Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire and my adventures on Google Images

Whilst looking for inspiration for a digi-pak cover, a friend drew me towards the beauty of curtain lighting, as a particularly literal approach to the title An Army Of Lights. I searched DIY sites, and google images for inspiration, and came across these...

(Note, i could not find a smaller equivalent or this rather large image below)

Unfortunately these could not be used, as they are not my own work, but they did remind me of covers of recent indie and folk albums.

(Note: although The Horrors are not particularly folk-y, I did see their cover impressive)

I do like the blurry, retro style of these images, and I would like to incorporate this style in my Digi-pak, if I were to combine this with ether images of curtain lighting, or a city/suburb scene in the style of Rut Blees Luxemburg.

Bloc Party, A Weekend In The City, and Rut Blees Luxemburg.

To this day, the artwork for Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City, and the singles released for it, remain to be a person favorite of album cover art. These were taken by German Photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg, who typically depicts the beauty of urban scenes and landscapes at night. She also contributed her piece "Towering Inferno" for The Street's debut album Original Pirate Material.

I am personally a big fan of this style of photography, and due to it's association with British music scene, as well as the connection between the often time-delayed artificial lighting and the aptly named title 'An Army Of Lights,' this style may be appropriate.

Initial inspiration for the digi-pack

Here is a collection of album covers of a similar musical style to An Army Of Lights. This ranges from folk and folk-rock to britpop and post-punk.

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Editing process

The overall editing process was fairly simple. From experience gained in AS level coursework, as well as this year’s animatic, I have a certain level of knowledge of using the iMovie software. The biggest difficulty I found was syncing the music to the mimed playing and singing, or the change of shot, that I tried to keep to the beat of the music. Whilst this was fairly simple, yet time consuming and intricate, during the editing of the rough cut, it was far more difficult to keep the lip-syncing in time. To remedy this, any replaced or edited shots were then cut to fit the original shot by the 0.1 of a second. However, this still made parts slightly out of time, so there was a certain amount of trial and error involved.
From the outset, I planned to include minimal transitions between shots. Although they can be a convention to music videos, this is mainly suited to pop music and r’n’b, not rock. I wanted to follow this convention, as I also planned for the video to be naturalistic, so flashy transitions would not fit the style at all. However, the effects supplied by iMovie proved very helpful to create a difference between the band clips and the teenagers. I was again inspired by the bleached band clips of the Plain White T’s “Hey There Delilah,” to place a black and white effect on the clips of the band. However, to create a romantic, retrospective feel for the teenagers, I used the “Heat Wave” effect, which brightened the clips to almost a sepia effect. However, due to the bright sun of the original filming, this bleached out some of the details on the original shots, so I needed to change some of the settings. I could not seem to get this perfect however, so some of these editing shots I found noticeably darker. However, no one mentioned this during feedback, so this may be person over-analysis. No effects placed on the clips of singing, connoting the lyrics are a sentiment shared throughout both focuses of the video.
On the whole, the editing process I believe went a lot smoother and quicker due to not having to learn many more skills. However, if I were attempting to create a video of another genre, such as electronic or pop, this may have included further editing which would have been a much more difficult task.

Final Cut

This is the final cut of my music video. In response to the two main pieces of feedback I received, I have significantly slowed clips of the teenagers. However, through experimenting with speed at various points, I did not feel this was completely appropriate for most of the song. Instead, I only slowed clips at the very start of the video, before the rest of the band join at the first pre-chorus ("Just looking for a little light.") I also planned to slow the clips of the teenagers in the final verse, when the song returns to only the vocals guitar and bass drum being played. However, although in theory this should work, the unveiling of the stolen can and one being pushed over did not look at all as effective as it did originally, so I have kept this at the original speed. Although I do think the slow clips work, the effect I used on iMovie has made the clip jumpy, which is annoying to say the least. However I do not know a way to remedy this, and still keep the speed, which i think is perfect. Asking for feedback on what worked with my new cut, one topic that arose frequently was these new slow motion clips were much more suited at these points.

Another piece of feedback was that there is too much of the band too early in the video. I agreed with this, so I set about replacing clips of instruments with walking. However, I did not have enough clips of the group walking that was in keeping with the linear narrative. With very little opportunities to refilm, I worked with the little I had, inserting minimal extra clips of the teenagers. Some of these I eventually replaced with the original band shots, as they were noticeably recycled shots from other scenes, leaving only two replacement shots. I do believe this has still managed to balance the two focuses much better than I had before; equally introducing the veiled identity of the band, as well as the protagonists of the narrative.

Rough Cut

This is my rough cut from my music video. Overall feedback included too much footage of singing too early in the piece. Another is that, in order to make the clips of the lads on the street more idealistic and perfect, and less like a group of kids hanging around school, slow many of the shots down, except for during the robbery. An aspect of the video I was unsure about including was the unmuted audio during the very first shot, which includes the diegetic sound of the playing television and the guitar being picked up. This experiment seemed to pay off, as I didn't gain any negative feedback regarding it, and some mentioning they liked its inclusion, and that it added realism, suggesting the guitar, and the full band, are playing live.