Final Production Diary

During this project, I have learnt new skills within the software Premiere as well as the typical and successful conventions of the products: a music video, a magazine advert and a digipak.

Before I started this project, I had limited knowledge regarding these productions. Although I watched many music videos, I was unaware of what made them so successful. At the beginning of A2 I already started to learn the different approaches directors took when creating these particular videos, which varied from a ‘parallel universe’, a ‘manipulation of narrative time’ to time lapses. Straight away this gave me ideas about my own music video – I took into account the locations and equipment which would be available and the people I could ask to be my actors. Throughout the course, I continued to learn a lot about music videos such as the theorists which comment on the aspects like Andrew Goodwin. By learning about these theories, I was able to use some of the aspects these theorists talk about in my own work such as ‘relation of visuals to song’. This meant I was able to link the lyrics of my chosen song to the footage I filmed for my video.  

The entire process of this particular project did prove to be quite difficult, especially when comparing it to my foundation portfolio. Most of this was due to the new software Premiere and learning about the wide variety of tools I needed to learn and use, especially how to edit the green screen scenes. The whole project was also very time consuming, and if I could do my music video again I would organise my time more efficiently as I didn’t predict how long my entire music video would take me. Filming was also a new activity. Compared to last year where I only had photo shoots, filming needed a lot more preparation. This is something I will consider for the future, if I ever take on any filming projects.

My magazine advert and digipak were also significantly important. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been focusing on these products, particularly my digipak. I found this ancillary task a lot harder than I imagined as in order for it to look professional, a lot of research had to be carried out. I often found myself going over my research tasks and searching for further examples to help me with my work. I also feel the particular genre ‘rock’ is a hard genre to professionally display on a digipak. This is why I also looked at previous albums and digipak examples from The Pretty Reckless for inspiration, and used professional-looking photos from my photo shoot. I also believe the photo of my magazine advert was the main professional aspect and over the past week I have been alternating the fonts to make it more realistic.

Recently, I have also been looking at my blog as a whole. This included using the appropriate labels for each posts and creating any planning posts that would help to show the development of my tasks over time. This is why I made a post displaying the alternations I had made along the way, especially during the editing process, and raw footage. I feel this post in particular would show how important editing was in regards to my video.

The last thing I did before finalising my products was ask my fellow peers and members of my target audience for advice and improvements I could make. I then started to develop my evaluation answers and present them on different platforms. With my audience feedback I was able to add more information to my third evaluation question, and then present this on iMovie – this would be one Software I could use for my final evaluations. For question one and four I used InDesign to present them as a magazine format. I did this as I am now very familiar with the software plus it looks interesting to present questions in this way. For my second question I used Prezi, with appropriate pictures to link to each section of the question. As I had already drafted my questions, making improvements and placing them into a different document was quite easy. This proved how important the drafting stage of the evaluation was.

Overall, I am happy with my products as I feel they all include a similar house style and it is easy to see how they group together to represent one particular artist/band.