Here is our own versions of the shots we were inspired by from other artists. These images include Imogen Heap, Rihanna and Emily Osment. In putting our capability and ideas together in relation to our artists image and video ideas, we came up with these shots and we are really pleased with them! We used programmes such as 'Paint' and Youtube and Google to create the appropriate effects that relate to our video.
When we were filming for our music video (although forgetting until near the end) we remembered to take some pictures that we may be able to use for the advertising of our artist. This includes an actual Digipak cover image and images for posters etc. Ideally we'd like this image to be in the same costume, and place as where we filmed our video as it links the two together and promotes the artist. It also makes the artist more memorable from her video. Throughout filming, we had three main costumes for Poppy. We got over 20 base tracks in all of these costumes!
Fairy lights scene, Night time shot and Daytime costume.
Here is a tiled image that Nick kindly made of all the possible Ancillary shots we have for the Digipak and poster.
Hopefully when enlarged the pictures will be of good quality, seeing as we had forgotten until later to take some they may not be exactly what we can use. However, it could also work as the majority of the shots are not posed, and Poppy is genuinely doing something or talking etc. This creates a goo image for the artist as she doesn't look like she's trying to model anything, but has been caught singing. It makes her seem more real and in touch with her music.
Here you can see me and Poppy watching what our music video looked like so far, after yesterday's lunch time editing session proved to be productive! After I left for my lesson, Poppy continued to edit, and today we looked at the outcome as a group. We were altogether very impressed and decided to continue with Poppy's editing (we are making sure to save separate project files as we go along, in case we need to revert to a previous version).
Today, we continued editing. Here you can see Mustafa and Poppy taking the reigns as Charon explains what we've been up to. After receiving some feedback, we experimented with the length of the clips we had chosen so far, as there was a cut on virtually every beat of the track. We were also told to think about the beats of which we are following in relation to the chorus and verses, which we have begun taking on board.
Poppy and Charon discuss the group dynamics, which I completely agree with!
Charon interviews Poppy about our music video plans (featuring a guest appearance by our teacher, Rebecca).
Last week saw the release of Florence + the Machine's latest and second album, Ceremonials. In the lead-up to this, advertising for the album and artist reached a sky-high, with a marketing campaign that spanned across various forms of media. As a fan of Florence, I was obviously exposed to a lot of this, but I decided to do a bit more research and found even more various ways in which Ceremonials was and continues to be marketed. All of this follows a pre-release leak, which has in the past caused albums to underperform drastically in sales. Therefore, the marketing for Florence's new album was more important than ever, in order to reach as wide of a CD-purchasing audience as possible.
This was dominated by several TV promotions. Her appearance on Later... with Jools Holland - a BBC music programme which has been going strong since 1992, and continues to be an important example of how artists can make live appearances to promote their latest singles and/or album - saw her perform the promo single What the Water Gave Me, along with the single No Light, No Light. An extended version of the show, which aired on Friday, saw her also sing the album track Breaking Down. The selection of songs she sung was interesting, as she opened with a song that the public may already be familiar with, whilst she also promoted her upcoming single, and an album track which gave viewers a taste of what else to expect from the album.
However, this was nothing compared to her (exclusive) performance of Shake It Out on Sunday's The X Factor results show, which was probably her biggest promo appearance to date. She stole the show with a rendition of the lead single lifted from Ceremonials, and was seen by approximately 10 million viewers across the UK. The single re-entered the official chart last week, and judging by its position on the iTunes chart (no. 13 at time of writing), it is set to unsurprisingly reach an all-time high this Sunday after a boost owed to 'the X Factor effect' (check out this blog post I came across that illustrates what I mean quite well). In addition to all of this, an advert for the album has been shown on TV (quite a lot, I presume, since I alone witnessed the advert on at least three separate occasions, and I haven't even beuen watching a lot of TV lately!) Click here to watch the advert in question. This is interesting because, excluding advert breaks in between music-related programming, you don't see albums being advertised on TV very often anymore.
Florence + the Machine performs on The X Factor
The internet also played a key factor in spreading the word about Ceremonials, with the leak itself having had the potential to create a positive effect (believe it or not, there are people who download music illegally - such as the Florence leak - on a 'try to buy' basis, or out of anticipation of hearing the new material, before actually going out to get a copy of the album). In addition, newsletters promoting artists are very common, and I receive a quite a few of these every week straight into my inbox (mind you, the effectiveness of this kind of marketing is questionable, as I hardly ever read them).
Screenshot of my e-mail inbox after using the search term 'florence', + an e-mail I received advertising her X Factor performance.
There have also been countless reviews, music site posts, banner adverts, etc. advertising the album online, and it would be impossible to list them all. However, below is just one example that I got Charon to screenshot, with this blog post in mind. She then mentioned how she had spotted a billboard for the album, which was something I had been asking friends and family about as I wanted a photo of one to upload to this post!
An advert promoting Ceremonials that popped up on our computer whilst editing today (after launching the wrong QuickTime program to create a screen recording).
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Left: A photo I took after scouring the magazines I have at home. Low and behold, there was bound to be something aboutThe X Factorand thus, Florence + the Machine's performance! Right: Florence graces the cover of NME magazine.
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Keeping everything in mind, it is no surprise that the album sales delivered, and Florence + the Machine scored their second UK number one album.
After finishing up our filming we are finally at the editing stage. This is the part I am most excited about as we are putting our footage together to create a great outcome. Below is a brief video made during out editing, it features us looking at another clip and trying to incorporate it into our timeline.
Below is a short clip of me filming Poppy and Mus editing our footage.
This screen grab is taken from us editing a clip on our timeline. We used Final Cut Pro, and enlarged the shot (image on the right) to gain a sense of how it will look on the big screen.)
