Josh Flowers - My Role In The Group

My part in the group is mainly being the editor for our video; using Adobe Premiere I will cut and edit our footage together in order to create the final cut for our music video. Not only will I be editing our video, but I will also be playing one of the roles within the music video, my character is supposedly the 'Protagonist' in the narrative for our video. For the editing, I plan to focus mainly on using the 'beat match' technique since our chosen song has no vocals at all, there won't be any lip syncing throughout the sequence. To prepare for this, I have been practising at home by creating short 'beat matching' videos using random footage and songs of my own interest. Below is one example of a short 'Beat Match' video I made and uploaded to YouTube title "CGI Dubstep" which features randomly selected CGI video game trailers synchronized/beat matched with the song "La Roux - In For The Kill (Skream Remix)", I chose this song because it is a similar genre song to our chosen song for our music video and fits under the same genre of Liquid/Electronic.  

My main inspiration for creating this video and others at home was another editor who has been creating videos in the same style as the one above for a few years now known as 'SaladUK', however he works across multiple genres of electronic music such as Dubstep, Liquid, Drum & Bass, Brostep, Hip-hop  and more. SaladUK uses many different clips of footage from all sorts of contents such big blockbuster movies, cartoons, tv shows etc, he then re-edits them to synchronize/beat match with the song of his choice. I have been a fan of his work for almost three years and have been trying to create videos in this same style within that period of time, however my videos are never quite as perfected or as popular as his so I rarely bother to upload them. To get a sense of what SaladUK truly does, I have placed a video below which includes all of SaladUK's most popular content from 2012 all cut into a short Show-reel. As you can see my and his techniques used in the videos below and above are very similar however the styles are very different as I like to make my videos more slow paces and immersing, whereas SaladUK makes his a lot more wild in attempt to put his audiences in awe. To see more of my own home videos or more of SaladUK's videos, you can simply click on the publisher's YouTube channels from the videos I have included in this post, (Mine being "Bass Junki" and SaladUK's being "SaladUK"

After featuring in the music video filming process for my performance as the 'Protagonist Character', I began to use my editing skills (that I honed at home to increase my knowledge and experience with the 'Match Beating' technique) on our actual video. At first it really did seem like a challenge to make our simple footage all beat match with our rather complex electronic track; however I began to play around with a few techniques I had learnt at home such as using Jump Cuts, Cross-cutting, Slow motion, Fast motion and cutting to black. All of these techniques proved useful in order to make our simple footage look a lot nicer and beat match very well along with our track; I also decided to put the video into black and white to make our video seem more mysterious and unique and I added more contrast to increase the shadows and light within the frames making them seem a lot more textured and eye catching. My methods did prove to be very time consuming and in fact I spent much more time editing than we had spent on anything else during the production of our project; in retrospect I think I spent far too long focusing on clip for clip and how to make it beat match instead of editing the video as a whole, I did it bit by bit which although helped me to get the best results out of each shot, it did waste a lot of time and resulted in me not being able to spend enough time on the ending for the video which is my only regret about or project. Other than the ending though, I was extremely satisfied with the video as a whole, especially my contribution as the Editor and actor, even our employee Boca-J himself was amazed by the outcome of our video, and I received much more positive comments from friends also. So I do believe my role was a key factor in achieving the results we did, however as a group we co-operated perfectly and I wouldn't have been able to produce anything like this by myself, so I believe we all did a great job and produced a very good music video that both used and challenged multiple Mainstream Music Video Conventions.

Theo Hall Evaluation Questions

Q3- Video Link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIXGEwXY8EM

Adam Peck evaluation questions

Q2. How affective is the combination of your main products and ancillary tasks?

  

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To answer this question, we had to create a short audio vox pop featuring people who had already seen our video; this included members from our own group, friends, other students etc. When interviewing each guest, we asked them a range of questions and recorded their answers. These questions included:

• What are your views on the Mise en Scene within our music video?
• Does our video follow mainstream conventions?
• How do you feel about the editing in our music video?
• Does the Mise en Scene fit with our music video and the song itself?
• Which one of our post production methods worked best and why?
• Do you think the black and white effect works well within our music video?
• What do you like best about the camera work?

We got very mixed answer from different individuals, below is the video that features our music video with the vox pop audio recording playing over the top so that you can hear both the questions asked, the answers given and also which guest gave which response.

Job Role

Throughout the production roles have been shared between all of the group, myself being the cinematographer and making the ancillary tasks such as both digi pack and magazine advert. These roles were given to myself by the others as they are my best areas of work. While shooting the music video every shot was considered by myself with framing of character with close recognition with the director also being the camera man deciding on shot types which worked with other aspects from out location. Our group worked particually well as we know each other from the AS year and also out of college and were able to achive the best outcome from our production.

(This is an image of myself and Adam filming.)

Alternative advertisement for magazine

Design:

This is my advertisement I have produced using different images I have found from the internet. The main image is the colorful tree coming through the concrete. I thought that this image would be appropriate to represent our album as it is nature sprouting through an urban environment therefore being relevant to our nature and urban theme. It is also the tree being produced in a graffiti art that makes it significant as well.

I have added extra images and text such as the "Lost in Tokyo" title for the name of the song and the KORELESS text I produced on a website, in a graffiti format, placed in the bottom right hand side of the advertisement so that the viewers can see the artists.

The small detail I added was an image produced by the famous and notorious urban artist, known as 'Banksy'. I thought that the art of the girl swinging would work with the main image of the tree as to give the message of no matter what, we can and should learn to love and treat nature with respect.

Distribution: 

For this advertisement to be distributed for it to be viewed by people, a magazine would be an ideal method. This is because magazines are an ideal way of enabling many people to read as they have a good reputation by its customers and therefore, high numbers of people will be able to notice our advertisement and possibly research the band, track and the video.

I think that the most ideal and appropriate magazine to distribute our magazine would be Q magazine as it is a British musical magazine which not provides content of music in the United Kingdom, but in films, radio and television. A section of every one of this magazine is said to contain a top fifty songs in the UK charts which is another opportunity for promoting the song.  This enables for a greater possibilities of our advertisement to be viewed as it will enable for a wider audience to view, notice and take interest in Boca J.

A specific magazine we could use to publish our advertisement in could be the Vibe magazine, a common name for musical news and information. Though the magazine is mainly for hip hop and R&B I think that our music video could still be featured as it has a similar beat pattern to hip hop.