-Extended- 3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To see what the audience thought we made a simple but effecting questionnaire asking the audience questions about the video. This questionnaire helped us out alot because in the end it convinced us to re-shoot the final scene. Everybody liked the shots which we had added some human input and they all said we should add more shots like that to improve our video. Here are some examples:

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

In terms of filming there wasn’t a lot of technology used other than the essentials, our aim was to make a video that goes crazy but keep it looking realistic so rather than using a lot of green-screen to place our actors in extravagant places and make it look flashy we just took a camera and filmed in various places in town, its what we did with that footage that makes the video look good.
Final Cut Pro was our main instrument for our video where we edited it, editing was the biggest choir as we were aiming to get a jump-cut for almost every beat but we managed it and also put in various effects, adjusted the speed of the video and colour i.e. the saturation, we wanted to make the video dark to make it fit with the theme. We stacked some clips adding an edit to one of them and then reduced the opacity so it gave an edit over the top of the main clip, an example of this was the effect ‘Bad TV’ and ‘Strobe’.


Along with using Final Cut Pro, which was a necessity to edit the video, we also relied heavily on Photoshop CS3 to work on the posters and CD covers. We gathered images, ideas, and skills to create our final finished products for the digipack. After hard work and dedicated time to the CD covers and posters we had a magnificent result. What really made our group work great was that we all had different strong points, such as story telling, planning, editing, graphical and artistic skills. We all worked together and listened to each other and took each others opinions about our work where we all contributed. Photoshop CS3 gave us so many tools and effects to manipulate and have total control over the designing process of the poster and CD Cover. W e used tools such as desaturate (removing all colour from objects), the filters fresco and grain which gave it a more a vintage look and alot of the movement tools to put the CD cover and poster together.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Even to people who may be listening to The Prodigy for the first time its fairly obvious that they portray that rock/electro underground rave scene and that’s most likely their intent appealing to young audiences of teens and young adults and, as we were attempting to keep to the formula The Prodigy has, we kept it rather ominous and foreboding. The CD cover and poster was also kept very close to their theme, we decided in the end to keep it similar to The Omen itself simply because it would be easiest and would also fit in well with the song and video.
In particularly the CD cover itself is a reference to the very end of the video, on the CD cover you’ll notice and “Danger of death” sign because that’s our central theme, the Omen possessing you and eventually killing you, and if you watch the end of the video, before the character passes out or presumably dies, the last thing he looks at is a danger of death sign, the sign symbolising what the video is all about.
We had a little trouble with an image on the CD cover because it was an image of a woman in a bikini but it wasn’t our own image rather it was taken from a magazine and we are only supposed to use original images. However, we believed it was best to get an image that wasn’t our own because we were fairly certain some issues would be raised by the college if we asked a woman we knew to model for us and besides which the image has been heavily edited on Photoshop so her face is unrecognisable as well as her body and so it shouldn’t raise any copyright issues, an issue that could be raised on the other hand is one of sexism, obviously its not our intent to merely expose a half-naked woman on the CD cover rather its what it implies, as mentioned the face was heavily edited so that its just a grinning, messed up, face and is supposed to imply things are not always as they seem and how someone can so drastically change in terms of personality by this I mean in the video the main character is just a guy having a quiet drink and next he’s running about town causing trouble.

Evaluation

Once we had the Video and Digipack complete it was time to evaluate it all. This included 4 questions asking us what our video was inspired by, how effective we thought our products were, how we learnt from audience feedback and how we used technologies to construct our products.

By Christopher Mckeeney

DigiPack Complete

After several attempts and many changes being made, we finally had our Poster and CD Cover complete. The poster was advertising the "Invaders Must Die" tour which is the name of the album and one of the hits on this album was Omen. The CD Cover included the front, the back and two inlays. From the research we realised most CD covers were very good but simple which is the look we wanted. It seemed very difficult to pull off "simplicity" but we eventually we got there and it was all complete.
A problem arisen whilst creating the front cover of the CD because we wanted to get an image of a semi-naked woman which we could later photoshop. Our teachers thought it was inappropriate to get this picture from one of our friends so we got the image off the internet and edited it to be sure we didnt infringe any copyright laws.

By Michael Sabti

Starting the DigiPack

We looked at previous CD covers and posters and used these as inspiration for ours. We all went home and because the deadline was nearing we decided to throw together some ideas and we each made rough versions of the CD cover and poster. When the next lesson came around we talked about all of our ideas and after comparing ours to other Prodigy print based work we knew what we would create. Chris then started on the the print based work while myself and Michael updated the blog, including videos and pictures.

By Christopher Mckeeney

Video Complete - Time to edit

Happy we had all the shots we needed we spent the rest of our free time and lessons editing the final shot and touching up on edits earlier in the video, as the character falls to the ground at the end we show a shot of the Barman who served him the drink which caused all of this to happen, this then fades out and the video, along with the song ends. Finally we had the video complete, it was now time to create our digipack.

By Paul Strafford