IMAGE / TEXT / WEBSITE MANIPULATION

MY WEBSITE & DIGI-PAK PHOTOGRAPHY SOURCES

SOURCES FOR MY WEBSITE PHOTOGRAPHY 

* The photographs of the x4 young boys are meant to represent 'Suburban Typo' as youthful preadolescents, wild, playful and eager to grow up into the world of music. I used my younger brother and three of his friends (Joe Fraser, Oliver Hammond, Joshua Masterson & Alfie) as the young band & received parental permission before photographing them in order to make sure their mums & dads felt comfortable with my work. I really aimed to capture a rebellious portrayal of their childhood, having the boys pretend to drink beer, smoke, pee on cars, and generally mess about. I photographed them on my nikon slr & a disposable camera & use my polaroid printer to develop some of the shots. With the variety of cameras I attempted to create a homemade, authentic feel. As most festival goers use disposables for convenience & effect. I aimed to parody their style & make 'Suburban Typo' seem rooted in history & a magnetism towards the alternative lifestyle. I edited all the photos using filter effects on iphoto / instagram, in order to make them seem more arty / aged.

*The Photographs of Bing & his friends - or fellow band mates. We photographed Bing on Grace's  SLR camera when we were filming the 1st & 2nd performance pieces. The river backdrop provided an urban, nature, holistic feel and aided our portrayal of the artist. The photographs of the fellow band mates were taken on other occasions when we met up socially. The photographs I then edited to make them feel more 'indie', sourcing - through the use of social networking sites (facebook,tumblr,flickr,instagram) & noting the effects used in the photography by people who I felt were quite 'indie' / 'alternative' & mimicking these. 'The Vaccines' use only monochromatic imagery on their site, which does make their site look extremely edgy and sophisticated - in a uniquely rocky way, their images seem lifeless, curious and extreme - appealing to their demographic and exciting a viewer who quickly clicks through their site.

* INDIE ETHOS

My site (using the photos of the boys) tried to mimic the discrete star image of an indie rock band. 'The Vaccines' most recent album What Did You Expect from the Vaccines? used images of x4 surrogate band members - all female. These females were almost Metamorphasized versions of the group, echoing their video for 'Teenage Icon' and blurring the gender stereotypes of rock music. Therefore i chose to make the band out of there younger selves rather than women & copied the classic band formation in one of my digi-pak stills.

 

I also used photos my friend & I had taken last year at Reading Festival on a disposable camera - trying to capture a hedonistic, musical vibe within their present life as well as youth. 

* My DIGI-PAK

For the front cover of my DIGI-PAK (as aforementioned) i have manipulated a selection of images in order to create a bricolage of ideas which can mean as little or as much as the viewer wants them to. I used power point to 'Remove the background' of the images in order to layer the parts of the photographs i wanted without any white backgrounds or distant objects. Though some of the images were ones i had taken for example the boy blowing up a condom (Joe) or the Olympics post box. Indie albums often revert focus from the artist and onto the music. Star image has seemed to drown music in its glossy facade, and groups like 'The vaccines' "XX' 'Two door cinema club' 'Bombay bicycle club' reduce this forced merchandising and voyeristic reception, by using graphology / art based album covers, photographs which connote their songs, albums, music or group, or photographs of people other than themselves. Therefore i aimed to use this style for my own artwork, including references to 'The Beatles', drug culture, disco, British heritage, Disney, and The Queen, Andy Warhol to create a mad collage of inter-textual imagery. I used a similar style for my back cover as well cropping out different images / cartoons / sketches / paintings of arms in order to create a chain of collaboration. 

 

Editing continued.

Today we continued to finalising our editing. We are now in the penultimate stage of the process and working on the little tweaks & tying up all loose ends. There have been many things which have unfortunately been unachievable to complete, i really wanted to film the 1970's for example - finally deciding that we could use a wig wham i own & have our protagonist emerging into a world of 'free love' with people grouped round an acoustic guitar, wearing tie-die, long patterned skirts, loose shirts, and having their hair loose, long, wavy, and decorated with flowers. I felt this era would be able to give the piece that flash of colour that it desperately needed.

  

 Yet though this would have been aesthetically pleasing due to others exams & the robbery slowing down our filming availability (not to mention the lack of help for fellow students due to their own coursework deadlines & stress!) we were unable to orchestrate this decade. Another issue is the quality of our footage, the school cameras we used for most of the music video were extremely outdated, and naturally the clips (once imported) weren't as sharp as we'd have liked them to be. For our performance pieces however Grace's camera -  top end piece of equipment, was available for use (It was being mended prior to these filming sessions) which made a huge impact on the visual worth of the images. These aspects were unfortunately out of our hands, and today we felt it was important to just stop for a minute & work out strategically all the steps we needed to take in order to complete the deadline & exceed our expectations. 

1.) We needed to overlay a picture of a clock onto the start of each era, fading the image & dimming it out in order to establish overtly the fact she was traveling back in time. We were aware that music video doesn't have to establish itself in the same way as film, rigorously using master shots & close ups to link each action & reaction into a linear narrative (or at least one that will help you to connect the actions - or feel distanced & confused if aiming for an enigmatic feel). However we also knew that though some people would pick up on our historic references, others wouldn't, and we needed to exaggerate our ideas. The  'clock'  thus has been embedded in order to display a passing of time & distance Rhianna from Bing. Adding to the intensity of the piece by elongating the gap their is between their locations - years / decades. 

2.) We needed to colour correct all our clips - Making the current day shots a better quality of image (hoping to fix some of the problems posed by the camera quality), and making the earlier decades reflect the style of film used in those eras. We researched into the progression of colour filming & altered the saturation of the 1920's to nil. This monochromatic effect was aided by adjusting the backlighting, thinning the edge width, adding a striped effect, and a flicker effect. Overall we aimed to mimic the projected b&w films of the roaring 20's & clearly display to the audience that Rhianna was in another time frame - as although they may not be able to connect all of the iconography commonly associated with the era, they would be able to link the use of black & white to the past.

   

We also edited the 1940's sketch in order to make it sepia tone & are going to increase the saturation on the 1980's to parody the neon brightness of the decade. 
3.) what we were going to do about our fake band, we still haven't been able to group together 3 more boys to form 'Suburban Typo', so we are now most probably going to have to individually photo graph people in order to create the bio pages for our website (as our digi-paks /imagery used on our websites is mostly either of Bing or uses images unconnected to the band, seeing as most indie rock album covers tend not to use the actual band / artist and rely on images which connote their hedonistic life styles & anti authority ethos).  

FINAL PLANNING

In our final planning stage we started to brain storm all of the loose ends we needed to tie up. We were unsure at this point of which other x3 boys we were going to use for our band & were debating weather to photograph boys at school against the green screen, use our friends out of school and meet up for a quick photo shoot or use Facebook photographs which we had already taken on other occasions. This was the bane of our project, we had found it so hard to find people to use for our band, partly because we were too fussy & partly because of peoples lack of time commitment, reliability & availability. We also needed to work on colour correcting all of the eras in order to signify their time frame to an audience who weren't as overly familiar with the narrative we had created. We have now transformed the 1920's into black & white, adding the 'stripe' effect & lowering the tolerance & thinning / feathering the edges the parody the project style from the time.  Furthermore we made the 1940's a dull sepia tone, added a pink / red tint to the 1940's by adjusting the RBG balance & saturation, and brightened the 1980's altering the saturation, hue & contrast.     

      

Editing the Performance

We are currently working on editing our shots from our x2 days of performance filming into our sequence of narrative, keeping the different threads on x2 separate timelines in order to simplify the process. The computers we have been using are extremely clogged up and therefore take a great deal of time in order to operate on final cut. Thus rendering files has become an extremely time consuming job and has majorly slowed down our production. We are concentrating on stringing together the entire song through performance clips, even though around 50-60% of the final music video will be narrative based, purely because we want to leave all our options open in terms of our overall style  and shot range. Something which has proved particularly challenging is lip synchronisation, mainly because our lead male singer (Bing) harmonises 'The Vaccines' song and has trouble enunciating his speech, singing at times as though he were a ventriloquist. We had to be extremely brutal in choosing the selection of clips & spent a great deal of time moving the audio along the time line / slowing it up or speeding it down, in order for his vocals to match the rhythm of the song. We are aware at times that the narrative/performance is perhaps incongruous to the audio, though we planned to sustain this effect in order to make our piece as abstract and surreal as possible. In fact today when editing my co-worker said "If we hadn't made this, I would have no clue what it was about", and my response was..."yes but that doesn't matter" - simply because we aimed for a basic thread of intertextuality & historical references, but even if our audience members do not understand the intended plot, they will still (hopefully) be able to gain pleasure from viewing our piece, which is after all our key aim - along with selling 'Suburban Typo' as a commercialised industry product. 

Filming&Editing&Tweaking

 In terms of filming we have x2 shoots left to complete. From the start we knew our ambitions were extreme & our hopes were possibly unrealistic. We knew that blunders would block our path & something that has been extremely tricky is reliability of key actors & extras - as of course an industry production company would have the budget to pay for casting directors, an experienced cast & in turn their commitment. The reason i am drawing on this particular issue is that currently our lead male singer has fallen ill which has completely postponed our performance filming. originally we aimed to acquire an already formulated band to sing the performance pieces (which would  then be inter cut with our narrative), however the commitment of those we asked faltered and thus we made the decision to only use our lead male in the video itself & not feature an entire group. So far he has been fantastic : taken direction well, looked good on the camera, and been extremely punctual & reliable, however falling ill is hardly his fault, but it is slowing down our production line. 
                                                

We want to film him watching our lead female travel through the decades on a television - in the first established location (reiterating a place of comfort & one reminiscent of their relationship). We aimed to convey his constant presence in her mind, and his continual protection over her, even when separated unrealistically by years and years of history. In terms of this shoot we have orchestrated all costumes, props & planned hair style & makeup (blemish coverage & guy liner). We are however yet to upload the footage onto a disc (for the 'TV' effect). Though is only because we want to wait until we have shot our final era, as then we will have a clear idea of all the transitions & of the chronological order of the footage.


  

We have had to majorly cut down the footage on our timeline in order to make way for this shoot & the performance. We did actually debate cutting it altogether, especially because the performance needs to be almost equal to the narrative in terms of screen time & our song is a relatively short piece of music, which means we have an extremely acute time frame to play with. However I did really fight to keep this shoot in as i felt the aesthetics would help to create more of a complete piece of work. I knew we could experiment majorly with  symbolism & rely upon signifying features in order to make this era easily recognisable & visually powerful. Before we planned to shoot some 1970's punk rockers in a public place, clowning around, acting rebelliously - stereotyping typical hedonistic behaviour. However I thought the concept of using a protest to represent an era flooded with anarchy & resistance (for example Vietnam, Nuclear weaponry & Russia,). Thus we plan to film a slightly larger cast that anticipated running with banners as if off to protest (giving a clear impression of their actions without actually filming hundreds and hundreds of people at a protest). Using a larger cast makes organizing slightly more challenging in some respects, but in others it means we can be slightly less picky about casting (we were previously restricted to merely 'punky style people').. So we spent quite a lot of our meeting today making mock 'anti-vietnam' posters - as well as editing & blogging.

 


So far we have:

*Uploaded all of our footage from - the modern day & 1980's & 1950's & 1940's & 1920's
*chronologically ordered the footage
*Cut down all acquired clips to the correct size
*Altered the speed of clips 
*Reversed parts of actions, for example : at the end the entire sequence is played on rewind as if she is being thrust back into the present day 
*Reversed actors movements - EG: coffee shop scene - slowed & reversed the lead male's movements in order to extend the drama
*Added slow motion 
*Starting colour correcting (currently in this process & debating whether to set some eras in black&white and sepia)
*Removed unneeded sound & uploaded our artists track onto the timeline
*Cropped certain shots & zoomed in, in order to gain a wider variety of close ups as we were majorly lacking in them & desperately needed to artificially create some in order to a.) embody a greater sense of variety in our shots (more visually interesting) and b.) remain faithful to the conventions of music video.