Some Fiddly Bits

I have redone my chase scene. I've decided to do a group shoot at the school and play my track over the top. I've decided to re-edit the track to cut about 20 seconds off of the end to fit in with the timing of some of the cuts. It took me so long to try and get the final 30 seconds of the video to look good, I used a bit of slow motion when the solo started in the song, because that is my favourite bit of the song so I tried to do something different with the video style.

Background Experiments.

The minor tasks are fine now. The reason I chose not to include pictures of band members in them was because I wanted the sense of mystery about them, the way a teaser trailer would tease a movie. The reason I chose the name 'The Pen and The Sword' tour was becuase that was the name of another song we were writing at the same time we recorded Pickslides and Feedback. I thought I might aswell use it.

The reason I had all the names and fonts is because when we were a band and played together a lot more, we sat down and thought rather comprehensively about all this material. I think we fancied ourselves putting together a concept album, nothing ever came out of it, except for me being able to use the material now.


In my re submissions I wanted to keep the advert void of band members but I want to change my DVD cover to have the band members on it, this would give it a more personal feel. This can be seen below.



Another thing I wanted to put in my final DVD cover was a textured background image. The one I settled for was a picture of sparks flying from a angle grinder outside a house. This gave the DVD cover a deeper feel and allowed me to layer more images on top. I did go through quite a few background pictures however.

This one I looked at first because it was relatively simple and kept the same feel of my original plain white background. One problem with it however was that the black image would be covered up by my pen and sword image and my band photo. The image wasn't wild enough for me either.

This one was one I chose because it was pretty much fully black. It gave me the same problem that the main image was covered mostly by my images already on my piece. It was a step in the right direction though, as more of the image sprawled across the pages.

After the failure of the last two images I started searching for 'shattered' images because of its relation to the band name. This one immediately caught my eye, but it was not very practical to use as it was very large, was not composed correctly and did not really fit in with the concept of the tour album.

The most obvious 'shattered' image for me to search. The only problem with this was that it was too small and ended up pixelated on my InDesign document. The colour also did not match my band photo.


This was my first real success. The colours all matched and the image looked great and was hectic enough for what I wanted. The problem was though, that because of the layout of Indesign and the size of my document, the image would be stretched as it was bigger than the page size. What I wanted to do, was on my left page, to have the image on the left and on my right page, have the image on the right. This would give it a uniform feel and I thought it looked very appealing. But alas, the image was too large and not the right shape.

Because the colour of the previous image was perfect, I started looking along the lines of fire. And along the lines of 'shattered' images, one thing just as wild was exploding. So i started searching 'exploding stars' as I have an interest in astrology of sorts. I found several images, this one looked good but again was not the right shape.

Again, another cosmos image, this one was ok, just too small.



This, is my final background. It did not occur to me that I could have one large image that sprawled across both pages. Obviously i'd leave the spine blank for the title. This image was perfect as it was the correct size to format to fit the page. It is very hectic, which is what I wanted and has no single image to be shadowed out by the pictures. I am very pleased that i found this image and believe my final piece looks very good.

Cover Inspiration and Progress

Back to my minor tasks. I have been working at length on my dvd cover and advert. I have made them similar in style so that it looks like they were produced by the same company. One of them in black, one in white, to give them the contrast but still make them the same style. This relates back to the way I wanted them to be minimalistic. I like the way they are looking.

After getting to go ahead to re submit my coursework I restarted working on my DVD cover.

This was my original submission. As you can see it is not comprehensive at all, there is only one page with no blurb. However I do like the font of the band and tour names. I also like the picture of the pen and the sword.
This is what I have done so far for my re submission. As you can see It is a bit more comprehensive than my original. I've encorporated the pictures more this time and added a picture of the band. I've also added a description of the tour, I was thinking of adding some short review statements from music magazines and newspapers.


This is pretty much my final piece. I added a background image to really get a full feel. I will post up some of the images which I tried to use as a background image. As you can see I kept the pen and sword picture and the band photo. I added some spine wording to give it the look of a dvd. I also added a blurb and tracklisting. The DVD logos and age ratings were added very last to actually make it look like a DVD cover.

Because artists very rarely release tours on DVD it was quite hard for me to find inspiration for the cover. Here are some that I could find though.

Technical Advances

The reason I could not have used my previous film for my task is that it just was not long enough. I totally underestimated the time and effort needed to get a sufficient amount of material to make a decent film. After the first filming session, which I only spent about 2 hours doing, not only did I lack sufficient shots to make a legnth of film to match my music, but I also did not take into account the shot changes, such as the two shot match or others. I made sure when I re filmed my scenes I would make room for the technical shots.