Group Video: Final Product-James Donovan

Our Group Video: The Man Who Sold The World




The song we chose was The Man Who Sold The World by David Bowie. We chose his song because we like the surreal theme the song has as well as how it can be interpreted in many different ways visually.

The song was from his album The Man Who Sold The World in 1971

For the visuals we decided to go with an uncanny valley theme with visual effects and editing. We went for an unrealistic approach with a hidden message that could be interpreted in different ways depending n the viewer.

Website-David Hutchings

Link: https://davehutchings2000.wixsite.com/mysite

One of the things that needed to be created for promotional purposes was a website. David did this task by using Wix to design a website to promote the band.

The biggest problem was the fact that this was too complicated for David to create a good site. However he made three pages for basic presentation.

Homepage featuring the logo. The problem with this one is that the white background doesn't fit in with the actual background.

This is the page for band tour dates. There is nothing more too this one as it is pretty basic.

This page is definitely the best and is used to advertise our fictional album.

The following images are edited versions of the website to make it look a bit better.

Overall, the greatest issue with making the website was that the designer existed to create a legitimate website for real music, not a fictional band like what we were doing. This mean that there was a lot about the base design that couldn't be changed.

Second Storyboard-David Hutchings

Before we finished filming our music video and began editing, David decided to create a new storyboard. This was done because the original storyboard was just ideas for certain shots while this one would be to plan out what order the scenes went in and what was being said.

 This storyboard only features the scenes that had lyrics in them so we filmed random shots to fill in the bits where there is just music.

By the end, we had stuck very closely to this plan, though we did change the order of it.

Inspiration for our shots (Intertextuality)-James Donovan

For one shot we had James do a close up shot and lip sync. We wanted this shot to have an emphasis on special effects, to both follow our theme and challenge our editing skills. We wanted the shot to be distorted or warped in some way and use stop motion to add a surreal effect to the video. After going through different effects we finally decided that a VHS tape effect would suit our surreal theme.
Our original plan was to use stills, made in Photoshop, with the Threshold effect, however the final product looked, in our opinion, terrible.

(Original concept)















(Final version)












Another concept we had was to have one of us pop up for a few frames in the video using green screen. We took inspiration from the movie Fight Club when the character Tyler Durden pops up in certain scenes for only a frame to give the film a surreal theme. We wanted to have a similar theme in our video.

One shot we wanted to create was a green screen shot of one of us, facing away, while the background becomes distorted. We did this with the Add Noise tool in Sony Vegas and this was to follow the surreal and VHS theme we had running throughout the video. This was inspired by Bowie's traditional style that he had in his music videos, a surreal dream like theme.


One shot that we created was a mirror shot using a green screen. James would lip Sync into a mirror and David would then re-shoot the same shot, however this time he would have a green screen in front of him instead of a mirror. this was then edited in Sony Vegas to create the illusion that James was David's reflection. This was inspired by shots that can be seen in multiple horror films.

One scene was inspired by a shot in Ghostbusters where Sigourny Weaver opened up the fridge and we saw it from the inside.
We decided to use this as basis for the two scenes where David and James opened up the cupboard.

Magazine Advert and Digi Pack-James Donovan and David Hutchings

As something extra for our music video, David worked on a magazine advert and a digi-pack for the CD.
They were both made with Photoshop using multiple filters to create this unique effect. For the band name, it came from a cropped version of the logo.

Below is the completed digi-pack. For this, David used the magazine advert, the logo, an image from last year and random shots of water and placed them on a template to create the CD.

This magazine advert was designed by James. We wanted this to keep with the themes of our music video. So James took the VHS segment of our music video and based the advert off of that theme. He got an image of a blank VHS video to get a grainy background  and the text usually found on the sides of the video (the play and time) this added to the grainy and surreal themes we used for our music video. He used our logo designed by David, Inverted the colours to suit the background and used a black box behind the text to keep with the grainy, low quality, theme. We used December of 2017 as our release date because this is when we completed our music video.

This digipack was designed by James. He decided, while designing this digipack, to use the same imagery and themes of the poster. The front cover was similar to our poster, using the VHS image and the same text. The fold was our logo designed by David. The back of the cover uses the same grainy background as the front cover and features reviews from different music magazines. The inside of the digipack uses a closeup, Threshold of James as well as the names of the songs we used in our album. Another image we used was an image picture we took for our prelim task last year, a music magazine, an image of James and David. James took this image and used the spot healing tool to remove our faces to keep with the surreal theme of our video.

Filming and Editing-David Hutchings

Week 1:

Thursday 16th November
Location: Cemetery
Shots Taken: Depth of field, pan-shot and hand on tombstone.
Weather: It was sunny but still had a lot of wind blowing.

This was a script that I made on Word to get an idea of what scene syncs up with the lyrics.

Week 2:

Date: Saturday 25th November
Shots Taken: Mirror shots with greenscreen. Medium shot with lighting under face. Shot of water blowing with the wind.
Weather: Frequent rain. Bright. This didn't effect filming as we were inside.

We started off with a mirror. The plan was for one of us to be filmed with the greenscreen up and the other with it off.

We used a green cloth to act as the greenscreen. It was too large so we had to compare it to the size of the mirror and mark where to cut it.

A picture of James cutting the green cloth along the marks made on the cloth.

We attempted to fit the cloth before realising it was too large and got back to cutting it.

Eventually we got it short enough and stuck it onto the mirror with double-sided tape.

To get both the mirror and medium shot done we needed some artificial lighting which James is holding in the image to do the medium shot.

30/11/17: Opening lip-sync.

For this shot, I decided to film while sitting down on the stairs to match with the lyrics. The biggest difficulty that I had with filming this scene was making sure the lighting looked good. In the end, I held a light under my face and made sure the camera didn't show it.

The text that is in bold, italics and underling means that it has been shot.

Week 3:

4/12/17: Greenscreen shots. Close-up of eye.
9/12/17: Cemetery, re-shot depth of field, pan shot with lip-sync. James' house, re-shot the mirror scene and filmed shot in the cupboard. Town, shots of crowds and river.
The poor weather did affect some continuity but we re-shot the scenes were it would have been affected.
10/12/17: Close up of putting a video into a video player.

While Filming at James' we "Built" our own tripod for James' phone using a tripod (For a broken camera) and some hair bobbles.

Weather report for Saturday. This proved to be highly inaccurate as there was a lot of rain and snow.

When we had finished this we began the editing process. For this we used Sony Vegas, James was the one who handled most of the editing. However, I started off with a simple video just to see what scene should go where which was used to help in the actual editing process.




One of the more important moments was trying to create a video static effect over the stop-motion scene which required him to take an image off the internet of a generic static effect, from a VHS tape, and cut out a piece of it in Photoshop, I then used a combination of green screen and animation too make it pan in front of the stills in the background.

The major problem with the video was that the audio from the internal speakers' recorder sounded terrible. This meant James would have to use and MP3 converter so it would work.

Focus Group-James Donovan

We shown some content involving our music group to a small group of people. We shown our inspiration for our music video, research on our chosen song and a storyboard of our music video.


Here is a summary of the feedback we received from what we shown:

One thing someone said about our Storyboard was that we had a good idea of some of the shots we wanted to create and that we had a strong thought about what we wanted to create going into this project. They also said that once we knew how to edit these shots, the way we wanted them, we could create a visually appealing and inspired music video easily. However one said that the storyboard could use improvement as there was not enough of it.

We were told that our research into the song, The Man Who Sold The World, and its lyrics were decent. We took heavy inspiration from the abstract from the abstract style of David Bowie and payed attention to the lyrics of the video since some of our shots follow what the lyrics say. For example on the lyric "You're face to face with the man who sold the world" we had a two shot of our actors staring at each other, face to face.

Involving the inspiration for our music video we were told that the videos we chose were good examples for the abstract style of our video.

From our inspiration from Kanye West we were told that the use of animation and editing was an interesting choice for our video.

From our inspiration from David Bowie we were told that the dream like and abstract narrative style would be a good way to draw in our audience.