Sam Scaife - Digital Media Design FDA

New Course New Blog!

I've now started a new course Digital Media Design BA Top Up and I've created a new blog for it

samscaifeba.blogspot.com

Please follow my the I do this year work on that blog as its going to be far more exciting and analytical (if those two words can go together.

Year2 Assignment4: Post festival Hype Film

From the footage which I have taken I have edited together this 30 second piece that aims to make the festival look exciting and action packed.

I had this video online on the wednesday just 3 days after the festival so that It could catch the people looking for media of the festival.

I Created this video In Final Cut pro. Then applied several effects to make the video appear worn and have a stronger colour palet that was fitting with the meadowlands branding.

Year 2 Assignment4: Meadowlands Filming

During the Festival I made several Video Blogs documenting what we where doing. here are the links to the pieces;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-cOqA6-RMk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9WX7kOA3Zg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF78bRCf7TQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-cOqA6-RMk

Though some of these are quite embarrassing to look back on. it was good to remind me of what I had been doing during the festival.

The filming went well and we got 14gb worth of footage. We made several mistake with the levels and didn't get any interviews but we where able to edit some nice pieces together.

Year2 Assignment5: assessment post

our Fifth unit has required us to submit several things online. here can be found links to several of the things I need to provide.

Website
samscaife.co.uk

Business Card

front

back

direct link https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=142jbGPrLnlv-yFa5_s2eOXdmQr85Q1cZwRkBlabOUBI

Graduation Show poster

Year2 Assignment4: Finished video pieces

All the videos which I made have been uploaded to the Meadowlands youtube page, made by Kirsty.

Short promotional pieces

here are the 5 short trailers I have made. I have tried to get them to be video responses to the songs which each of them uses so that I can generate more traffic towards Meadowlands Festival.

Yellowfish Sessions

this video I edited by myself from the footage which a few of us filmed at Yellowfish studio. The title was made by Marie. kindly because I was rushing to complete this on time Marie with a little help from Jessie also made the lower thirds.

Year2 Assignment4: Crit day

As I can upload some of the stuff I have done now I think I will then I will post about the process later.

My crit day was rather stressful as I've been having computer problems and my computer kept restarting. I had to rely on it saying on for long enough to upload the videos which I had made my shot pieces out of, so that I could render them in class as my home computer is not good enough to do so. Had I been better organised I would have done this the week befor so that If anything went wrong I could have done something about it, but I managed my time badly again.

This meant that I only ended up showing 3 out of the five that I made. Here are the 3 videos I showed:

The feedback I got for these was:

include more shots of the artists, which my other two do have large amounts of.
for the Penguin Cafe Orchestra one i should reworkd the view of the contry side as it is not working.
again for the PCO i should rework how I display the text

Year2 Assignment4: Catching up & Initial pitch

Well its been over a month since I posted anything on my blog, which is far too long. so I just thought that I would catch up as now I have done the pitch and complete the video element of this project!

Pitch

Well im away from home at the moment so I dont have the screen grabs that I have from building the pitch so expect to see a post in a couple of weeks that talks a little about the process of doing it and links to the 2 pitch that I made.
I split the pitch in two. so that I could make one colabarotive pitch with my course mate simon about our preposed mobile website, and a pitch about my personal video which I would make for Meadowlands.

As I dont have Keynote or powerpoint on my computer I decided to make my presentation using google docs. the advantage of this is that I can embeded it easily here,

The second to last slide contains the proof of concept video that I made to demonstrate my ideas. here it is linked bigger.

I was pretty happy with how this turned out. The feedback which I got was:

The first Shot has to be chosen carefully to convay a message. or should be too fast for recognition but still for a reason.
Ask myself why have I used each piece of footage? and what it brings to the video.
Keep the Framing elements and more them stronger and more inportant.
I could film some footage of the meadowlands site and apply effects to it to fake it.
Think of how the shots transition.
The band names should be first.
The Meadowlands logo should not be edited and I should not edit with the colour so much.

Another point which came up in this pitch for the whole of the class. Was that the maintenence of the website had changed hands meaning that we could now remake the whole site.
We already knew from the first meeting that there would be a day at yellowfish studios where we could film some of the bands playing at meadowlands.
We had to split these two tasks between us and because I was quite keen on making more films I chose to not put myself forward for more inportant rolls with building the site.

Year2 Assignment4: Creating the pitch and developing ideas

This evening I have been creating the part of the pitch which me and Simon will collaborate on. I have been creating this with simon using Team Viewer a remote desktop control tool so that we can both work on his Mac Book Pro at the same time. This has been really helpful and we have pushed our ideas loads during this time. here is a screen shot of how it worked

I just noticed I kind of messed up taking a print screen of that! well at least you can get the idea of how it was working.

Year2 Assignment4: Quick mobile framework test.

For my website I'm going to collaborate with my course mate Simon Sinclair. We are going to use the framework jQuery Mobile to build a mobile website which emulates a mobile app. I am going to have to code part of the website so I've been getting use to the framework and trying out what it can do so that when we put our heads together to design I will be aware of the possibilities and limitations of the framework.

after finding out that you can host websites through dropbox I have hosted the experimental site that I made here. (while it will stay there until I receive my marks for the project, 4-5 months, the link may not work after if I remove this from my drop box)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8522654/site/index.html

I'm quite excited by this framework as I think its going to allow us to produce something which looks really professional and has great usability.

Year2 Assignment4: Quick note on copyright

I'm currently planning on using vintage footage in my videos and I plan to get these from archive.org. the most common type of licence for the type of footage I want on this site is Public domain the legal text for this type of licence is as follows;

The person or persons who have associated work with this document (the "Dedicator" or "Certifier") hereby either (a) certifies that, to the best of his knowledge, the work of authorship identified is in the public domain of the country from which the work is published, or (b) hereby dedicates whatever copyright the dedicators holds in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the public domain. A certifier, moreover, dedicates any copyright interest he may have in the associated work, and for these purposes, is described as a "dedicator" below.
A certifier has taken reasonable steps to verify the copyright status of this work. Certifier recognizes that his good faith efforts may not shield him from liability if in fact the work certified is not in the public domain.
Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of the Dedicator's heirs and successors. Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.
Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

From reading this I'm pretty certain that this allows me to use the footage for commercial use and that any infringement that may occur lies on the uploader of the footage. I will however check with my tutor just to make sure as I do not want to make it so either me or the client are liable to be sued.

Year2 Assignment4: Pushing video Ideas

I have been doing some more research into what video content I can produce for this festival. one of the initial ideas I had was to do a pencil drawn style rotoscoped animation of the bands playing. this has already been done and I found a video of it on vimeo,

I think this produces a really cool style but as a standalone idea it is not good enough to get the excitement for the festival that I need. The content has to be something the people really want to see.

I spoke to my friends Emma Van Diggele and Jemima about what kind of videos they would be watching if they where going to attend this festival. What came out was that they would not really watch the video content they would be going on the website trying to look for information on that the line up is like, what the Vibe of the festival is and what kind of clothes people will be wearing there.

I think that this feeling of the festival vibe and style will be really important when trying get a young audience interested. When I'm making the videos I need to makes these overt in the pieces.

the fact that they would not watch the videos made me thing that I need to produce very short videos that have information in which would be written down. such as the line up, activities and announcements. the videos should also be very short so that people will quickly watch them and get excited about the event.

existing youtube channels such as the one for bestival create video content before and after the events and you can see from the channel views that the ones which get the most views contain footage from the event. I think this is because people have been looking to see if they could see themselves in any of the videos. (this is something I should think about for the post festival films). what I also noticed was the the pre festival films only had a couple of hundred views even for quite a well known festival such as bestival.

I want ways in which I can increase the number of impressions that each of the videos generates. I thought of maybe posting the video production process in forums about motion graphics or advertising but that would only get people from those areas interested. I think there is potential in creating things which can then be spoken about in different forums that the target audience would use.

another Idea that would involve people would be to create video and poster competitions where the winners get featured on the website or given free tickets. A good thing about competitions is that they give people a reason to visit your site multiple times and if you allow them to vote for the winner the repeat visits increases loads.

on a quick note I really like this video from Camp bestival shot on super 8 film

Though this video dose not do it I think taking vintage footage that is no long copywrite protected and applying new visual graphics to it could create some really good shots to be part of a larger piece. the start of this promtional video for outlook kind of dose it

I came up with another Idea for a video which is to take the logo and a short 0.5-1second clip of music from all the bands and then string them together so that you get a very quick feeling about that the style of music is like at the festival and you see the names that are playing. for those that don't have logos I can get styling inspiration from there myspace sites.

I can create videos for each of the bands for them to put on there websites are promotional pieces. each of these videos can link back to there facebook page as well as the bands myspace or website.

Year2 Assignment4: rough web structure

In my lesson we have spoken through methods for planning the website we will be producing for phones. we can up with ideas for the structure and then I used mindnode to draw a rough plan of my website.

currently I'm thinking that I should hide lots of these elements within each other or a large display of the sight map.

Year2 Assignment4: Initial Ideas

During the first day we got set our brief I had several ideas on what direction I could take this. These ideas are;

Rotoscoped Style animations of the bands playing pencil drawing style

this would be presented as short fast paced animations that can be shared and linked to friends because of the interesting style in which they are animated.

traditional view of Art based

I was thinking that what ever I produce should be inspired by art. When i say a traditional view of art which has on overt meaning such as a basic oil of a landscape. that is what I can see appealing to the target audience the most.

Portraits of artists cut into the grass

I came up with this idea when trying to think of possible ambient media techniques. I could also produce large portraits of artists on brighton beach and in other places in east sussex. these could take the form of large pieces which are hard to figure out what they are unless viewed from a distance like the white horse (though that would be a little out of my depth) of they could be done small scale like graffiti stencils but instead of spraying paint onto the stencil I can cut the grass which pokes through it.

Create a poster to appear in Don't Panic

I knew of dont panic as a free envelope which contains posters adverts and information about whats going on. looking at the website however it is much bigger than just that and also produced a magazine as well as web TV content. I could produce content for this as it would be seen by a large amount of young people.

Juxtaposing the quite town with the party spirit of a festival

Though I think this is quite an overused ideas I think It could work with the sight.

Lyrics

fans of bands will know the lyrics so I think doing something based on the lyrics of the bands that are performing. For this I need to listen to the music form some of the people playing.

I also wrote down a method to approche coming up with a good idea. It's a method that lots of people use but I felt like writing it down would help me stick to it.

Look at media forms
Look at communication forms
Look at no comercial media practice

try to highlight areas that can be combined to create something "new"

package it for meadowlands

try to find an emerging trend to add excitement to the idea

Year2 Assignment4: Current web presence

I have been looking at the current web presence that meadowlands to see where I can improve it and what I think they are doing well. I've left the links in full so you can see how easy they are to write out on your own.

Website

http://meadowlandsfestival.com/

Their website has a strong colour pallet and illustration style. The content is not very inviting to read and there are interesting pages which you may not fine if having a quick look. such as clicking on the line up tab gives a page which shows you the basic line up and prompts you with text to look at the other options in the drop down, but having quickly see who's playing I feel people will not necessarily look further into the website where better information is found.

The information about the bands performing on each day is presented in the form of a blog but there is no incentive for users to click the read more. It would be good to have embedded media with samples of the bands music.

Twitter

http://twitter.com/#!/Meadowfest

they use there twitter to link back to the facebook page and link to other places where they have an online presence. they tweet semi regularly keeping a steady steam of information to those who follow but they currently only have 85 followers.

it need some incentive for people to want to follow the twitter.

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Meadowlands-Festival/76483633398

They make good use of posting regular information on there facebook page. the information comes in an informal way and has embedded video clips of the bands or there posters. but again there is no good incentive for people to contribute there own things here.

there is a disappointed review on their review page which starts out saying

Actually it was a real let down, 2 stages with good music, but absolutly nothing in between, empty space, few food stalls. Was bored for much of it. nothing for kids to do apart from bouncy castle that was deflated for the most of first day, and tiny tent for making stuff for younger kids for 2 hrs each day. apart from that nothing.

this made me think that as well as just advertising bands I should aim to advertise the festival vibe and try inspire people to have fun by themselves within the grounds.

other places where I have found Meadowlands linked are below.

only one of the links has links to the festivals facebook page.

one of them has a forum which would be good to get involved in so that people get that feeling of community and a approachable festival.

old

http://www.last.fm/festival/1357973+Meadowlands+Festival+2010

Year2 Assignment4: Meadowlands Festival

We have now started our 2nd to last project although we will now have 3 running simultaneously until the end of the course. The project is a live brief and after a representative, Mark Ede, came in on Thursday to talk to us I now know what we are doing.

Our client is Medowlands Festival in Glynde. It is still quite a small festival in its second year that is expecting to attract 2-4 thousand people. At the beginning of the meeting Mark said this key sentence which sum of exactly what we have to do,

"How can we make people aware of Meadowland? how can we make them excited about it."

The cool thing about this is that we will be able to attend the event! though we will be working.

For this project we will have to produce several different elements. We will pitch these elements in just under two weeks time and get them approved by the client as well as enhanced by the group so that we can begin producing them ready for them to be used. The elements of this project are;

Pitch way that Medowlands can use social media more effectively
Implementing those more effective ways
Pitch innovative ways which the festival can promote itself
If approved create these promotional elements
Pitch a pre-festival moving image piece/s which will be used to create interest & excitement
Pitch a post-festival moving image piece/s which will be used to show the success of the festival
Create the moving images Piece/s
Pitch ways which we can effectively use out time at the festival
Pitch a design for a mobile optimised website which festival goers can access before, during and after the festival to engaging in the social media channels and contribute to it.
Create the mobile optimised website (this will be done as a group effort though I imagine it will be done by each of us having to produce 1 page or feature of the website)

As you can see there are quite alot which we have to do for this project. While this project will last for several months the pitch which will determine how the rest of the project goes in very soon. This pitch will have to contain proof of concept pieces & good mock ups.

As a group we did a quick brainstorm to think of ideas on how to promote the festival. Here is what we came up with;

Flyering
Social networks
Posters
Sticker campaigns
Badges
Beer Bottle Jackets
Use local media
T-shirts
Virals
Mapping
Blogs
Competitions
Game both physical and digital
Promotional films
Documentary films

It was made clear the several of these are already being used but some of the ideas could be developed. Currently I'm very interested in producing some form of Viral content as it is something that is new to me and that I imagine would be a load of fun!

Here are several thoughts which I had and a quote from mark during the meeting. I think that these really should form the foundations of my idea development.

Our involvement should add value be decisive and take initiative
Easy of use will be key
Interested in getting youth involved
What we produce has to be interactive
How do you generate inpresions
Digital distribution is key
"Official & unofficial festival involvement is fine"
Key word Strategy (meaning that I should pitch a strategy not just several separate parts)

I have done loads of bullet points so far there's just one more set coming for this post. We Talked about areas which we will have to research in order to get a idea on what we can produce. Two of these research areas are compulsory and I will have to talk about in my pitch so I will put these in bold.

Music promotion
Band promotion
Mobile & 3G coverage
optimizing web content for mobile
what current festivals are doing
Festival imagery
Festival culture
Copy write and public filming laws

So that's a brief summary of what my new project is all about. There will be a large amount of posts in the next few weeks as that is when all of my preparatory work has to be done, and so far I've stretch it out for the whole project.

Year2 Assignment3: Final Pieces

I have now submitted the pieces I have created for this project below you can fine the final outcomes.

Here is an interactive PDF viewer which surprise surprise you can view my pdf on!

Year2 Assignment3: PDF & research

As part of the project we have been asked to submit a pdf document explaining our thought process and creative decisions. My project already has a strong styling so I am going to the same to present my pdf document.

On the D&AD website you can view past submissions. These submissions have pages submitted with them which are in a similar style to what I'm required to submit. below are some examples of pages which i really like.

turns out you have to be logged in to view them, but if you are a member and care to log in below are the links to the images which I found useful.

http://www.dandad.org/awards/student/2010/download/00299/578581/charlie-hocking-3.jpg
http://www.dandad.org/awards/student/2010/download/01307/578470/sadhbh-o-beirne-2.jpg
http://www.dandad.org/awards/student/2010/download/00644/578636/olga-bukhalova-1.jpg
http://www.dandad.org/awards/student/2010/download/00644/578634/olga-bukhalova-3.jpg

Year2 Assignment3: Colour changes

Colour

My tutors thought that the colour palette I had chosen contained several colours which where too similar and could potentially cause confusion. This is a good thing really because I had noticed that I had stupidly picked several colours in the original palette which where out of gamut and was going to have to change them anyway. I have edited the colour palette and come up with a new one.

Due to the colours on my monitor being messed up I had to log on to my housemates computer to see what they actually look like. When I looked I noticed that again the new blue colour I had picked is very similar to the green. My housemate also mentioned that he felt like the browns where still quite similar colours and that I should adjust them as well.

Here is the revised version,

In this palette I have kept the faded pastel tones which I had in previous versions but I have strayed away from having the theme based around copper. I feel this is a good decision because It allows me to have 5 distinct colours to represent each pillar of Plan A. As part of an identity this distinction is really important as it allows the audience to instantly recognise the relevant parts of the campaign.

So the colour thing happened again when I went to check the colours and what I thought was burgundy on my monitor is in fact deep purple. The lilac is a little pale compared to the blue so I'm going to make it slightly richer.

quick test,