Sleeping Beauty cover

We asked our actress to lay on a bold colour background so that it would be easier to edit afterwards. We asked out actor to lean over her as we thought it emphasised her as the focus if he was looking at her.

As we decided this would be the back page of our cover, we added the bar code to make it more realistic.

Rapunzel cover

This cover took longest to create as we had to take the pictures of the two actors separately as they had to be at two different levels.

Additionally, we had to edit the tower in so that it matched our colour scheme but was also still visible. We adjusted the colours on the tower so that it became part of the background rather than the main focus.

We also had to consider a realistic height to have the actor in comparison to the actress in the tower.

Post Production Questionnaires

We thought our best chances at having a big audience would be to post our video online. However, as the video was too big, we had difficulties and so had to find another way to do our showing and questionnaires. We uploaded our video onto Youtube and then used Facebook to link the video to our audience and send them our questionnaire. We sent it to 20 people each and now we are waiting for their results.

When deciding our questions, we tried to cover as many different aspects that we had considered in the first place in order to see if our video turned out how we planned successfully or not.

Beauty and the Beast cover

In the image above, you can see the editing effect in place.

Our complication with this cover with how to show the Rose without leaving our colour scheme. After much debating we finally decided on the image above and decided to darken the colours until it fit the colour scheme as close as possible.

Cinderella Digipack cover

Using Adobe Photoshop, we removed the backgrounds from our initial shot until we were left with just the two figures in the picture. We did this by using the the tool which allowed us to erase large sections at the time and then used the rubber tool to make a more accurate close in on the two figures. Next we used a colour adjusting tool in order to create silhouettes of the two figures. This took a long time as it was hard to make sure that the colours were just right and that it was still possible to identify the figures in the picture.

We changed the background colours depending on what colours we made our silhouettes. In this case we made a pink background for our black silhouettes however, we intend to alternate this with two of our other covers. Pink silhouettes with black backgrounds.

We put 'Cinderella' to emphasises the theme of fairy tales.

This is our front cover so we decided to have the band's name on it. The Glow on the name illustrates the focus of this cover. Also by having a glow we felt that it suggested an unnatural element which we thought we could relate to the idea of fairy-tale fiction.

Finally, we decided to give our figures another dimension and so decided to emboss our image to make it look like they're coming off the page.

Over the next week or two I hope to have uploaded all four of our covers.

Adobe Photoshop 7.0

We used Adobe Photoshop 7.0 to create our digipack covers. With this program, we were able to manipulate our images and change them into our final results.

We used this to play with the colours, the backgrounds and the graphics of the pictures.

Through using this, we felt that our final results will reflect those which we planned to begin with.

Over the next week or two, I will upload the results of editing our digipack covers with this program.

Digi-pack covers

Following the theme of fairytale, we looked at other stories where there is a 'fantasy boy' character which have their happy endings. The ones we decided on (In order going down) are Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and Beauty and the Beast. We hoped that through the positioning of the women, they would look like they were the main focus of the picture suggesting a modern view on the portrayal of women. The men in these images are still the heroes, yet they have a more passive role in these images. We used images that would be most recognizable to an audience as we intended to modernize them and only use silhouettes. The images below are a plan of what we would like our Digi-pack covers to look like. We continued with our colour scheme of pink and black as it represents female pop-rock artists in our opinion. At the top we considered having the name of the album and the band's name 'Mia-Mae' at the bottom.

Above is our modern interpretation, we intend for the man to have a head as this is just a plan. The converse matched our colour scheme and also showed our theme of fairytale modernized to the 21st century romance.

Above, we have sleeping beauty, the way which we modernized the bed by not having the large grand bed in which she has often been portrayed. Equally, she is a natural sleeping position whereas in many interpretations she is laying on her back which we thought made her look too much like an object.

Above has been taken from the story of Rapunzel. This image corresponds to that of our website and is the only one which meets the usual expectations of a classic fairytale. This suggests that there is still the side of romance which is represented by chivalry.

Here we have Beauty and the Beast. In the story, the beast is protective over the rose and allows no one to come near it. In our image, both characters are of equal distance from the rose leaning towards it, besides removing the idea of his power of hers, the rose, similarly to the story represents the romantic side of the song which isn't considered much anywhere else as we feel it isn't a major theme in the song.

Narrative Vs Band Shots

We were wondering if there was a way for us to present a clear distinguish between shots that were story lines and our band shots so that we could contrast them as much as possible.

After looking at various music videos, we decided we most liked how it was done in the Bryan Adam's music video Summer of 69 as he split his music video into the past and present by using black and white for the past and colour for the present.

We thought that while we wanted to use black and white for narrative shots, we would focus more on colour when it came to the band shots in order to emphasise the difference.

As our colour scheme is bright, we thought that a similar idea would have been good for our music video so that it follows a theme.

The black and white, we feel, gives the narrative the look of being a memory of the artists which felt fitting to the lyrics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f06QZCVUHg

Exploring Gothic Fantasy

As both of us are English Literature students, we felt we could apply our knowledge of the subject when creating our artists' image. Our A level English Literature focuses on Gothic Literature, we looked at our texts Wuthering Heights, Dr Faustus and especially The bloody chambers for inspirations.

We looked at the position of women specifically in the Gothic.

In Wuthering Heights we focused on the older Catherine and their position within the novel. The first time the reader meets Catherine in the novel is as a ghost. We adapted this idea by having our artist Georgia appear everywhere throughout the video but not always seen by the other actors in the video. Furthermore, Catherine is described as a passionate character, we thought we could try to portray this through her lyrics as they discuss her strong desires for her 'Fantasy boy'. Moreover, like Catherine and Heathcliff, our character is unable to be with the man she wants to be with.

Dr Faustus only contained two women one of which was used as a victim of the male gaze. We subverted this idea by not showing women as sex objects but illustrating them in two ways of which we believed were more plausible characters. Our subversion was also due to the modern interpretation we took for our music video. We had one artist in brighter and with more or a 'girly girl' image, this was done by using a huge emphasis on the colour pink. Our other artist was shown as a darker side through the use of dark colours to show a contrast between the two. This idea was influence by the aforementioned music video by Paramore for their song Misery Business.

The Bloody Chambers had a wider exploration on women. The women in the fairytales were often the desires of men however, with the modern interpretation we approach our music video with and the lyrics, we made the man the object of desire. In the stories ' The Lady of the Love House', 'Werewolf' and 'The Bloody Chambers' are the only three stories within the book in which the female is able to take control and become more powerful than the male. In the other stories though, (also in parts of the Bloody Chamber story) the women is a victim or a spectator to other acts of heroism or violence. This suggests that the woman is powerless and inferior to the males. Our protagonist does not act or win over the man she wants, but watches him and sits on the side lines throughout.

The Website

One of the requirements for the course is to create a website promoting the band. We kept with our theme of Gothic Fantasy, specifically looking at the 'damsel in the distress' idea. As neither of us had ever created a website before, we had to learn the technical sides before we could bring our ideas to life. We were introduced and developed our skills through the Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Fireworks packages.

After having grasped the concepts introduced to us through the packages mentioned above, we were able to develop our ideas to make them fitting to the theme we were following and we were able to indulge in our creative skills in order to produce an appealing website.

We looked at Avril Lavigne's website: http://home.avrillavigne.com/ since we felt her image and voice most suited our artists. At first we designed our website as below:

Our problem with this was that it became to simplistic and didn't leave us enough creative possibilities and so we added our fire breathing dragon and the tower. We felt that all this together made the page too crowded and we wouldn't be able to add anything without making it a mess. By overcrowding the website it would make it unappealing to an audience as it would be too difficult to look at.

Our final result:

meant that we were successful in creating a website that followed our colour scheme of black and pink as well as following our Gothic fantasy theme. Fantasy was a clear and obvious theme for our artist and through our knowledge of the Gothic through our Literature lessons alongside what we had imagined our artists may be thinking when they wrote the song. Although the image above is not the complete website, we saw this is a good basis that would allow us to include more detail about our artist without overcrowding the page.

To create the dragon and the tower, we researched Gothic towers, looking at Rapunzel in particular. We chose the tower that mostly said 'Gothic' to us and put a picture of our protagonist in the top to illustrate the damsel idea. Likewise, we looked at various dragon images and then adapted the one we thought was most fitting and made it follow the colour scheme we wanted. We would like to make the fire move using flash to animate our website. We already started this idea of animation by embossing the dragon and tower so that they look like they are slightly coming off the page.

Mia-Mae... Stereotype or Subversion?

We looked through our ideas of Gothic Fantasy and the aspects of Gothic and Fantasy which we had learnt through English Literature and other research we've done. We found some similarities between our music video and others of the genre but, there were also ideas which subverted from our chosen genre.

Stereotypes

Our protagonist was a passive character who looked onto the situation without taking any action. She sits back throughout the video and watches situations pass by her.

On our website, we have the girl trapped in the tower. This meets the the stereotype of the passivity of women and how they need a chivilrous man to come save them.

As I study sociology, I introduced Daniella to the theory of a 'bedroom' culture. This is the idea that as girls are more controlled than boys, they develop a situation where they communicate with their friends through phone conversations or over computers. This means that girls have a more advanced grasp of language, according to the theory. I found I could apply this to the music video as the artist wrote the song herself which shows her using language in order to express herself yet does it in passive way which is mostly illustrated by her sitting in a bedroom singing throughout the narrative.

Our colour scheme of pink and black seemed to be a conventional pop/rock yet feminine theme which suggested that the target audience were likely to be young pre teens to teenaged girls.

Subverting

Through our research of artists such as Avril Lavigne and Paramore, we noticed that the Gothic didn't often coinside with this specific genre of music. Even though our style is very similar to those artists, by introducing the Gothic to it, we made it our own orignal idea. The Avril Lavigne website was closer to our first website idea however, we felt that this was too feminine and so we adapted it by using feminine colours but not specifically feminine imagery for our theme.

Unlike many music videos, our artists are not shown to be objectifyed by the male gaze. We noticed that this was not obvious in the videos by Paramore or Avril Lavigne yet, it was hinted through short and tight clothing or having very little flesh covered. In our music video we catogorised the artists as two seperate images. Georgia, was dressed brightly in pink, with her hair straightend potraying a 'girly' character. Our other artist was dressed in dark colours with red hair which gave her more of the 'rock chick' image. These contrasting characters showed what we felt was a more realistic image of what girls tend to look like.

Georgia Bedroom shot

(3.22)

This shot is the complete opposite to the other artist shots. By having these shots as quite bright, we were able to contrast the differences. On this side she shows the hopeful side of not having what you want whereas on the other hand the the other artists' darkness shows the more heart-breaking side of the song.

The lighting is coming from the window above her and a window right opposite this allowed as much natural light into the room as possible.

By having a low angle shot, we felt that it showed her in a powerful potion which contrasted with the lyrics 'You're just something I can't set free'

We didn't add any effects to it as it was already a bright shot and we didn't want to over do it.