Different features of our website

We chose as a colour scheme for our website purple as we decided to have it as the signature colour for our band. The meaning of the colour purple is one of peace of mind, serenity, magic, royalty... It is said to be the perfect colour. http://crystal-cure.com/purple.html

The Home page of our website

One of the most important things of any website is the home page as it is the first thing that people will see when they access the website. So when creating the front page we had to be very careful about the choices we made and what we put on it.

Home page

We have on it a picture of all the band members, we chose this one as it has all of them and they all look good in it. On the top you can see the names of the pages of our website:
Home - Music - Videos - Photos - Contact

Home page

We also have a variety of other photos for fans to look at directly on the home page and the latest news from the band so as to enable fans who are in a hurry to be filled in about what the band is doing. We have a link to sound cloud for fans to listen to the band's 'biggest hit song' of the moment

Home page

There are live twitter feeds on the side so as to keep fans up to speed with the band's every move. We chose to place these next to the latest news so that they are easily found as they are in the most obvious place.

Home page

There is our band's latest music video posted at the bottom of the home page. If fans want to look at other music videos from our band they can access them on the video page of our website.

The Music Page

Music page

We have on our music page the lyrics to the song All you need is now. A link to it on sound cloud so that fans can listen to it and if they want use the lyrics to sing along

Video Page

Video page

On our video page we have the bands music videos and an explanation to why they chose to have this as a music video. This helps the audience see the bands point of view. 

Photo Gallery

Photo gallery

On this page all the photos of the band are available to fans.

News Page

News Page

News Page

On this page the band posts about what they are doing, up coming tour dates... It is a way for the band to communicate directly to it's audience and keep them up to date with what they are doing and when and where they are touring.

Continuing the creation of my website - Twitter feeds

I finally understood why the twitter feeds were not working correctly on the website, it was because I had accidentally ticked the box called Show on all pages and so the twitter feeds were everywhere... So now I have un-ticked it and the live twitter feeds are only on the home page of the band. This is perfect because it would be very silly to have a website promoting a band without the live twitter feeds to keep Reportage's fans up to date on the band's every move in direct!

The box I shouldn't have ticked

Our website

For the past few days I have been working on our band's website on Wix. I started off by adding photos and editing the presentation. We had live twitter feeds on it, however this was a bit annoying as if you moved them on one page they would also change place on other pages... I also added many photos to the website as it is very important for our artist to have a lot of pictures of them on it as we need to really set up the star image of our band as they are new artists. I also added some news about our artist and their first music video.

Reportage's photo gallery

Our home page with some photos and the latest news from Reportage

Adding the modelling shots to our new sequence

To add the modelling shots in without risking messing up the rest of our editing we created a separate sequence called 5D models. On this sequence we looked for the best place to add in new modelling shots. We then placed them in the sequence we were working on. This wasn’t difficult; we just had to make sure that they were in the right place of the sequence. 

5D models sequence

Continuing the editing of my music video

I have been adding the modelling shots in the past few days, this has been a very tedious process as it is very important that they do not come in to soon or too late.

• If they are introduced in the video to early this will confuse the viewer
• If they are introduced to late it will be equally confusing

A modeling shot

I also named all of these shots and marked the moments that are good as they are all very long shots and some of them contain moments that are very, very messy... So even though it seem to take up a lot of time it is actually

saving a lot of time in the editing process.

Mat and Luke's feedback on our first cut

Mat and Luke watched our video. They had a lot of very very use full feed back on what we should do to make it much much better.

We have a lot of shots that look good overall, however all the video becomes more interesting by the end, as the cuts are much more fast and this is more visually appealing. They suggested that we cut the longer shots so as to make video more dynamic!

They also said to us that shots work better when they are "grouped", e.g. when you can hear the base clearly you should have an ECU of the base guitarist hands playing, then of her face and finally move into a wide shot of her (all of these cuts should be fast). This makes the video less random as well as making it more dynamic. However, the downside to this is that we have to restart all of the editing from the beginning…

The modelling shots are very beautiful and extremely realistic. We therefore decided to use them more than we did in our rough cut. They work incredibly well in the ‘instrumental’ parts of our video so we will put most of them there.

Overall our music video is very visually pleasing and if we group our shots and add more modelling in it the video should look incredible!

Strengths and Weaknesses of my rough cut

Example of a modelling shot

I think that certain parts of the video work very well and that I have edited them nearly perfectly on time. I also think that I have created a good contrast between some very fast cuts and some slower ones which fit in very well with the music. I also think that I have made good choices regarding what shots should be used and where they should be used to create a good effect. All of the band members look phenomenal and, even though it is still just a rough cut, I can already see that the video is going to look incredible!!! Sunshine is so good at mouthing the words to the song at the exact time which makes editing her shots very very easy.

However, due to the short amount of time we had to produce this cut I was not able to include any of the modelling shots and could only do the band shots. This was very frustrating for me as I would have preferred to add them in already so as to have a rough idea of to where they would have looked better. Also some of the shots are not edited on the beat or strait after a word of the song is finished which looks terrible. I would have to work on these shots a lot more so as to get them to be perfectly on time.

I still really am enjoying the process of editing as its incredible to finally be able to see the video slowly come to life... I really can not wait to have finished the rough cut and be able to start making it all perfect and perfectly on time!!!

Continuing the rough-cut

By doing my rough-cut I'm starting to realise just how hard it is going to be to finish my music video as it is so difficult to sync all the bits of the song together. As we chose to have three parts to our video

Full makeup (in the first part of the song)

Only lipstick (in the second part of the song)

No makeup (in the final part of the song)

it has made the editing process very long and difficult as we need to sink the shots for each ones of these 3 parts separately and to three different parts of the song!!! The first one was by far the easiest as it was done to a beat that we added to the beginning of the version of the song we are editing to and to the one that we played on the day. However for the two other parts there is no such beat so I had to find a beat in the song and then find the same beat in the film. This was not easy as it is a very repetitive song and it is extremely difficult to find the right beat. The hardest shots to sync are the ones with Anastasia (the drummer) because she is playing the drums it is hard to hear the music behind them and so syncing becomes even harder!!!! Furthermore, as we chose her only on the basis of looks, she can not actually play the drums so, very often, she is out of time; meaning that even if I sink her shots perfectly I will still have to move them around so that it looks like she actually knows what she is doing.

Editing process

Screen grab of our 'bins'

So we have to have a rough cut done by the end of the week! We started editing on Monday by naming the shots and 'binning' them. We did this so as to organize our shots better and to make editing easier. We put the shots in bins called

•   Full makeup

•   Lipstick

•   No makeup

•   Photo shoot

•   Close ups

In the 'close ups bin' we put the shots that were of close ups of parts of the girls bodies where you could not see their heads (e.g. CU of shoes, hands...) and so it doesn't matter in what section of the music video they are. 

We encountered a problem with viewing our shots as they refused to open on the computer so we had to re-upload them to the computer to be able to actually view them and start editing.

On Tuesday we started lip-sinking al of the full makeup section this took us a long time as it is a very tedious process and if it isn't perfect then the whole music video is not going to look good.  However it was very nice to do this as we realized just how amazing all of our shot are and the music video is definitely going to look incredible!!! 

Today we started actually cutting our video. This is by far one of my favorite process in the making of a video. I love finding the right beat where to cut a scene and choosing what goes where... Furthermore it is so satisfying to look at the finished product and thinking "I actually did this WOW!!!'

Evaluating research and planning

Our shoot day

The day before the shoot day I finished fitting the costumes and ironing all of them, this took a very long time as the sewing machine broke down while I was taking in the jackets and I had to get help from Loz to fix it. Also due to the material of the costumes I had to use minimum iron on them (so as not to burn them) this made taking the creases out very difficult!

Nude makeup I did on the drummer

On the day of the shoot (21^st of November) I felt confident that everything was going to go well because I had spent so much time organising all of it and had done a good shooting schedule so that we would have had time we needed to get all the shots we needed. Before we could start shooting we needed to sort out all the costumes, finish the set, and I had do the makeup of all the band members. There were many makeup changes as we needed the band members to have no makeup for the end of the video, red lipstick for the middle and full makeup at the start. We obviously started by filming them with the nude makeup (No makeup does not look good on camera as the lights make the skin look very shiny and take colour away so I needed to apply a little on so that the girls didn't look like shiny corpses) as it is easer to apply more makeup than taking it off. For the costumes we needed to decide who would wear which red accessory. The set looked exactly like what we planed very retro with a a platformed stage, a retro microphone and black and white instruments. The girls looked all extremely beautiful and elegant in their outfits. it was exactly what we wanted as we wanted the video to have a very fashionable feel to it. 

Nude makeup with red lipstick I did on the keyboard player

We divided our roles very efficiently. Liza was in charge of the playback, Genevieve was directing with Tilly and I was in charge of the costumes and makeup. This was an essential part of our music video as it is entirely based on image. It was very difficult to get the right makeup (for the full makeup) because to make a strong eye-makeup that doesn't look  slutty with the red lipstick. Also not everyone's eye shape is the same so I had t o create a different makeup look for every girl. Also Bright red lipstick does not look good on everyone so for Dayana and Anastasia's lipstick I had to mix brown and red lipstick together so as to create the perfect shade or red for them as it was essential that all the girls were wearing similar makeup or els the whole message of the video would have been messed up. I think I did a very good job at doing the girl's makeup and making sure everyone was ready on time for the shooting time.

Full makeup on the base guitarist

One of the major problems we had on the shoot day was time management. We did not realise how long it would have taken us to  get all of the band shots and we were not aware that we did not have the studio all day. However we overcome this issue by not doing our backstage scenes and only doing the photo-shoot with the band members and not the extras as without the backstage scenes it would have been confusing for the audience to have other people in the photo-shoot. We managed to get incredible footage for the photo shoot in a very short amount of time. However, we were very successful at getting all the band shots and make the girls look incredible. We got all the shots we needed of the band in all three situations (no makeup, lipstick and full makeup). It was perfect and will absolutely reflected in our theme of image in the music video.

Photo-shoot shot

We also managed our actors very well. Anastasia did not know how to play the drums but we showed her how to play them in a way that made it look that she was actually playing them but still looking very sexy. We explained to all of the girls that they had to look sexy, that they had to get into playing their instruments but at times look detached from everything so as to reflect the fact that they are not really playing them and that they are thinking "we are beautiful, we know it so it doesn't matter if we cant play because we are sexy and attractive so nobody cares". To help them achieve this we showed them the video by Robert Palmer Addicted to love http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcATvu5f9vE&feature=player_embedded as he had a similar approach to the way we wanted the band members to act.
The part of the shoot I enjoyed the most was the photo-shoot as it was very energetic and fun to film. Also helping them to chose the costumes for them and sorting out the costumes so that they looked perfect on all of them was a lot of fun. I particularly enjoyed helping them choose some of the poses. I am very much looking forward to edit the band shots together as it is going to be a lot of fun to put together the shots so that they start off with full makeup and end with none. I am also very much looking forward to editing the band shots together with the photo-shoot ones. It is going to look so visually appealing and beautiful that I can't wait to see the final product.

Our set with band members

I think that our production group works very well as a team. We are good at communicating to each other and separating the tasks effectively between each other so as to get everything done onetime. The most important lesson I learned on the shoot day was that it is very important to manage time efficiently so as to avoid complications; however you can always find solutions to all your problems as we were able to find a solution to our lack of time in the studio. We are probably going to change the colour scheme of our website to red, black and white so as to fit with the colour scheme of our music video. We will also probably change the font to something more elegant so as to fit better with our star image. 

Organising the websites for our band

So we started off by creating a Twitter page for Reportage so as to help our band use new media technologies to be closer to their audience as many people in our current age communicate with through online media (e.g. social networks) and this is also an essential tool while promoting a new artist as it helps them truly connect to their audience by letting them know what they are doing.

We then created a website using Wiz with a link to their twitter page. This website will enable Reportage fans to have information about the band's tours, look at the band's music videos, by merchandise.... It will, like the Twitter page help the audience connect withe the members of the band and keep them up to date with what the band is doing.

This is an example of the merchandise we will be selling on the website 

Final Cast list

Final Cast list

Band members

Amber Donso

Dayana Pinaeva

Sunshine Alaibe

Gabriella Wilson

Anastasia Rastorgina

Extras

Lavinia Di Lorenzo

Tatiana Zahid

Anne-Sophie VanDWoude

Anna Popova

Finalising our ideas for the album cover

We decided that we would like to have polaroid shots staked up or one polaroid shot on our album cover. We want to do this as it would give the album cover a retro look but it would also make it seem playful and young. It would appeal to our target audience as it is something that is a timeless object of style, furthermore it would appeal to an older audience who would recognise the polaroid film from when they were younger.

 

On these polaroid photographs there would be images of our band members with on the one on top the singer  in a pose similar to this one: