the website

after looking more at the other website template we had to change because we werent able to put on the stuff that we wanted to so Sarah found this one, and i think it will work just a well if not better.
i do like the home page but im not sure the main phot fits, i think we should use another more girly fun one.

i do think the colour is good as pink as its very girly, but im not sure we should use it as me and Sarah don't really like the brown and have tried to change it but we can't.

i really like having the gallery bellow and it changes while your on the page which adds something to it i think.i also like having the music there, Sarah did some fiddling to put a photo of Emma as the ablum cover which was very clever.

for the gallery there all the photos that a student photographer took for us onthe day, and there are some good modeling photos of Emma that were taken off facebook, the photos look really good and profesional, i think maybe we should add some just normal day to day photos of her to make it look like she is adding them for her fans. we also need to put some of Mina's photos up from the day as they are in colour.

i really like this fashion page, Sarah saw a similar thing on Kylie's page so did one and i think its really good as fans can see a bit more of what she gets up to on a day to day basis.

digipak

I have been going round trying to help and do bits for each product we are working on at the moment, so i went and helped Mina with the digipak.
We had a look online for templates and like one which opened out on both sides so we could fil it with photos:

 we printed this off and some sample photos to make a rough one.
PHOTO OF MINI DIGPIAK

this was when i came up with an idea for the case, i thought it would look really good if we did a photo shoot with Emma and had a big close up on her face with bare shoulders, and then on the back of the case there would be a photo of the back of Emma, so as if its the back of the photo on front. and for the writing it could be on her back as if on her skin or ontop of her hair.

we were defiant about wantig all the photos to be focused on her, we could possible have the band in the back round but because we have made it just her and not the band theres no need to put any focuse on then, like Lily Allen's band you never see them. 
These are some screen grabs of what Mine did to try out makig a sample digipak but for our real one it needs to be made with Photoshop.

this is a screen grab of it on photo shop where we added the photos onto in the end.

calender

while looking into the merchandise for our musician's website Sarah told me about how she thought it would be a good idea to make a calender as she saw in some researching that other stars have them. i thought this was a very good idea to sell a product full of photos of her because our young girls audience would love this because they can admire her, and this could appeal to guys with her being so attractive.

these are just a few photo snaps of options for different months.

we may not but i thought we could possibly involve one or two photos of the band, but there wouldnt be loads as they aren't the key part, it's all about Emma. I think these boys will also appeal to the young girls audience as they are attractive and stylish too, and young girls love to idalise boy stars.

who's doing what

today Layla has gone to get on with some editing as we need a first draft doen by friday. Sarah is continuing with the website, but we have had to change template because we couldn't put enough stuff on the last one. So im helping by starting to looking to merchandising for the website, and Mina is looking at the photos shee took for our digipak.

editing

We have already begun editing. Layla has very good knowledge of working final cut pro so she began looking through the shots. i went in and helped her for a bit, we were syncing all the main shoots from each scene up to the track. this was a very fiddly job as we had to make sure it looked like she was actually singing. we managed to get this done, finding the best takes from each scene, some had different good bit so we put them both in so we could cut the good bits together later.

in this picture you cans see a shoot from the beach scene (left) and one of our extreme wides (right)

 this is a picture of Layla matching up the shoots to the song, to help us do this we used markers. to make it easiest you would mark on the beat so you could use the sound to match the two up.

this was after we had matchecd them all up and began looking at some of our close ups, on the left you can see a big close up of Emma in the beach scene and on the right is a wide of plum waiting in the dressing room.

website

We got to watch some of our footage today and i think we were all realling impressed with how it came out, so i think we are now that bit more motivated to make it all look as good as it could. in our production meeting we decided that Layla would begin the editing, Mina was keen to do the digipak and Sarah and i started looking on wix.com for our website.

 

when we tried to start doing some work on our website we realised that we hadn't properly chosen another name for Emma, so we did some research into this. we thought her name really need to be girly and light to fit with her image, here a screen shot of a list of girls names we found from a website.

 

For now we just decided on having Emma as it is a pretty name and suits her well, this is still subject to change though. we defiantly weren't going to have a band name as it is all about her and we don't much involve the rest of the band in anything else.

account of shoot day

The day before the shoot I checked over using the props list I made that I had all the props I said I would bring and anything extra that I could find that I thought would fit with the video. I packed all these items away in my car ready to leave first thing in the morning so I didn’t have to worry that I had forgotten to put anything in, and so I could be in school promptly before 8 o’clock.

In the morning I did feel excited for it to finally be the day when it all comes to life and felt very real. A lot of that excitement was clouded by worry and stress, but I know I get worked up easily so I tried to stay as calm as I could.

We weren’t quite as prepared first thing as I hoped we would have been. As we were filming on a Monday we had the Friday before to set up, but school finishes at 4.s0 on a Friday and the group filming that day were scheduled to finish at 3 so that didn’t give us much time. On the day the group ended up running over so we helped them clean up as they were very tired and we wanted to get setting up as quick as possible.

this is me and Layla carrying the sunlounger and chairs for the table set down from the drama department.

While we were waiting we went to the drama department to check they had delivered all the props they said they would. all the props they said they would. With help from the set guys we put up all the walls for the whole set, so that’s the three sides to the photo shoot on the left, the three sides to the make up room in the middle, and the large window wall for the café/ bar which we put a long bar in which we had built for us. Sarah and Mina had painted the blue panels for our beach scene, and they had begun painting the yellow sun but it wasn’t coming out quite right but they had to leave it to dry. 

here's Sarah and mina in their painting aprons

Because of school finishing early on Friday Layla and Mina had to leave but Sarah and I stayed on for a bit to bring through all our props and do a bit more setting up.

Over the weekend the set guys did some painting for us so that all our walls were white but that had to dry for a while. So when I arrived at 7.45 I began making the sets. The café was easy as we had the checkered floor, bar and big window, then we added curtains to cover the window which had marks on it, the curtains weren’t ideal but they were all we had and so would do.

For the make up room we had already tried out Sarah’s table, stool and mirror and really liked how that fit in so we put that in and covered the desk with jewelry and make up that everyone had brought. We put the clothes rail in which we borrowed from the drama department and hung different fur jackets and dresses on coat hangers that I brought. We also covered the floor with a fur throw of Sarah’s. I really liked this room, how it all tied together and was so girly. For the first photo shoot I went and got some double sided tape to stick the fake flowers on the wall, because of the issues with the balloons we just put a load on the floor, with them we covered the floor with fake petals, as a finishing touch we stapled onto the wall some fairy lights in the shape of hearts to complete the set. I think this was my favorite set, even though I’m not massively girly I loved the set as a whole. For finishing touches we hung a few things on above the bar on the walls and in the dressing room to make it look more realistic. Once the sets were finally set up we had our cast, Plum (make up artist) did Emma’s make up while we were doing the finishing touches so she was ready when we were. The last thing we did was set up the cameras and lighting, we kept the lighting the same the whole way through and we marked out where we put the cameras so that we could keep them in the same positions.

We were all really happy with how the three sets looked, for me they defiantly looked similar to how I had been imagining. In front of the sets we had the lighting for the sets, we showed these in some of our shots because we want it to look like a shoot they went well with the look. There were a few minor details that weren’t quite what we wanted (the curtains in the café/bar were just plain material so weren’t that realistic but we weren’t going to focus on them, we had hoped for a black table and chairs but got fake wooden which didn’t look too bad and again we never really focus on it in the shots, we had wanted the balloons to be heliumed up but I have already explained the issue with that), but overall I think we created a set that really was our concept.

For the different roles we tried to move around so that we each got a chance to run all the different areas. I don’t think it was quite evenly spread out but every did get to do all the different roles and I think everyone learned from doing this. I learned how to use the sound system, I did the playback role quite a bit, off all the jobs this was probably the easiest, all I had to do was make sure we were on the right track then press play of pause when we were rolling. A job I quite enjoyed was working the lights. For the silhouette scene instead of using a real flash I turned on and off the lights, we did this because we needed it to be a slow flash to properly show each of Emma’s poses. For the shot I had to fade down a light when it started then press a button to turn on a light from the other side which showed her silhouette, she did four different poses and it looked amazing.

I did a lot of back stage filming which we will edit together to make a behind the scenes making of our music video. I think this is a really good thing to do as it just shows a bit more of what was going on, a lot of musicians do this now as a way to reach their fans more as people love to see what their idols are normally like. I did do some camera man work which I did really like and it refreshed my memory of what I did last year so I wasn’t worried about not knowing anything. Layla did most of the directing as she was the best at clearly tell everyone what was going on but she did switch around, Mina also took some good high quality photos of Emma and the sets, she was in charge of taking continuity photos. Everyone worked really hard with what every role they were doing…

It’s always hard to point out what you did well yourself, but I do feel I put a lot of effort into the preparation and work on the day. I brought in the most amount of props as I live closest and had a lot of stuff it was easiest for me to. I tried my best to be really involved the whole time with what was going on but did my best not to get in anyone’s way. I switched around the roles a lot so that everyone got to do everything. Along with working hard I enjoyed the day.

 I don’t think we had any major problems on the day. I think our first main issue was starting so late. I think by the time we took our first shot we were just over an hour late in starting, this did worry me but because we had gone over the production schedule and done the shot lists all in such detail we all knew what we were doing and what we needed to do we just had to make sure we stayed organized and didn’t get any more behind. Everyone worked really hard and we actually managed to catch up on time and finished at 6 which was brilliant. At a few points we had too many people talking or trying to organize at one time which could have become chaotic but we managed to keep it mostly under control. We had a small issue with the yellow from the sun not drying right but Sarah managed to fix this by painting it onto some white car then stapling it onto the blue background. We did have an issue when beginning to film the silhouette scene because although we had thought about this scene a lot we realized we weren’t exactly certain how to go about it, we knew what we wanted but we had to translate that onto the camera. After some fiddling we found an easy way to do it but it would have been better if we had known exactly like we had with the other shots.

My favorite part of the shoot by far was defiantly the extra wide shot that fit in all three sets. When we had talked about this I wasn’t sure if it was going to work with so much going on and it being so wide but the school got in and extra wide lens which was amazing! It looked even better on camera than it did in real life. It looked so good with the transitions; originally we were going to use tracking shots for these but when we started filming it worked better just to have all still shots so we stuck with that. The mise en scene for the sets was also a main part I felt we did successfully.

Maybe a part we could have done was the tracking shots as I do feel they could have looked great but we were pushed for time and because we didn’t do them from the start it would have been strange just picking them up at the end. But I think all the extra shots we got in will make up for those tracking shots we missed.

In the morning we only had Emma, Jack and Plum so it wasn’t that hard to try keep them happy. Unfortunately Jack did have to wait around while we were sorting things out and Plum was getting Emma ready, so when I could I tried to talk to him and make sure he was happy which he did seem to be.  Looking after them in the morning was good and they were all so good and listened to what we wanted and didn’t mess around at all. In the afternoon it was a lot hard with all the boys there as well, but again they were all really well behaved and worked hard. We made sure that every now and then someone went and got drinks for anyone that wanted one, or if we didn’t need some one for a short period of time they could go to the cafeteria for a drink. We weren’t really tough on anyone as we wanted them to have fun as that was a huge part of the video and they all seemed to be having a good time with it. I sent them all a text in the evening thanking everyone for their hard work and for being so good.

Although I was very stressed I did really enjoy the whole day, I think my favorite parts just were the two photo shoots. I was worried they wouldn’t look as good as we had been hoping but they looked better than I thought and was so happy with them. All though it was very full on the atmosphere with the group stayed positive and I think we all worked well together.

We got some very good shots I can’t wait to see edited into the video, one in particular. Very fortunately my dad has a passion for cameras and after begging for a while he allowed me to bring in his haslblack (a rather professional all school camera that you have to wide up) using a stick to hold it still we had the camera above looking down through the box seeing Emma the other side and it looked amazing so I cant wait to see how they look.

I defiantly learnt a lot as whole about the day, it did feel a lot different of course to the thriller I filmed but the same organization and preparation applies. The key to it being successful after having a good solid idea is control, keeping the sets under control, organizing, arranging and informing the actors well and making sure the group stays organized. And I know we aren’t professionals so we weren’t perfect all the time but I felt we did our best.

Because our concept is fair simple, very girly and attractive, so appeals to young girls easily our other products will be easy to stick with the theme so I don’t think there any huge things we need to do for them, we just need to fit in doing a photo shoot to get some studio shots of Emma. With all the stuff we have for it with our ideas I think we will be able to make a good website if we work hard enough on it.