Final Production

This is the final, updated version of our music video.

CD pack

This is the full CD pack that will accompany our Music video. Here I will go through every page of the booklet, from back to front.

This is our album cover. This is an image that we want people to associate us with. It's futuristic theme is something that we have adhered to throughout most of our A2 work, as you can see below.

This is the front cover of our inside booklet. As you can probably see, it is very similar to the album cover, and sticks to the futuristic theme. The contrast between red and blue refers to the contrast between day and night; something that we feel we show very well in our music video.

 This is the first page inside of our album booklet. It contains the lyrics to our hit, Day N Nite, and helps the audience to sing along.

Finally, this is the back cover for our CD. It contains a track-list and other features such as a barcode, record label and small-print. We felt that it looked more professional this way.

Question 4 : A2 Evaluation

This is my answer to the final question for our A2 Media studies Music Video project. http://prezi.com/pk7nivhda0at/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Question 3 : A2 Evaluation

This is our answer to Question 3, as part of our A2 evaluation for our music video, 'Day N Nite'.

Question 2 : A2 Evaluation

How effective is the relationship between your ancillary products and your music video?

Question 1 : A2 Evaluation

Myself and my group immediately identified what we wanted to do with our music video. We wanted  a clear accompaniment with the song's lyrics, as well as show a clear storyline within the video. My initial idea, whilst in pre-production, was to show that our main character was going nowhere, and each day was a repeat of the previous ones. In order to do this, we had to make use of different angles and editing techniques, as well as using a decent amount of footage, to help portray this storyline. The grey chrome cast effect was key in showing this.
Other than this storyline, a key feature we felt the need to add was a good accompaniment with the lyrics of Kid Cudi's Day N Nite. For this we needed a good use of Mise-En-Scene, good camera angles, more good use of editing and, of course, good miming. In terms of Mise-En-Scene, we identified that the continuous alternation between Day and Night in the song would match our visuals. So every time the artist mentions what we was doing at night, we include a low lit shot, and every time he mentions his daytime activities, we show a brighter shot. This clearly helps the audience know what is being said and the meaning of the lyrics as the picture that they may have had in their head to help them understand the premise of the music is right in front of them. This clear relationship between the lyrics and the visuals is a good example of Andrew Goodwin's music video theory. A good relationship between lyrics and visuals can help the audience to understand exactly what is going on, and this can aid a song's success.
One thing that I noticed when observing our music video is that in certain ways, it is quite similar to the actual video for Kid Cudi's Day N Nite. For the most part, it only contains one character, it occasionally uses others to help portray the jealousy and the character's loneliness, and there is a clear relationship with the lyrics and the visuals. So it could be argued that our music video has developed music video ideas and conventions that already existed, as it is a theme that has been used before. However, there are features in our music video that perhaps go against the conventions of a hip-hop music video, even though there are moments which imply otherwise.
One common feature of a general hip-hop music video is the low angle shot to demonstrate the power that the artist has over their audience. This is an angle which can be seen throughout different moments of our music video. It helps portray the supposed power that a hip hop artist should have, as they are looking down towards their audience, but not in a patronising manner, although this has been the case in the past.
However, one of our features of Mise-En-Scene is the characters clothing. This isn't usual hip hop attire, and goes against the sport jerseys and sometimes provocative gear that is worn in a regular hip hop video. Also, we did not include any jewellery in our video as we didn't feel that it would adhere to the sad feel of our product.
There are no females in our music video, which is yet another feature that is rare within the genre, and we do not have other males to accompany our main character, which perhaps takes from the power we originally granted him.
There are plenty of reasons to suggest that, for the most part, we have challenged the conventions of a regular hip hop music video.
On the whole, we feel that we have both challenged and adhered to the stereotypical hip hop video. We do not include any shots of the main character having fun or any conventional shots that I have previously mentioned. However, we have acquired inspiration from certain videos, particularly the original Day N Nite video, and have incorporated these features into our products.

The Association : Website

This is the official website for my media group; 'The Association'. Here, you can find our merchandise, music, profiles, past work and upcoming tour dates.
http://kieranlukas1.wixsite.com/theassociation

Day N Nite designs

Here are the first drafts of our album cover and our back cover. These have been designed by group member Kieran, and there is a clear theme within the photos of technology, which has connotations of the future.
Our album cover contains a contrast between two colours, which helps signify the 'day to night' theme within the song.
The dark figure is that of group member Dan, who is the focus for a lot of our work and has been in the past.
Below the album cover is our back cover, which contains a tracklist, record label (Belt Buckle Productions) and a barcode.

Day 'N' Nite - First Draft

This is the first draft of our A2 music video for Kid Cudi's Day 'N' Nite, which we have been working on for months. There are still a couple of minor changes we would like to make and we will try to do this before the deadline.

Work in Progress

We are making decent progress in the filming of our music video. So far we have used locations like group member's houses, the countryside and some around a suburban area. We want to make this video get across the idea of 'repetitiveness', as it portrays a man who is constantly experiencing 'Groundhog Day' and seems to be stuck in a circle that he cannot get out of.
We have also used the school premises in order to gain shots to use for our website, 'TheAssociation.com'.

Day'N'Nite Copyright

Today, we decided to use our time to contact the distributing companies of Kid Cudi's Day'N'Nite, so that we were able to gain permission to use the sog for our A-level project. Unfortunately, wew were not able to find a way to contact either Dream on records, Universal Motown or GOOD Music. Since there is no way to contact any of the companies mentioned over their website, e-mail address or any form of social media, we decided to write about it on our blogs. Although this is a very popular song, I was very clear about the fact that we should choose the original song rather than any of it's multiple remixes to try and avoid any copyright issues. Myself and my group must stress that we are using Kid Cudi's Day'N'Nite for educational purposes only and do not wish to make a profit.

Kanye West - Stronger : Practice piece

This is our previous practice task, where we decided to make a video on Kanye West's stronger. It is only a minute long, and it was made months and months ago, but hopefully with the experience of making this video we will be in good stead.

Storyboard

This is the finished storyboard. this contains my group and I's ideas about what we are going to include in our music video. We may decide to change certain things if we feel that the visual realisation is in fact better with a different camera angle, we are open minded enough to allow for corrections to be made

Update - Progress so far

Hi!
This is just a quick update informing you of how we are doing on our project
I have finished the storyboard, and that will be uploaded to the blog in due course. I feel that the necessary improvements have been made and I hope that the storyboard makes filming a smoother process.
We have also finished our album cover, which will also be uploaded to the blog soon. Kieran has done a great job with it, as he has matched our ambition to make our artwork look very modern and has also implemented the idea of a split-screen effect, where one side is lighter than the other; hence the title of the album, Day N Nite. We are yet to make a back side for the album/cd, but we imagine it will be something similar.
Finally, we are working hard on our website, TheAssociation.com, and it will contain a homepage, store, tour, exclusive info and a music page. We hope that this will give our audience an insightful experience and they will appreciate the effort we have put in.

Across each of these we have used a posterization effect. This is something that we have seen in some of our favourite tv shows, such as the inbetweeners. This was a great effect that we really wanted to implement in our project, and through Kieran we have managed to do that.

Further updates will be on the blog soon!

Storyboard - Progress

This is my group's storyboard. It is a work-in-progress at this current moment.