Pilgrim Records Going Viral

Today, me and Niall created our facebook profile, in preparation for our music video release. As our only source of advertising and publishing is the internet, we believed that joining a social network would rapidly enhance our audience feedback, as our target audience are the people most likely to use facebook. From this page, fans can see our news, our music video and give us feedback about our work. This would be extremely beneficial for future work and direction, especially when including samples such as test shots, where fans would be able to judge for themselves whether they like the new work or not.

The facebook group was created to coincide with our music video launched. A screenshot is shown below

Ancillary Tasks - Reviewing previous work

For our Ancillary Tasks, we have to make a Digipak CD and Poster to advertise and promote the music video. The Digipak must include a CD, CD case and a leaflet contatining details such as song lyrics, or just pictures of the band.

Before we start creating our own versions of these reference materials, we decided to look at and review the bands versions of the digipak

 The Ballad of Mona Lisa Single DigiPak

Panic at the Disco! released The Ballad of Mona Lisa as a single, and as such, released a Digipak specifically for the song. The CD only had the one feature track present on it, which is unusal, as bands generally upload a few other, older tracks to the CD, or remixes of the single, in order to promote the single and allow fans to get more for their money.

The Cover art consists of simply the Bands Logo and the track name, on a navy blue background. The top right corner is ripped, and the logo and background give a Steampunky vibe, continuing the style of the badn and their latest album 'Vices and Virtues'

The official album with the track on was released later on, under the name 'Vices and Virtues'. It is the bands third studio album. The Album had 10 tracks present, with The Ballad of Mona Lisa being the first. The Artwork continues the Steampunk Theme, with Band member Brendon Urie and Spencer surrounded by strange equipment, as well as wierd actors. The bands logo is present in the top right of the album cover.

The posters released specifically for the album were few and far between, instead the band relying on third party posters and posters relating to the band in generally instead of its latest creation. The only poster directly reffering to the vices and virtues album consists of the CD artwork expanded to fit a bigger size format, and looks more like a movie advertising poster that one would find in a shop, than one for decorative purposes in someones house, though it could still be used for that purpose. Other posters include images of other albums, and pictures of the band together, such as below, though the example appears to have been released in a music magazine, possibly after abn inteview with said publishers.

There is also posters which involve only Brendon and Spencer, since the other members decided to resign from the band.

From the research provided, I believe the duo style poster would benefit our group fantastically, as there are only two of us in the group, as well as only one performer in the music video, meaning that there would be no need to have a whole band shot, since there is no band in our rendition.

For the digipak, we could provide either a similar style to the poster we make, or similar to the bands album cover.

Story Board and Ideas

Today we started putting our ideas onto paper and came up with a general overview of what we planned to do. This is to help form later ideas, and is influenced by our research.

The ideas for costume and style of performer.

The start of the shot storyboard

Adapting our ideas using Research

'Panic at the Disco! - The Ballad of Mona Lisa' Music Video Analysis

Changing our Song

After looking at our shots present, and discussing with our mentor about future plans, we decided that the footage we had already filmed was of unsatisfactory quality, and didn't adapt well to the editing program and the song track. This would cause us to have to re-shoot all of our work. It was then we decided to have a general look at our situation, and came to the conclusion that our ideas weren't strong enough to support the video and get a good grade, and the production of the video was not going as anticipated. This caused us to try and decide on a alternative, either replanning or starting again altogether.

We have decided it would be best to change our music video track. Although this would provide alot more work, including re planning, researching and the shooting of the music video, we believe this will strengthen our coursework, and as long as we put the work in, will be better off for it.
We have changed out song to 'The Ballad of Mona Lisa' By Panic at the Disco!

(Video)
For the rest of the day, we are going to plan out our music video, including a storyboard, to help progress as much as possible in what little time we had left. From then we will perform a little research, however, the bands are in simila genere's, if no only a slightly different, and the research we already performed would apply to the new track iswell. This mean't that the learning side of the research was pretty much already completed, only referecning and showing proof of development was needed.

The lesson after we will start filming...

Next Steps

Now that the examination revision has finished, we can focus solely on our coursework portfolio. Reviewing what we have done so far, we have decided that we need to make a few improvements to our variety of things.

 First of these things is our shot quality, as there are some shots that need to be improved to fit in naturally with the rest of the video, as well as sync up with the music track. There also needs to be more variety, which has been caused by both lack of shots planned and some shots going missing while uploading to the computer. To combat this, we plan to film a variety of new shots, including a close up of the bassist, to help provide a whole rotation of the band, as well as effective and high quality shots of all the band members close up with their instruments. We also plan to film a extreme close up of birth the Guitar and Bass guitar, to show the band playing them, mainly for the intro of the music video. This will help provide variety to the video, and is also a common convention in the punk rock genre, as the artists play their own instruments, allowing themselves to show off their playing to their fans.

We have also planned where and when to fit narrative shots into our music video, where the performance shots are weakest, but this may have to change when we acquire our new performance shots.

After this is done, we can progress forward to film and mould our narrative shots. Before we start this operation, we should research into similar music videos, to see the different ways we can tell the story, and how we can mix in it with our performance shots, using special effects. We will then have to storyboard our ideas out to provide an effective plan, to make sure the same mistake doesn't happen, and we get effective shots first time. The storyboard should include our ideas, what shot types we can use, and what locations we can film in. Providing a variety of opportunities to film will help us film faster and filming in more locations will help us provide the most effective shots.

While this is happening, during times when we are unable to film, we can focus on our Ancillary tasks. We have to create both a music CD and a poster promoting the single. This will be the way our track gets attention, and therefore will have to have a clear message about what genre and style it is, while attracting the target audience to our track. This again will require research into other bands methods, to see what ideas we can use and mix up. We can then perform several drafts and show it to people, and see if they can tell us what genre they think the track is, and how effective is the poster in attracting interest. We can then use this to improve and make a final draft. We can then do the same for the CD track.

In summary, over th next few months, we have to complete the following

1) Re-shoot some performance shots
2) Research into our narrative shots
3) Storyboard our Narrative ideas and filming locations
4) film the narrative shots
5) Research ideas for poster and music cd
6) plan ideas for poster and music cd
7) Make drafts and show them to fellow students for feedback
8) Re-draft and finish final poster.