Task 4

This is the directors commentary that Davina and i did for the pop promo...

My group and I are going to describe the technical aspects of our pop promo and digi pack, focusing on the 3 production stages; pre-production, construction and post-production. We will go into detail in each stage explaining the different elements that we used and why.

Pre-production

We saw clips of ‘Now is Everyone’ on their Myspace page and decided to contact them through Facebook. We then schedulable a meeting with the band to discuss ideas for the promo. I know people are really negative about myspace these days, but what an absolute gold mine of visual stimuli it turned out to be!
When researching initial ideas for the promo, we searched the internet, using sites like YouTube. We listened to the song repeatedly and wrote down the images and ideas that came to mind. The coloured rain came from an idea to have some of the elements in colour and some in black and white because we thought this was a way of introducing their star quality metaphor, which is “from the gutter to the stars”.
Various different types of puddles and rain effects were mocked up on Photoshop, as part of our preliminary planning. They were eventually filtered out due to the lack of time and technological ability. The creative anamtic enabled us to have an idea of how long each shot would need to be and where we would cut it.

Construction

During the shoot day we took digital stills with a SLR camera. We used them in the construction of the digi pack. It consists of a front and back cover and two inlays. The inlays are made up of a montage of stills from the shoot day, the promo and their private life, giving the audience a voyeuristic view of the band. This reinforces their organic nature.
For the front cover we made the title bold to draw the audience in and scaled the band members larger than life to emphasise their importance. The colour reflects both the mood of the song and band, tying it altogether.

The poster creates certain enigma codes. The most obvious being the positioning of the lead singer. He is positioned in the background but is the only one giving direct address, just like in the promo, showing he is present but out of reach which relates to Richard Dyer’s theory of star image and reinforces that they are, as a band, different to the audience.

When shooting the band in the studio we painted the walls green in order to use the technique of chromo-keying. To make sure it was as effective as possible we used specific lighting in order to eliminate shadows but also to light the band.



Post-production

We used an Mpeg 2 SD NXCAM which has a hard disk, to shoot the promo, this made editing easier because each take is captured on a separate file. Editing time was reduced, bins easier to manage and extended footage easier to handle. We were able to edit the footage to an effective cutting rhythm for the promo, by listening to the audio we used markers to mark the significant beats to make the cuts clean and sharp.
The wide of the band was shot using a green screen and the wall paper and floor were pictures from google images. When editing we placed an omni light into the composition in order to make the room look more realistic. We then keyed in the band by using key light to eliminate the green so the wall paper and floor were visible.
The rain was a separate layer, which was filmed on black. In order to place the rain over the footage we used the blending tool ‘liner dodge’, which makes the black go invisible. This then left the coloured rain.
For the splat effects we repeated the same process, however we had to construct a separate composition which used an animated splat effect from ‘riot gear’. We used another blending mode, darken, which turned the white see through, then placed this composition into the original and proceeded to edit it in the same way and do another set of keying to remove the black around the splats.

Finally we used the internet to promote the video and gain audience feedback by uploading the video to youtube and using a site called ‘surveymonkey’. By using this particular site it allowed us to create a questionnaire, which we then got people who had seen the video to fill out, giving us our audience feedback.

And that concludes our pop promo commentary.