's there was a sticker that had some information on the songs included. I decided that although I couldnt have a real sticker that I would create the effect on photoshop. I decided to create a box with some of the information I wanted to help 'sell' the product. This also made the cover look better and more professional. The only other thing I needed to make was the title of the album. I decided to add the artists name Ed Sheeran to the cover and put this down the right hand side. I needed a title and came up with 'Coming Home'. The reason I did this is for 2 reasons. I noticed on my website that I had tour date information. With the name of the album as coming home, I could play on the words and call the tour the homecoming tour. This sounded good but another reason why is because I found that the last letter of home 'E' is the same as the beginning of Ed. I decided to link the title with the artists name so that it gave a good effect. I had stuck to a black and white coloured theme however I believed that it looked to plain and boring. Most CD's are colourful to help them stand out, so I decided to go for a Red, Yellow and Blue colour theme. Here is my Front Cover completed:

As you can see, the CD would stand out quite a lot amongst others. By using these colours, it means that I will have to follow this throughout both my digipak and my website as I want to keep good continuity.

As most of my information was complete I started at home to add images onto my website. I started adding the logo's for my contact details onto my contact page and added some photos I had taken too of the artists with another character. This made the website look better and I also began to add other images. I also added the flags of the UK, Europe and the US on the tour date pages so that people knew for definate where they were. I had completed my news, contact and tour date pages however I probably will go back to make them better after i have finsihed completely.

After completing my video, I decided to start the last of my ancillery tasks today which was the digipak. Our teacher said from past experiences using a template for our digipak would help. Here is the template I have chosen to use:

I have used this template as it shows what the measurements are for the CD. After opening my template up on photoshop, I decided to do the front cover first.  Whilst as a group we were filming, we took pictures of the charcters in the video. As a group we wanted to use the same photos each because we wanted to keep continuity between us regarding the ancillery tasks. I chose one of the photos I had taken which is here:

I picked this image for my front cover however realised that this was the same as the background on my website. Although I wanted them to link, I thought this was too similar so decided to keep the image on the digipak but change my background on my website. I then began to start my front cover on photoshop.

I have now added more information onto my website. I have added some tour information onto my tour page. Most major artists tour in the UK, Europe and The US so I decided that I would need to create a worldwide tour. I had 3 different sections which would show where and when he would be touring. This took me a long time as I had to research places where artists perform in europe and in the US. This in the end looked quite good and all the dates were linked together. I will expand on this with images to make it look better.

Here is the link to our finished project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNXmE5LMSbA

We have uploaded the vidoe onto youtube after completing the final parts of our project. We had a few spaces in the video and decided on using effects to make the video run smoother. As we had already done most of this we didnt have too much to do so we uploaded our finished project onto youtube. We then checked it through and found there was no delay and the lip syncing was good which overall I was very happy with. The finished video has been successfully uploaded and is now ready to view on youtube.

I am continuing to add information onto all of my website. I started to add information onto my news page. I changed the template around a little bit as I cam up with 3 news stories that I could add onto my news page. The 3 stories all had their own box and were positioned ext to each other. I then included a big heading that showed what was on the page, and created sub headings so that if the website was real, people would see what story they would be reading. I did this beacuse it just made the website look more professional. I then went ot my video page where I added a heading. My idea for the video page was to upload my video from youtube so that people could directly be linked to my video. As the school had restrictions of uploading videos, images and music I couldnt do this today so will have to do this in the future. I then went straight to my contact page. The template was already in a good format, so I expanded on this. I added the same text boxes and came up with 4 ways of being contaced through twitter, facebook, my space and the website itself. I included this onto the page and decided that when I upload images, I can upload the logos of these companies. So far I have done information for around half of my website, however at the moment I have no colour scheme in place which I will change soon.

With the deadline being tomorrow today was our last main chance of getting everything finished. We wanted to do a lot with the video so we started by putting in the rest of the photos we had took yesterday. This was quite quick as we didnt have much to do as the majority was done yesterday. Now that our whole video ran smoothly we were still left with a problem. The original plans included a part leading up to the chorus however we believed that this was too long for a clip. We had took many different locations for these shots from last week and decided that we were going to split these up. We had decided to pick the selected clips and crop part of the video clip that looked best. After cropping this part, we cut the part off the clip we already had on our timeline and put them together. This created the same effect however there was more clips and the video looked a lot better than originally. We did this for the 2 parts leading up to the chorus and we were happy with the progress we had made. The last thing we needed to do was the rewind effect. The rewind effect occured around the 2 minute mark in the song. In our planning we came up with the idea that we wanted to use eevry clip before the rewind in a quick flash on our video. We left this till last because we didnt know what clips we would be using. We had to copy each clip seperately and paste them back into the timeline. We calculated the time that was missing from the video that our rewind had to cover so that we had no gaps again and this was roughly around 20 seconds. We then after pasting every clip, cut every clip to similar sizes until the end where we tried to speed up the end of the rewind. After doing this we watched the rewind back over and over again and finally after more editing liked what we had done. This meant that apart from the effects being added our overall video was basically done. We still had a little bit of time left so started adding slow motion effects onto the bottle drop etc but didnt finish it all.

Starting my website at first was rather hard however I started getting used to the editing. I started my website by firstly deleting some content on the front page. I focused mainly on the front page, as I created some text boxes and filled them in black and white. I also changed the title of the webpage to Ed Sheeran as well as changing the background image to one of my photos I had taken. This is the photo I have used:

After adding this as my background, I went further into the editing aspect of my website. I started to play around with the effects on my title and found a really good effect that I liked but also thought looked good on my title page. This was called the cannon emitter and made it look as a whole a bit more lively and better. I started adding in information onto my title page. I began by firstly putting information into the boxes I had created. I made up some information regarding tour dates and his new album release which will be my Digipak. I did this so that I linked both my ancillery tasks together. After adding this information into my front page I started playing aroudn with the headings option on the left hand side. The template had already gave me options to use however I started looking at other websites for artists similar to Ed Sheeran and looked at what headings they have on their websites. Some of the template was helpful however I changed the headings that werent to some that other artists have used on their website. I also added an effect to the template. At first the template was boring and simple however I created a bubble effect and added this, which also meant that when you hover over the heading the writing moves which looked really professional. The last thing I did was add a hyperlink from a part of ym information. As I had created a tour date page and was talking about his tour on the front cover, I found out how to add a hyperlink on wix by going to the option menu. I created the link to the tour date page and tried it out to make sure it worked correctly.

Today we took the photos to cover the gaps in our video. Here are some we have used:

We took these photos to put into our video. We did this to make the video flow more and also they were used to show the story of love from the emotions. For example these 3 photos show an argument, the love aspect and the fun part of the relationship.

After taking the photos, we uploaded them onto the mac computer. Here we started to add in some photos however it took longer than supposed too because of the way that the videos moved because we had to add them in near the beginning. My shot timing list again helped with this however we finsihed with most of the gaps completed.

As im nearing the end of my video I have started creating the website for my artists which is one of the ancillery tasks. I quickly realised at school that with school restrictions most of the things I wanted to do like upload images I couldnt do. I decided that in school time I would focus on my video and my other ancillery as much as possible while doing this task at home.  I had to create a wix account which is a program which allows you to create a free website. After doing this I looked around the site for a good template to start  my website. I am not familiar with the program or how to use it at all so today I have just been messing around with it and trying new things. I noticed there were 2 ways of editing and have gained some basic skills like text and fill on the program. In the next couple of days I am going to start my website fully and put some information onto it.

After our positioning of the clips on our music video timeline, we as a group knew what we needed to film. We started filming these extra clips in the lesson by going to different locations. We decided that the clothing had to be different to other scenes so that our mise en scene was different throughout. We went out to different locations to do different shots so that we could get as much video done in time for editing and our deadline. After taking these we went through the clips again choosing the best ones. This was then put into our video. As we had to get the lip syncing done perfectly, we noticed there were very little gaps like around half a second long between some clips. As the deadline was appearing quickly we decided to in some cases keep the gaps for effect in the video but in other cases add images of the 2 characters. These images would be included on our rewind part of the video. We decided that next wednesday the 28th of November we would take these images.

Today as a group we didnt take any more photos as our on our schedule we didnt plan too, but instead we got our video up to scratch with everything we had already filmed and uploaded onto our mac. The video clips we had taken on the 14th and the 15th in the studio we already chose the best out of. We decided that in the lesson we will put them into our timeline and get them in the correct positions on the video in time with the lip syncing. This took quite long to do as we realised very soon that where we had imported video clips later on in the song, we had gaps in the video. This meant that when we uploaded these clips, the timings of the other clips after would change times. This was very time effective as it meant we wasted a lot more time putting the clips we had already done back in their original time places. I began to make a timing list of every different clip we had so that time was minimised doing this.

Here is my timings for the clips:
This timing sheet shows my first few clips times but also shows most of my video clip timings. This is because I had to find each clips original place to start so that the lip syncing was in sync throughout the video.

After putting the clips back in the correct places, we looked at what we needed to do next. We decided the next clips we needed to take and looked at the schedule for our locations so that we could do them quickly and be able to upload them quickly. We noticed the deadline was coming up quickly so we had to sit down and plan exactly what we would be doing for the rest of our time leading to the deadline for our video.

Today we went to the studio we had originaly booked for the 14th. The studio was located in Harlow, in the town centre just 10 minutes from school. We had to take our props from school which consisted of the camera and the tripod. We also brought other props such as a guitar to use in our filming. This was because we had researched Ed Sheeran around a month ago and had seen that he plays an acoustic guitar so by having one, it was more realistic and also looked good at the same time. The main point of the location was to get all of our choruses done. This was a running theme we wanted in the video of keeping the location the same throughout which meant we had to do it at the same time. When we arrived we went into the studio and played around with the lighting. We also found that some props were useful such as the seats we used which gave it more of an effect. We filmed all 3 parts of the chorus for our song whilst also taking the other shots we wanted to take as you can see from our shot schedule a few days ago. Looking back after on the camera we were satisfied with our shots and filming and began to take some pictures of the people we used in the film, Darren and Lauren. We took these began we need photos for our webiste and our digipak and decided that as a group we would use the same photos to keep continuity between us. Here are some shots of our location and the props we used today:

Here is the location and the lighting that we used.

 Here are some of the props we have used in this particular filming sequence.

Here are the people involved with the props they used.

Today we had planned to go to the studio we had booked for our filming. We asked for final confirmation yesterday about whether the studio was definately booked however the studio had to change the appoitment. We decided to do it tomorrow, the 15th in our media lessons so that we could just change the schedule around and stick to the other dates we put down for the filming. We decided on this because we looked at our schedule and knew we could take many more of our shots in and around school. The shots we took were the ones we had scheduled to be on the 15th and did these in the lesson. After taking these shots we uploaded all of the clips onto our mac. We again took 3 takes on every shot to make sure we had the best possible film but also to use for cropping down for certain parts of the song. This allowed us to stick to the schedule we had originally planned but also got extra clips done ready to put into our video. We then looked back as a group through our clips we had taken and decided on the better clips of the 3 we took. From here we cropped down the clip size and included them onto our video in perfect timing with the song.

After taking the first shots of our video we began to upload them onto our mac computer to get our video started. We took at least 3 shots of each of the first shots so that we could edit the best one or parts of each together. The first part was the drums and we took 2 different shots to see what would look better. We decided as a group which was the best and started to import this onto our video from our video camera. We the did this for the lips and the eyes and did around the first 10 seconds of our clip. We had to then after uploading this, get the lips in sync with the music. This meant we had to download the track to import onto our video. We did this making sure that the song was the same length of time as the song we had been using so that we didnt make the same mistake as last time in our warm up video. After getting the correct song we put the videos into the correct places. The first 10 seconds were completed and we discussed the props needed to take the next shots we had scheduled to take.

 After finishing our planning and having our schedule we decided to take the first few shots of our video which we had scheduled to do today. We saw that the first shots we needed a drum kit so we went and found one in school to take the drum beat. We also in this lesson took the close up of the mouth and eyes for the first lines of the song. This was easy to take as we found a good location which had a black background which we wanted to do to add effect. We got back from taking our first few shots and decided that we needed to have a lot of different locations for our video. For our plans the locations had to be perfect or the look we wanted wouldnt come off. We decided that we needed a 'white wall' background for our choruses. Our group member Alex asked one of his mates to use his studio which had a photo and filming location of what we was looking for. As a group we discussed what we were going to do and booked the studio. This was the main location done and also allowed us to see what shots we would be filming on what day so we knew what was covered in the video from our schedule we completed before.

Here is our shot schedule for our video.

After finishing planning we thought as a group we should have a shot schedule. This is a schedule that tells us what day we will take our shots, what props we will need for that day and also where the loaction is for that day. We began by going through out shot sequence and determining whether we could get many shots done in one particular location. We wanted to do all the choruses the same with minimal but noticeable changes and decided that all the choruses would have to be filmed at the same location at the same time. We looked back throuhg our shots and thought about locations of each. We came up with many different locations in nearby distance to one another that could fulfil the shots we wanted whilst also allowing us to do them at the same time. As you can see from the schedule we have planned this thoroughly and have came up with many different dates for filming and which shots will be filmed together starting from the 7th of November. Some of our shots havent been scheduled as we are waiting till we have finished the editing of these parts before filming the next shots.

Here is our planning completed:



We still had to plan the last part of our video but based on our other planning and the last lesson we knew we wanted to stick with the other choruses. We planned what to do differently in the last chorus which was a face view shot rather than a side view shot to show better emotions to stick with the love story. We added this onto the planning and came up with some little effects we wanted to put in such as the lights going out after the song finished.

After last lesson we had to just finish our planning for our project. All we needed to do was finish the whole timing of the song which was 3:00 minutes long. We had stopped towards the end in our last lesson of planning and we were just deciding what we wanted to do. We as a group talked about what to do, and we stuck with the same chorus parts to be included in our video. We decided to change the ending for the storyline to be more clear. We started talking about the ending of the planning but then went back through all of shots and discussed if everything was what we wanted to do and saw if we had came up with any more ideas to make the video look better. This extra time helped as we were able to go through as a group exactly what we wanted to do in the video and although we didnt completely finish the planning, We left the lesson nearly completing our planning as well as having a better insight into what we wanted to achieve in our video.

Here is the planning we got up too:

Here we have got up to shot number 14, however we have around 3 more to do which is what we are going to do next.

After planning the first part of our plan we needed to plan the rest of the video so that we could start filming. Here shows our overall planning for most of our video.

We started by continuing from our original plans on playing of the words of the song and decided to make plans based around thses. We came up with an overall idea for every chorus part of the song and wanted to keep the same theme going throughout the video to keep continuity. We also came up with the storyline of the video with was a love storyline. We decided that we wanted to go through the feelings of love so we kept that in mind when planning as we were planning the first parts without the love and the ending shots with the love back together. We nearly finished our whole video but have a little bit more to do which we will plan next lesson.

Here shows the work we had done in todays lesson.

We decided to start planning and creating our storyboard so that we could start filming as soon as possible. We looked through our research and decided on the style we wanted to do for our video and began to do this in the first part of our storyboard. We noticed that at the beginning of the song the words were easy to perform in our video. This is part of the style we wanted as we wanted to stylise the video around the words. Overall in the lesson I reckon we have covered around 20 seconds of our song which I believe we have planned thoroughly and if it all goes to plan would look good.

After completing our questionnaires, as a group we came up with an audience profile. We decided that our intended audience would be teenagers around the same age as us ranging from between 13-20. The main reason behind this was in our research everbody had heard of our artist Ed Sheeran and this shows that the song would be popular for this age group and audience. Also we found from our research that the indie rock genre was also very popular amonsgt this age group as many artists they liked were similar to our artist. W intend to target our audience through our stylistic apprach on our video. We want to play on the words of the song but also because Ed Sheeran 'raps' in 'You need me man I dont need you' and some other songs some of the actions we want to incorporate will be in both the inie rock genre such as sitting with a guitar but also the rap genre like walking down the road or path. We intend to make this appeal to our audicne which we beleiev will based on our own experiences and feedback we gave each other in the group.

Here are our findings and conclusions we have found from our research questioannaires we recently conducted. We as a group decided to analysis our good and bad questionnaires seperatley to get the best possible idea of what our audience looks for and what they listen too. I decided to put this onto a a3 poster and made it colourful to make it look good. Overall we could see from this the most popular genres and link this to our artists Ed Sheeran, there reasons for listening to the music and also what they expect for both their video so we can get some ideas of what our audience want, and also for our website which would give me an insight into what I should put on my website for my ancillery task. We could see from the questionairre findings that Ed Sheeran was part of the popular genres our target listen too as the grime/hip hop genre, 50% of the people we questionned listened to. We also on our findings got some valuable information from our bad questionnaire which showed that although the results we got were valid, some parts showed that in most cases these people all wanted to see the artists in the video and this is an idea we are going to use by having the artists and his instrument in our final music video.

Here are our new questionnaires that we completed today. We did this because after yesterdays results we needed to re do our questions to get better results that are more reflective of our age group if we done them in a larger scale. We decided to look through the questions and re word some of them to make more sense to the people taking them but also to get more relevant answers we would expect. We reworded some of the questions and updated our questionnaire and then went and carried these out again. Here we printed 10 questionnaires off and took a good mixed sample of boys and girls to get a better overall understanding of our auidences views. Here are our questionnaires completed and you can see that the results we gathered from this research were much better than our last attempt. From these results we can gather good research and also come to conclusions on why our audience like this type of music and how popular our music genre really is and our artist.

As our prezi was in working progress I began to continue and finish the prezi all together. I opened up the prezi and carried on with conducting a real layout for the presentation and also added some extra information about what the research means. This idea came from the group as we didnt feel that we had wrote down what impact this might have on our planning for the music video. After finishing the information aspect of the prezi I began to create a path for the presentation. I did this so that the prezi followed a correct path between the information I had wrote down. I then added some images to make it visually more exciting and ran throguh the presentation a few times. I noticed I needed to edit the prezi some more so made a few changes such as the size of the writing to fit the page correctly but also I then added another findings information box for our real definate thoughts to be considered for our final production piece. Our prezi was then complete.

Here is the link to our prezi:
http://prezi.com/ohitawyvxe_x/ed-sheeran-similar-artists-and-genres/


As I was doing the prezi, my group began to conduct a questionnaire for our audience profile. This was to determine our intended audience and what kind of things our intended audience expected from a music video. They came up with 6 questions for our questionnaire and then went out to get results. We as a group beforehand decided that we wanted to give the questionnaires out to people around the ages of 16-18 who we believe to be our target audience from our own experiences.

After getting 10 questionnaires conducted from people within our targeted age group, we looked at the information that we recieved. We noticed that the results we got were very unreliable and very insignificant as some of the answers were not answered properly. The questionnaires looked as though people had been filling them out as a joke so we decided to rethink the results whilst still reading through to see if any of the information gathered was relevant. While we looked through them we decided that the questions were too vague for the best research and began to plan for our next lesson to carry out some more research with better questions and to people who will take the questionnaire seriously.

As a group we decided to show the research that we conducted on similar genres and artists in the form of a prezi. I got my group to send me over their research of their particular artists and genres that they had done yesterday in our lesson. Here shows the research that Darren and Alex did:

Darren:

Alex:

I then began making my prezi on the prezi website. I decided to layout the prezi in a particular way with the Ed Sheeran info first followed by the other artists then the different types of genres. I began looking at the information and putting them onto the prezi just to get the information down at first. After I had wrote down the information, I began to talk to my group about our overall findings and what we have learnt from our research. We had a talk about the kind of things that were similar and different and I put down our overall feelings and findings that the research has given us. Although we didnt finish, the prezi was still working in progress but the main point was that we had all of the information down and had talked as a group about our findings.

Research Continued:
Overall Conclusion and research findings:

-          to be successful you must have a long background and start your career at a young age

-          The instrument is a vital component for most artists

-          Doesn’t matter about age as mraz is 37 and Sheeran 21

Finding not relevant:

-          Both have a different sort of style

-          Signed on by the same record company

I have learnt from my research that specific artists have the same sort of background to one another however dependent on the style there are a little different. Both the industries are growing in sales as both have had high success rates through sales and nominations and shows that the type of music is popular. The audience that is targeted are young people around the 13-25 range. From past experiences I can back this up but also through research it suggests that younger people mostly listen to this type of rap/acoustic/rock genre.

For ancillary task:

Look at both musician’s covers and WebPages:

WebPages: Look at both and make a research profile on Ed sheerans. Then challenge and take some parts of his webpage.

Covers: Look at both as the same genre and find the similarities and base mine round that but add my own touch

Next Lesson:Look at both videos and find the similarities so

close ups etc.

Jason Mraz: Lots of close ups, slow moving pace

This picture shows how as a group we have begun to put down our ideas for our music video on the song grade 8. Each colour represents our groups thoughts with the Red being Darren's ideas, My ideas being in blue and alex's in brown. Between us we came up with very good ideas which we believe would have a good impact on our video when we begin to start filming. As we had a 2 hour lesson, we also began to research the genres and artists that are relevant to Ed Sheeran. We as a group decided to do between us 3 artists. I researched Jason Mraz, with Darren doing Ben Howard and Alex doing Jason Nuzuka. I researched into the main points about Jason Mraz and also began looking into the genres that Ed Sheeran is involved in. I came up with a few general points which we could use to link all the artists together. We then all looked at our chosen similar artists music videos to see if they all followed the same style. For my artist Jason Mraz, I found that there were smilarities in their videos like close ups of him singing and his acoustic guitar being in most of his shots but also differences such as the style and the pace of the videos. This gave me and the group some ideas about whether to follow the normal conventions or go against these. After this I began writing a conclusion based around my findings on these artists and jotted down some notes about what to do next lesson and also for my ancillery tasks to help me out in the future.

Here is my research:

After choosing our music to use for our video I had to make a a letter to send to the production company to have permission to use Ed Sheeran's song Grade 8. This would stop us from any copyright issues and would protect us from illegally using the song. Here is my letter:

This photo was taken of me and my group researching what song to choose to do for the final production. My group which is Alex Sodimu on the left, Darren Cousins in the middle and Me on the right were all researching songs seperately for ideas to give to one anohter. The requirements of the music video was that the song was either 10 years old or older, or if the song was new but didnt have a release of a video. This was because its harder to come up with original ideas if the song has a new relevant video.  As we were researching we drew up a shortlist of potential songs we wanted to do regarding our ideas. The songs on this shortlist were: Bruno Mars- The other side, Bruno Mars- Runaway Baby, Labrinth- Sweet Riot and Ed Sheeran- Grade 8. As a group we then decided together which one we wanted to do. We did this by firstly discussing our ideas on each song and removing a song at a time. After looking at the lyrics of the songs and discussing our individual ideas we came up with Ed Sheerans Grade 8 song. This was a hard decision to make because there were so many songs to choose from and we had good ideas for many of them but overall we all had some good relevant points to the wording of the songs, and we all knew the song which is why we picked it as our final music video production piece.

For my final production work I am working in a  group with Darren Cousins and Alex Sodimu.  I am working with these because after our practise go at the production I thought we worked rather well as a group which is why we are working together again. For our final production we had the choice to either do a music video or a movie trailer. We had a little talk to weigh up our options and decided that we were going to do a music video after our recent attempts and because on judgement we had better ideas than a movie trailer.  For the production I have chosen to do a webpage and a digipak rather than an advert for the new song. These ancillery tasks have a final deadline of friday the 7th of december where both have to be completed. On friay the 30th of November the video deadline to be completed is and on the 14th of December everything about the production has to be done as nothing after that date will be accepted.

The last preperation task we completed was the practise task. This task was all about preparing for our final production piece and was a practise/example of what we could choose to do. We had either the choice of doing a music video or a film trailer. Firstly we got into groups and I was with Darren and Alex. We then began to choose what we wanted to do and as a group we decided to do a music video. We had been given a choice of what songs to chosse from, by our teacher and we picked Mariah Carey Without You. After this we had to plan our different shots and scenes and what we wanted to do on our storyboard.

Here is My storyboard: Page 1 and 2

 

This shows the planning we did for our music video. After completing this we began to start filming at our locations we set. We had our plan and was reading off of this and after a couple of days filming we began editing. As we had previous experience now of editing we began to edit at a much quicker pace and we started to look more deeply into the types of editing and effects such as slow motion and fade in and out. We used this is our video to help us bind it together. Overall we completed our video with a good overall product although we could definately have made it better.

Here is the link to our video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4tdADU8zRo&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ&index=5&feature=plcp

In this task I have learnt many things such as the importance of planning properly, covering our shots, using the same song and time keeping. Firstly the planning we had to do was very immense and we needed to plan everything from props we were using to characters and location. Although we did this relatively well, we got stuck in some cases by not being able to do what we originally planned but also with things such as at the beginning of the video having the bag in the middle of the clip which wasnt planned. This shows taht we have to plan every little detail more in depth than before to be really successful. Another thing I have learnt is the covering of the shots just like the one direction video I did. When we was editing, we noticed we needed more shots than we had taken and this made the video a bit out of sorts. This is why there are so many photos. Although we planned the 10 photos in the middle of the song, the rest werent planned as a result of under taking shots. The biggest error in the video we did was the fact that we used one song from the internet to use as the song over the top and lip syncing, and another on our phone which was a different version. This made the song not match with our actor which made it extremely hard to edit although we did a relatively good job on this. Time keeping is another thing to take into consideration just because we left it a bit late to finaly finish the clip. Although we could have done these things better I elieve that the lip syncing went really well and the video and effects was of a good quality which we as a group were very happy about for a practise attempt.

Another one of our preperation tasks was lip syncing. This was a new concept so we began by looking at other videos on youtube to get an idea on what to do and how successful they can look if they are done properly. At first this looked extremely tricky however as the task went on it became apparent later that timing is everything in the task. We began by getting into groups which I was in with Darren, Jack, Ricky and Dan with Maxwell doing the camera and all the shots. We decided to do the song 'thats what makes you beautiful' by one direction. We had to plan the whole process of the video and again as there were 5 of us, gave each other a character each with my character being Louis. Over a few lessons we finished our planing and did our filming. This was the first time we had done filming in sync with music and in the end you could tell that the video wasnt really successful. After we got our filming done we had to begin editing on the imacs. We had never edited before however I believe that I picked it up rather well and we edited through the song rather quickly. There were many concepts to do with the editing and we used some of these in the video however most we didnt really touch. We finally came up with our video and had to upload it onto youtube. The main point was to get the lip syncing correct throughout the video and ours looked really good.

Here is the link to our video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxda7mUI5uI&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ&index=9&feature=plcp

After we uploaded the video we saw that there was a delay in the song. We saw this delay to be of 6 seconds which is why the lip syncing is really poor.

In conclusion to the task I learnt lots of valuable experiences. The main experience was the lip syncing. We could tell that to get it right it was going to be hard and we had good practise on getting it perfect however it turned out unfortunate.  This definately has helped me though to get a decent idea of the good levels we need but also has given me skills that I can use in the future for our final production piece especially with moving and editing of certain different clips that need to be put together as one. I have also learnt from the task that we should take more shots and slower shots instead of it all in one. We in the task didnt give ourselves enough cover or opportunities to make it look better and this could be seen in the end video where some parts we were laughing etc. Overall I believe that this task was very valuable to me especially for my final production as it all has the same principles of what I need to do for my final piece and this gives me previous experience in doing this to a high level.

In order to prepare for this task we have done several previous activities such as friends, lip syncing and our practise task. This blog is about my friends video which I did with Ricky Lawrence, Sophie Harten, Jack Halliday and Darren Cousins. We had to act out a scene from the tv series friends in which we had to follow a script. We began by giving each other a character to follow and gave Jack the role of camera man. We firstly had to learn our words off the script which I believe I did successfully and then began to film. We at first were really bad and had to take a lot more shots than expected to make it look good and cover ourselves for when we edited.  After completing the task we edited as a group to come up with the overall video.

The link to our video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFnETHKDs4Y&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ&index=7&feature=plcp

From this task I have learnt a few very good important aspects that will help me in my final production. Firstly by giving each other a character I have found that we need to stay in the same character all together but also when changing shots we need to be in continuity with our last shot. For example in one of the shots I was facing in one direction which meant that the next shot I would need to be in the same direction to make it similar and look effective. This will help me in my final piece as I would need to think about the positioning of the artist to make it as real as possible. Another thing I found was that we need to learn from the script straight away. In the friends video some people still had their scripts in front of them as they didnt know the words. This would totally ruin our final production if this happened so we would definatly need to make our actor/artist know the words of the song grade 8. This task also allowed me to have more chances with the types of camera shots we need to take and it allowed me to familiarise myself with lots of different camera angles which we could use in our fial production.

This is my blog for my final A2 media production. My name is Bradley Stokes and I will be blogging everything I have done in preperation and in construction for my final piece. We had the opportunity to either create a msuic video or a new film trailer and as a group we first off decided we were going to create a msuic video. The brief for our video is:

- A promotion package for the release of the album, to include a music promotion video with : a cover for its release as part of a digipak (package of the CD) and a webpage containing and prmoting the artist.