Digi pak research

This is Evanescence's second album "the open door" the writing style is gothic so matches the music and art work.

I really like the colours and thought the pattern on the disc was nice. I also liked how the booklet was attached and the paper it was made from.

Atreyu's digi-pak is one of my favourites; I love the way the cover looks innocent and doesn't really match with their music but when opened the sheep rips in half and reveals a wolf. This would fit well with our digi-pak as the Cheshire cat and mad-hatter later reveal themselves too be evil creatures.

Like a lot of digi-paks it also contains a second disc which is a DVD with music videos on it. Instead of being opened like a book the booklet containing the lyrics folds out and has a lot of pictures of the band.

Machine Head used a red case instead of a clear one. We like this as it makes the digi pak stand out more and looks more interesting.

We liked this digi pak because the outside is black and white and the inside is colour. This would be good for our digi pak as we would like our illustrations to be in black and white as this matches the book. We would also like the booklet to be in colour and more then likely photos of us that will also be on the website.

Album Cover analysis

The first album cover is Evanescence- Fallen; as this is the album our chosen song is from. The image is the lead singer Amy Lee; in this picture she looks mysterious which fits in with our video as we want the characters to come across strange. I also like the blue tint effect as it makes it look strange and gothic.

This is the cover for Evanescence- The Open Door; their second album. This cover has a more Alice in Wonderland theme; mainly because of the door. At the same time it is still gothic like their first album cover.

Atreyu are my favourite band; this particular artwork is from the artist Dave Quiggle; http://www.davequiggle.com/. This relates to our coursework as the outside looks nice and your first reaction; is "awww look at the cute sheep," but when you look at the inside of the case it is creepy and dark, and the sheep is ripped in half and a wolf is it in its place almost like the sheep is a mask. This fits in with our idea as we want it our music video to start of "nice" and turn out dark and twisted.

Our website

We wanted our website to match the theme of the video so we used black and blue for a Gothic meets Alice in Wonderland feel. The website was to promote our digipak and new video. My favourite page is the gallery as it shows pictures of our make-up and from the shot which always reminds me of how fun the days were. Paul found a free website builder called www.wix.com so we used this. Paul and Yaz wrote the text and me and Paul uploaded the photos. Another part I like is the picture viewer at the top as it fits with our digipak as they are in black and white. Here is our finished website.

http://www.wix.com/a2medianewacademy/a2-media-coursework

Our Final Project

Our Music Video is now complete. I had a lot of fun making this and i am very proud of the final result. i just hope that everyone that watches it enjoys it and can see how much hard work Yaz, Paul and me put in to making it.

Digi pak

We decided to make our digi-pak ourselves as this would be more authentic. We found cream card that sort of matched the old textured background. I made the net for the outer case and Yaz made the net for the inside.

I also drew the pictures we wanted them to be similar to the illustrations in the original Alice in Wonderland book; i tried the make the characters look as much like us as possible. We added blue ribbon the the front to tie the case together as blue matching Alice's dress.

We thought it would look good to line up The cat's eyes with the "grudge" style creatures like she is revealing herself. We liked how the atreyu cover slide open but we decided ours would open up rather then sideways.

Yaz sewed the bottom instead of glueing it so it looked more interesting and handmade. This then folds out like so:

The left side is were the booklet will go after paul has made it and it is off alice running away from the creatures as she is not on the cover. We added a blue bow so it looks less plain. We wanted to stick to the blue theme so we found a blue cd case and Yaz sewed this to the card.

A close up of the right hand side shows a drawing of a screenshot of Yaz as the creature we wanted a screenshot of both Yaz and Paul drawn again to gain the creepy effect.

This is the back of our digipak, it's a picture of a teapot as this is an important part of the Alice in Wonderland story. When it opens up it shows the cup that i throw of the floor and the "tea" spilling out; explaining why i throw it on the floor as it looks like posion.

website research

This is evanescences website. A lot of sites have a button saying "enter site" a lot of sites have a page before the homepage giving new information; in the case of Evanescence that they a new album coming out shortly.

Start away the colours coordinate and match the music; there is also a picture of lead singer Amy Lee which fits with what the writing is saying.

The Butterflies in the background can be moved around the screen I thought this was very interesting as it makes the site fun and shows what professional can do.

There are several links to around the site for examples photos, news on the band and merchandise. Some of these like a gallery and merchandise we may use for our site as we need to advertise our digi pak.

Like the butterflies the birds can also be moved showing that on websites all the pages have to link together.

Most of the picture are of Amy Lee but we would like ours to be of all of us and pictures of us filming; but the layout is nice.

When you click on the picture to view it opens in a new window as you can see by the picture. I like this idea as you can see the picture more clearly and because its a pop-up it doesn't interfere with what you where already doing.

As we only have our digi pak and not t-shirts and other merch to sell maybe we can make our merchandise page more interesting.

Like we would like Evanescence have a page showing their videos. I like the scroll sideways bar showing the other videos. Their new video is already selected so all you have to do is press play. Maybe this is a good idea for our site =].

Editing

We used i-movie to edit our film and it was a very frustrating process. We started by watching all our footage to see which ones were best as we filmed some shots more then once so we had more choice in the editing stage.

Then we put the footage into chronological order to insure we knew how the music video would piece together. We began with the last bit the last shot from our first day of filming, showing that you never actually film in order; this was the footage of Paul setting up the camera in a manor of an amateur style music video, which ours actually is. This is because it fits too the stereotypes of how we wanted to portray our music video but also with the conventions of a official music video in later footage.

We chose this font as we thought it looked gothic and fits with the Alice in Wonderland theme; I really liked the background as it makes our video look old fashioned and a little bit creepy. We added the music first instead of last because this was easier as we did our editing along side filming. Most of our shots are sped up especially the Cheshire cat parts and it was a bit too long and it makes our video more dream like.

I split the close up and mid-shot clips of Yaz as the Cheshire cat up and re-ordered them. This make it more dream like and hinted at the fact the dream would become a nightmare as her head movements look creepy. I tried to mirror this at the end when she looks up as the creature as this is a indicator something bad is about to happen.

Matching up the track to Yaz and Paul's lip-syncing was the hardiest and most frustrating part of the ending process so we all had an input. We put this in first so we knew how much room we had to add footage before and after that part of the song. We decide to switch between close-ups and long shots as this sticks to the conventions of a real music video. As Paul wasn't the best a lip syncing so when it was his turn we used the long shots and used Yaz for the close-ups.

Yaz used a transition called zoom to skip between dream and reality as it makes the video flow better and faster and also makes it look professional.

Overall i love the way our video turned out and think it shows our imagination, creativity and hard work and hope everyone else can see it too.