#coursework development

digipak front mockup:

digipak outer packaging:

digipak inner packaging (+CD):

& finally, here’s the designs individually (without the clear / plastic overlay on them to make the mockup look more realistic):

outer packaging designs:

CD art:

the music video (major task)

creative critical reflection

the instagram page (promotional website - minor task)

the digipak (minor task)

the digipak:

the way dania and i had previously talked about, we decided to make separate minor tasks for the portfolio to better show our individual colours and talents. therefore, i began working on the digipak first.

i definitely had to do a fair bit of research going into making the digipak since i wanted to be sure i knew the exact kind of product and outcome desired of me (due to the fact that digipaks aren't exactly a 'thing' anymore, for lack of a better phrase, with the music industry fully relying on digital music streaming platforms to distribute and even sell music rather than actual CDs).

but i believe i ended up with a good understanding of digipaks and their purpose, which helped me in designing my own for 'still with you'.

i based my digipak heavily on the title card sequence of the music video that i had already worked on to create a sense of uniformity between the song and both kinds of its visuals (i.e. the music video and the digipak). therefore, i made sure to use the same cursive, loopy handwritten font and the same red and blue colours for the digipak.

after playing around with a couple different ideas (some a lot more fanciful than others), i eventually settled on a relatively simple but, in my opinion, more impactful design for the digipak.

this is a design i made (and quite liked) but ultimately decided against using:

and following is the final digipak design (including a full mockup of what the CD & its packaging would look like):

digipak front mockup:

digipak outer packaging:

digipak inner packaging (+CD):

& finally, here's the designs individually (without the clear / plastic overlay on them to make the mockup look more realistic):

outer packaging:

CD art:

& that’s all for today!

signing off now,

even though it has been a long, long day indeed, i just really wanted to get things done as quickly as possible, so i pushed through the fatigue & both uploaded the video:

and made the instagram page that will serve as part of my 'minor tasks' that call for a promotional website to be created for the singer / song:

dated: 230331

technical difficulties but they got worse:

this past week… has really been something. the reason i call it an ‘editing bat-cave’ is because that’s exactly what i turn my room into when i edit a project- i’ll sit with my laptop and a bottle of water, open up my editing program (filmora 10), and just… disappear into the process until i check the little clock on my laptop and realise it is now six hours later.

from having my (brother’s) laptop shut down at almost regularly-occurring 15 or 20 minute intervals because it couldn’t deal with my editing program and the high-quality footage to scouring the internet for ways to fix the problem and make my editing process just a little bit smoother, it was quite a lot to deal with.

still, i didn’t let all of this affect me and just kept on working- making sure to save my project as often as i could so i wouldn’t lose any progress once the program crashes as per schedule.

starting in earnest:

i whittled my ‘usable footage’ down to 27 minutes of cut footage, and then got to using it to tell the story i wanted to. i actually realised with a start at this point that the footage i had might not be enough for the music video, but since planning another shoot day (even just a small one- an hour or two at most would’ve given me enough time to film the extra couple of shots i wanted for diversity) at this point was practically impossible due to my actors not being available, i just had to try my best to work with what i had.

it took me a couple of days, but i finally completed my first draft of the music video (which meant that i had synced up all the clips i wanted where i wanted on my timeline in accordance with the song lyrics and music) by the 30th of march.

color-grading:

from there, i then moved on to do the colour gradation for the music video, experimenting with a couple pre-set lut’s but ultimately deciding on colour grading all my footage myself so that it would fit and look best with the aesthetic i was going for.

initially, i had actually planned to have all my flashback scenes where the couple was together colour-graded in soft, warm hues (yellows and oranges) and to have the present scenes where the main character was alone colour-graded in stark, cold hues (blues and greens) in order to really drive home the contrast between the two states of emotion.

but ultimately, i realised that colour-grading my present scenes like that (in harsh blues) didn’t make them look good since a lot of my present scenes naturally had warm, sunny tones to them.

things work out for the best:

instead, to make sure that the flashback scenes and the present ones had a clear contrast between them, i opted to put a grain and film filter on the flashback scenes and construct a viewfinder overlay to put on top of the point-of-view flashback scenes so that it would seem like the main character was filming his significant other in those scenes.

this allowed for a much more natural-looking colour gradation for my music video footage overall and still let me clearly differentiate between the two types of scenes in my music video, so i thought it was a good call on my part.

making the title (an ode to canva):

after i was done with this, there was only one thing left: to make the music video title! in order to make the title, i turned to my photo editing ‘software’ of choice: canva. i know it’s not professional photo editing software by any means, but photoshop has always felt too complicated and clunky for me whenever i’ve tried it, and canva truly works wonders for most everyday projects with the bonus of having a wonderful, clean, easy-to-use user interface.

plus, i’ve used canva for all of my photo editing needs since something like 2018, so it’s a program i’m really comfortable with, and that’s always bound to make the going easy, so canva was a no-brainer choice for me here. in any case, i got to work playing around with the official album art for the song ‘still with you’ released by jungkook’s music label ‘bighit entertainment’, and that’s how i ended up with the following:

animating the title:

after i was done making the title art to my liking, i headed back over to filmora (my video editing program) to fiddle around with the effects etc. there and maybe figure out how to get some movement into the title.

while looking for some inspiration regarding this on the internet, i came across a tutorial on how to do a handwriting effect for titles, and though it was (quite frankly) an unnecessarily long process and i very well could have just settled for a simpler title sequence, i decided to give it a go since the handwritten title would go really well with my overall music video aesthetic (there’s something sentimental and analogue about both handwritten notes and old film, after all).

after a lot of fiddling around with different settings and trying out a variety of movement effects on my title, i finally ended up with the following, which i was fully satisfied with:

at this point, all that was really left was to add my newly-made title sequence to my music video timeline, but i felt like something was missing in the title card… and that ‘something’ was: a little ‘writing with pencil’ scratching sound so that it would really feel like someone was writing the title.

making the credits:

after i had added the sound effect, my title was complete, so i moved onto the next order of business: making the credits. i opted to keep my credit sequence fairly simple, with just a film overlay on top of some unused b-roll footage of my main actor walking along the beach and simple, white credits popping up on top of the footage.

first export of the video:

it was now that i was finally ready to export my music video! i exported the project in 4k with a happy heart, and when i played it after it was done, i realised that i had put the grain intensity a little too low (25%) for the flashback scenes and that the grain was barely visible in the final video despite having looked okay in the viewfinder of the editing program.

still, adjusting the grain settings to a higher intensity (50%) wasn’t really hard to do, and i just exported the project once again. this time, when i watched the music video all the way through, i was overjoyed not to find any faults in it.

and finally, escape:

and that is how i finally escaped my editing bat-cave! it might’ve been one of the most stressful, awful weeks of my life where i felt my sanity slowly slipping away from me every time filmora crashed or my (brother’s) laptop shut down on me, but i finally did it, and ‘proud’ is an understatement for how i feel about the outcome of this project or myself for finishing it.

& that’s all for today!

signing off now,

dated: 230323

the downsides to 4k footage:

the first wall i hit in the process of editing this music video? the fact that my pc simply refuses to even play the 4k iphone footage we shot, let alone muster enough processing power to edit said footage. still, it wasn’t too hard a problem to fix since all i really had to do was borrow my older brother’s much-more-powerful laptop for the week.

it took me a good two full days to just download all of the raw footage and then transfer it to my brother’s laptop, and even then, i was really worried about how i’d go about editing it all since the footage was pretty choppy to play on there as well. still, i got started today in earnest.

slow-going, but it's progress!

despite the fact that progress is painfully slow-going because the sheer processing power required to edit such high quality footage takes a lot out of even my brother's laptop, i am starting to get somewhere.

for today, i mostly just focused on sorting through all the footage and separating usable footage from the rest. while i believe that in total, we have around an hour or so of footage to work with, the amount of 'usable footage’ is likely to be much smaller than that.

signing off now,

dated: 230323

roughly an hour ago, dania reached out to me again. she had been going through a really hard time due to something tragic that had recently happened, something i was aware of, and that meant that the group she had joined was forced to do their work without her input. 

apparently, that group therefore decided that they wouldn't let her work with them anymore. this struck me as surprisingly cruel, since dania had had a genuine reason for not being able to contribute, and she was still willing to put in the work going forward, but to each their own, i suppose.

anyhow, dania asked me if she could re-join my ‘group’, and i happily agreed. we had, after all, worked on the initial concept of the whole project together. we decided that i would go ahead and edit the film on my own as was always the plan, and she offered to work on our minor tasks (i.e. the digipak and website etc.) too, but we ultimately decided to work on our minor tasks separately and make our own websites and digipaks so that we could both show our work separately and not have to sacrifice either of our artistic visions.

for now, though, i’m going to get started on the editing!

signing off now,

dated: 230319

gearing up to go:

after everyone had gathered at my house, i made sure our actors’ costumes for the music video were appropriate, that we had loaded up all the equipment we would need in the car, and that we were ready to go.

at the beach:

our first destination for the day was a relatively-nearby beach that still took us an unfortunate two hours to get to due to traffic, making it around four in the afternoon when we arrived. immediately after arrival, i scouted around for a good place to film and found, much to my surprise and delight, a few grassy knolls that even had lots of little purple wildflowers scattered around on them.

i set up my camera with the help of my crew and we got to shooting some more lip-sync and other shots of the area and my main actor. when we were done with all the solo shots, i wanted to take some flashback (and specifically, point-of-view) shots with our actress, so i moved to another knoll with slightly different fauna for a little diversity in my shots.

having to make some new 'friends':

we very quickly realised, however, that as pretty as the flowers and patches of grass were, they were also extremely riddled with all sorts of creepy crawlies that had no qualms about climbing up our pants. still, despite the ants and miscellaneous creatures i don't even care to name, wreaking havoc beneath us, i settled my actress onto my backpack so it could serve as a cushion and we got the shots i needed in record time.

seaside shots and a slight panic:

afterwards, we finally moved towards the actual seaside and shot there. i made sure to get a lot of b-roll of the sea, the sky, and the pretty gulls flying about so that i’d have an adequate amount of footage to play with when i started editing.

at this point, it was six in the evening and i could tell the sun was barely 20 or so minutes away from full setting, which was definitely cause for alarm since we had to hit one more location today and daylight was of the essence.

our little crew packed up our equipment as quickly as they could under my admittedly-panicked instructions, and we all piled into the car, driving to the nearest park (in accordance to our original plan).

racing aginst the clock at the park:

as soon as we got to the park, i took a couple more lip-sync shots and while my actor was practising, i made sure to keep my camera open to get as much b-roll of the sunset and the park as i could.

we filmed our last lip-sync scene just as it got too dark to film anymore, and we all breathed a sigh of both relief and slight regret, on my part, since i had wanted to shoot just a couple more takes of everything we had shot in the park just to be on the safe side, but it simply wasn’t possible that day.

nevertheless, it had been a day extremely well-spent, and we wrapped up our day of hard work with a group hug before getting some food.

& that’s all for today!

signing off now,