Before we began brainstorming ideas of what we wanted our digipak to look like, we needed to look at examples of real media that were already out there. We researched, and found a variety of existing album covers. We specifically searched for artists that fall within the indie genre, due to the fact that this the genre that Littlewing fit in to. It was fairly easy for us to find artists that fitted into the indie genre, and therefore the album covers, because myself and the other member of my production group both listen to that genre of music. We put them together on a mood board, as used this a source of inspiration when creating our own digipak.
Having now included a narrative in our music video, it looks very different to how our second cut did. The inclusion of the narrative was a very good choice, as it broke up the performance, and helped to match the song at times - particularly when the song was slower - as performance wouldn't have fit as well. We also added more cuts, now that we had all of the footage that we wanted happily in place, and we matched these to the beat of the song as well. Finally, to really make our music video look professional, we added titles and institutional logos, which made it feel like a real music video, and I was very pleased with the final outcome.
Having come to the decision that we needed to film a narrative to accompany the performance element, we needed to film within quite a short space of time. Fortunately, organising a date for production was a lot more straight forward, due to the fact there was only three of us, and we all lived very local. We chose to film at another forest location near to us, as we wanted it to appear as if it had all been filmed in one day, to avoid it look jarring. We walked for almost an hour around the forest, until we found a spot that was on the bed of the river, but wasn't too exposed to the sun, as we didn't want the shots to be over exposed. In our storyboard, we had wanted a shot of the couple walking up some stairs into the sunshine. We couldn't believe our luck when we walked along the river to find a wooden staircase leading up into the sunshine. The location was quite romantic, and clearly reflected the relationship between the couple. So overall, we were very pleased with how this shoot turned out.
Once we had chosen to add a narrative section to our music video, we needed to find extra cast members to fill the roles in the narrative. As part of our narrative, we required a girl that looked quite similar to the lead singer Annie, particularly having similar hair. This was needed as our narrative would make the audience think that Annie was in a relationship with the boy, however it would be revealed at the end that it is in fact a different girl.
However, when we re-evaluated our narrative, we realised that this was far too complex, so we chose to just include shots of the couple. In terms of casting, after searching for a girl that looked similar, we realised that my production partner looked the most similar, and after some convincing, she was willing to be part of the music video. As for the male lead, I knew that my friend had done some acting before, so therefore wouldn't find it too awkward to be part of the narrative - pretending to be in a relationship.
Having re-watched our music video many times since finishing the first cut, we realised that some of the shots we had used were quite weak in comparison to some which we were yet to even use at all. Due to the fact we had such a large amount of footage, we were about to go through our video and remove all of the flat and weak shots, and replace them with something much better. A problem we knew that was existing in our first cut was that we didn't have enough cuts. In order to improve this. we decided to listen to the track again (without any of the visuals), and create a graph communicating the pace of the song visually for us.
By creating this graph, it made it clear to us which points in the song were fast paced, and therefore would require a lot more cuts. It was quite easy to add more cuts in the music video, as we realised we had a lot of shots that were far too long, so this graph helped up choose where to make the shots shorter. However one problem we were yet to fix following the editing of the second cut was what to put in the slower paced section of the song. We asked our peers for feedback, and they said that it was becoming slightly repetitive having just a performance, so maybe we should think about also including a narrative to accompany it. Myself and my partner discussed this, and we realised that we had known it all along, but we had just had our finger's crossed that it would all work out. Although we were going to have to do another shoot to film the narrative, it wasn't too bad, because we had storyboarded a narrative as an initial idea, so we were able to use that as a starting point.
