Blog :)

In class today I confirmed tomorrows plans with Amy, Sophie and Kelsie and answered questions about details I'd thought about and worked out at home. Everything is good to go! We just need to collect the camera tomorrow, I need to sort out my costume tonight so that it's ready to put on and go through exactly which parts we need to film.

This lesson we also looked through our video so far and tried to add a bit. None of the footage so far had an ideal clip for the extended "woah" before the final chorus, so I suggested filming a close up/extreme close up there and then in the lesson so that we'd have that and nobody would know that it was spontaneous as my uniform wont show if done correctly.

I went to the technicians and asked for a camera, they then refered me back to my teacher who needed the camera for ten minutes so we started to set up our Myspace page. When she'd finished with the camera me and Sophie took it outside whilst Amy chose to continue with our Myspace page. I grabbed my iPod from my car so that anything I'd mime would be in time with the actual music, guessing the timing probably wouldn't be a very good idea and would be difficult/verging on impossible to get insync when editing. Sophie asked if we should go to find a spare classroom, which we could have done, but I figured that it would be time consuming. The weather was idealic and we were surrounded by greenary so I suggested that the mise-en-scene would be more interesting and suited to our genre where we were. So, we settled on some green bushes which could be decoded subconciously by our audience as jealousy. I then said that perhaps we should record the entire song incase any other lines haven't worked out for us so we did this. I had a bright blue, summery scarf on so i wrapped this around my school shirt's collar to make sure that it wasn't showing. I checked with Sophie that the shot was close enough for it to not notice and she reassured me. We then recorded the whole song, including the "woah" part three times to be safe.

Finally we went up to our classroom and transfered the videos to our 'editing station' whilst Amy showed us what she'd done to our Myspace page. She didn't know how to edit the profile as it has all changed since we used to use the site, but I managed to work it out quite quickly and showed her how to do it. We then watched through a tiny bit of the footage me and Sophie had produced. The colouring was very bright and summery, with well-suited mise-en-scene and animated facial expressions, however I'm worried that the filming wasn't zoomed in quite enough and some of my uniform shows. It does seem quite subtle though, so we can study this in more detail in Wednesday's first lesson.

Today we found out that instead of Friday as our showcase deadline, it would in fact be Wednesday period three, so we only have the one hour on Wednesday to edit! I plan to ask Amy to simply transfer whatever we record tomorrow onto our computer during her morning registration to save time, and I might try to work on editing throughout my period one free, depending on how the room is being used.

Once I got home today I got stuck into editing my album artwork straight away. I completed what I set our to do on Picnik and added a black "wall" in Paint - which goes with the diary/girly/animated theme I'm going for luckily. (Finished image: right)

This is of course not the completed album cover, I have to add the other half first, as well as the text and the diary/cartoon style scribbles. It will also have to be the correct size of an actual album cover, and I'm going to have to design the back cover and an optional spine too.

This lesson I also found out roughly from Sophie and more acurately from my teacher, that the album cover is not supposed to be for Taylor Swift, but in fact for our fictional singer's name, which we hadn't realised at all. This entire time we had been pretending that I was Taylor Swift. Luckily nothing has to be changed, other than my name in the album artwork and Myspace page. My actual name is Emma Langschied, which is quite long, complicated and in no way catchy, so we've decided to shorten it to Emma Lang. This is the new name we'll refer to the music artist as.