February 9th - Final Edit and Upload

10am
Rhys and I have got together today to finish the final bits of editing and to hopefully, upload it to YouTube.

10:15am

We've been adding some vignette effects, colour correction and of course adding the eye zoom transition we've been practicing. These effects will exaggerate the madness and torment in certain places.

11am

We finally got the eye Zoom. We just have to add the final corrections and render it. 

12pm

After about 35 minutes of it exporting its finally a whole file on my desktop. 

2pm

It's up! Hazzar! I'll upload it into the next post! Keep an eye out!

February 7th - Editing the final sequence

I just finished editing the final sequence with Rhys. We are really happy with what we have and we're really glad with how it's coming along.

We will discuss, hopefully tomorrow, bits for the final edit and things we need to make sure it's perfect.

February 6th - Final Filming Session

Today Rhys and I are finishing our filming. We have a good idea and a good plan for what we need to do. We chose to use the barn because it was the easiest to access and gave us the best lighting to film. We also had the use of my home and anything inside at our disposal.


February 6th - 4pm
We finally finished our filming. And it was a great success, we have enough footage to fill the final gap and then some. More importantly though, Rhys lived.
I will edit the footage together tomorrow and upload our almost finished piece to YouTube for everyone to view.

January 28th - Filming Schedule for the final sequence

Okay, Rhys and I have made plans for the final sequence. It's been a few months because we've been busy with other things, but this is our plan. Short and sweet.

Enjoy!

We thought quite hard and considered a few places for this. We finally decided on my outhouse in the garden. This is due to the light because it provides decent light but we can manipulate spotlights on Rhys. Also, if we turn off the lights there is enough light coming through the door to give a grey feel. Which, when we combine it with the suit we decided Rhys should wear means it gives a great slow, sad feel to the sequence.

January 25th - Completed Website

We finished this website so much faster than we thought we would. We've put in a lot of hours but we finally finished it.

We added merchandise, photos, bio and what we do pages.

We followed all the main conventions but decided against a photoshoot style gallery for the photographs. We added photos of Jack being natural as well as staged.

Final website:

www.ParadoxOfficial.com

January 22nd - Website Progess

I'm making some really good progress with the website. I've managed to create the header and footer and upload some pictures of Jack. I'm using lots of images of Jack because of the lack of Jack in the music video. Woah, say that 10 times fast.
Have a sneak preview then, go on. Treat yourself.
Header:

 And the footer:

I've also used lots of Social networking sites, because that is another convention of a musicians website.

January 21th - Beginning the Website

So today, I've begun work on the website. This task should be easier now because I use conventions and base it around my Digipak.
Most of the conventions are based around advertising yourself so I'm going to plaster the webpage with pictures of Jack and the Digipak.

January 15th - DigiPak Almost finished

Just a few pictures that we're using in our digipak. It's almost finished, just adding some album names and a bio and that sort of thing.


Getting there!

We're using Jack's face as much as possible here to emphasise who the artist is.

 Back to work.

James OUT.

January 10th - DigiPak First Edits

so Rhys and I took some photos the other day and using mutliplicity I managed to add jack lots of times to each photo. 

Then after that I took the photos and made them into a Panoramic shot to use on the CD section of the DigiPak.

Coushty. Take a look!

January 9th - DigiPak photos

So we've just finished taking photos of the lovely Jack Keeling.
Have a butchers.

We really love Jack playing the part of our artist, because he's very smart but because of his age gives of a nice youthful aura which our target audience will attach to.

January 7th - Back to work!

We're back! Still fat and full from christmas lunch Rhys and I have set out to get a plan going and get motivated for the final months of our course.

We are taking photos of Jack on Wednesday ready to upload and ready to edit for the DigiPak design which will hopefully be done by next week!

This month we're also doing our website design to accompany it and finishing off the music video in February.

Enough Talk! Let's get to work.

December 15th - Final Digipak Design

T'was the night before Christmas. Well not entirely, it's still 10 days away but we're still working hard. Here's our final Digipak design put together by Rhys. We hope to create something like this for real.

It's very exciting how it's all coming together.

This is our final digipak design. It follows conventions of madness and confusion and we think it's really quite effective. We like the fact that our artist is shown multiple times and how the front cover is used to show insanity.

Sadly, this is my final post before the Holidays.

Rhys and I will come back very refreshed ready to finish the DigiPak, the music video and start work on the website. 

Eek!

Merry Christmas.

December 10th - Planning Ahead & Test Shot

So today Rhys and I got together to plan ahead for the coming weeks before christmas in order to make sure we're on track.
We have some blog tweaks to sort out and a few things to upload and sort but I'm glad to say we're pretty much on top of it.

We also improvised a shot for our inside Digipak covers. We wanted to see our model multiple times across a panoramic style shot.

We used my iPhone and managed to produce this.

I really like it, although the third Sid has his left arm cut off. I'll research photo-stitching so I can manually avoid situations like this.
Other than that, I think it looks quite cool!

I hope you like it as much as I do!

December 4th - Album Name and Cover

Today we are creating an album name and adding it to the final design for our album cover. We floated an old album name idea and we decided to go with it.
Pylons.
It's one of the lyrics in the song Fitzpleasure and a word that stood out to us for unknown reasons.
We like alliteration.
We took inspiration from Canterbury's consistent artwork style and intend to lose it.
We also picked a font. It's called SpaceShip.

December 3rd - Digipak designs and track listings.

Rhys and I are still brain storming about how best to do our digipak. We're back on the blurry face idea but also want to use the multiplicity idea for the inside covers. We intend to try a panorama shot with multiple uses of the artist throughout.
We would use multiplicity and photo-stitching and the photo would be across all 3 of the inside panels. Rhys is doing some preliminary designs which I shall upload later.

As well as making huge leaps forward in our designs we also completed our track listing.
Please excuse the morbidity, it's just part of how our artist defines himself.

1. Asphyxiation
2. Paralytic
3. It Is What It Is
4. Perplex
5. Betrayal
6. Craving
7. Incarceration
8. It Is What It Isn't
9. Fitzpleasure
10. Delusion Illusion
11. Vividity
12. Exhalation


Those are our track names. The track names suggest a journey through feelings that the artist had whilst writing the songs or story he made up.
The narrative basically starts with him choking and running out of breathe and ends with him essentially coming out of the rough patch and finally exhaling. Which could be taken as him dying or him surviving.

November 23rd - Album Cover and Multiplicity

In today lesson we began by mapping out the positioning of where to place everything on our digipack. This moved us quickly on to the subject of what our main cd album cover should be. We have previously played around with the idea of Jack our artist being our main focused and to blur his face, like so.

however we felt being a new artist the public will need to be able to identify him. After a quick brain storm we came up with the idea of having Jack in the same shot but more than once, possibly in different clothing each time. This would be relevant to the scattered thoughts and many personalities shown in our video. We took same sample shots of Rhys in various places in the class room, followed by further research into this technique and how we can achieve it. The correct term for this process is called multiplicity photography.
The technique for multiplicity is really easy to do in photoshop.

So it's later on, on the friday. I've got home and the pictures from school didn't load. So I had to retake some pictures. I tried with my guitar before my brother magically arrived home but here are the Multiplicity edits I did. I'm so happy with them! 

September 30th - Risk Assessment

Rhys and I have just been to school. On a Sunday - I know we're too committed. No stop, please.

We just completed a risk assessment for tomorrow ready for film. Got a busy day and an early start to avoid lots of school children but we'll get it done.

Have a butchers. 

September 28 - A whole week of filming

This has been the busiest week of my life and thus the reason for the lack of posts. When we weren't filming we were editing and when we weren't editing or filming we were at school. And we have to eat and sleep so I hope you can forgive me.

This week has been very productive indeed. We managed to film the entire asylum sequence within the week, practice shots, reshoots and all. And we've made quite a lot of headway in the editing process. 

We'll be back to work on Monday to shoot our Tea Party sequence.

September 26th - Lip Syncing Task

In preparation for creating our music video, me and Rhys practiced lip syncing on camera. Even though it was just a preliminary piece of work I found it difficult to line up the song with the movement of the lips.

Rhys is in the video. Please enjoy!

September 17th - Shooting Schedule

Okay! Rhys and I have an action plan we're going to stick to! Here's what we'll be doing over the next few days when it comes to filming. I'll get the editing done between each filming day so I can see what we need to get done, show Rhys and our tutors so we can see where to go from there. It's all getting rather exciting.