Album Art Exercise

Album Art Exercise

The Album exercise was something I used to help make an album cover for my music video. I needed practice so I used a site that simplified making an album cover.


I first had to get a name for a band, I chose "Executive Search" as i clicked a link called 'Randomly-Generated-Wikipedia-Article' that gave me a random name for my band.

I then needed a title for my album. I found a link to a site that was a page of random quotes from celebraties and films.








Band name: Executive Search

Album title: All I can say

My image:

For the album cover image I used the website "Flickr" and I downloaded an image, in which the person who put up the image has allowed people to access and download it. I put it into photoshop, added text with fonts from "Dafont" and manipulated the image. The final product of the picture was this:

Final thriller: Visions (The full movie)

This is our fourth and final thriller piece. Visions (zoned out productions)

The preliminary Task (The Courier)

The Courier

The courier is our third minor film we made acting as the preliminary task. I am now going to critically assess my preliminary exercise.
We thought to create a small story to do with the transport of goods hence the name "The Courier" (one that delivers). We wanted there to be three main characters and to have only the three characters in the film.

Match on Action
We used the Match on Action many times in different scenes through the short film as it worked effectively and made the film better and made them stand out from our previous ones. Match on Action is basically cutting the film then playing it in a different position but at the same time making the film carry on looking more fluent and keeping it flowing.
Examples of match on Action in our preliminary task:



















Shot, reverse shot
Shot and reverse shot is mainly used in conversations. This is when one person is facing another when they are listening to the other person and the camera moves position for the other person to do the same. we used this one or two times in this task as there were a few scenes where conversations takes place.

Examples of Reverse shot in the preliminary task:

Eye line match
We did not use the eye line there fore we have no examples of it in our film. We thought that this technique did not match or go with our thriller, we thought it was not appropriate.

180 degree
this is another effective technique we used in our short film. This involves the camera being in a position where the characters are on the same side
s through out the film but not necessarily in the same room.

We used many different types of film making techniques to make this one stand out from the other two films we made. They include; the different types of camera shots, mise-en-scene, we also used the attachable mic for a better sound and we used

Audience feedback (final film)

Audience feedback  (final film)

This is a video of the feedback kindly given to us by our classmates. The gave us their personal opinion of our film as well as going in detail as to what they liked and didn't like about our final thriller piece.

Over all they gave positive feedback, they said the liked the film and they said there was good sounding for example diegetic and non-diegetic sounds.
(Diegetic sounds are the sounds in the film in which the characters of the film can hear. e.g: knocking on doors in the film, characters dropping things that make loud noises. Non-Diegetic sounds are the sounds in which the characters cannot hear for example; suspenseful music and voice overs & narrations.)

Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the finished product?

Preliminary task and thriller comparison:

The preliminary task was the third film we made in media studies that lacked a lot of components of a common thriller. It differed from our final film quite a bit. We used many different types of camera angles and techniques as well as sound techniques (diegetic, non-diegetic etc.) Our final thriller film had the same techniques but we used them in different but in better scenes. For example, match on action in  the park scenes in our final thriller, we took many different shots from different angles and we tried to put them together and make the film look smooth and look as if they fit in perfectly, correctly. Match on action in the preliminary task film was used in the scene when a character was walking into the room then the camera is at a different angle but we tried our best to make the film look smooth. It was much smoother on our final thriller piece.

The courier (match on action scenes)








What skills we gained and what did we learn?

We gained many skills when making our media films as well as gaining skills in between the making of the 4 films. We learned more about sound, sound effects and transitions to make the film look as professional  as possible and link the films back to real thrillers. We used different camera angles to make the films look better. we also learned about the best positions for the camera when when filming and how to use the tripods stands successfully and to our advantage.

Scenes from visions (final thriller)

Match on action

Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product

We used various different types of technology such as digital cameras & camcorders, our mobile phones, Wikipedia, google, Youtube, slideshare, dafont & Free SFX computers and iMacs.

We used these different types of technology to help us with our final thriller peice, our blogs and for aid and information.

We used google for searching various different things and wikipedia for information as well as facts and figures. We used slide share for a quick and easy presentation for various blogs, cameras and camcorders for recording our thriller pieces and our mobile phones for quick pictures as they are easy to use, connect to bluetooth and to upload pictures. The websites we used for our thriller peices were Dafont for good text and font styles in order to create good titles and credits, we also used FreeSFX for sound effects to add sounds that reflect on the film.

 Youtube was used, as it is one of the most popular and easy video uploading websites in the world we used it to our advantage. We used youtube to upload our video and successfully put it straight one of our blog posts. Wikipedia is a free online encylclopedia so we used the site for various bits of information, for example informaion and facts for our Sir Alfred Hitchcock presentation. For our video editing, we used final cut express, due to the fact that we were using iMacs every now and again and final cut express is a video editing software only for the iMacs, we used it to edit our thrillers.

We have gained many different types of skills from using these types of technologies. One of the main skills that we learned was learning how to use the digital cameras and camcorders effectively. We got better at steadying the camera when filming as well as using the accessaries and equipment that are compatable with the camera such as the tripod and the mini microphone. We also learned how to use final cut express and edit films almost like a proffessional learning the key effects and fades as well as sound editing.



Question 5

How did you attract/ address your audience your audience?

How does our thriller hold the audiences attention?

The thriller opening we made holds the audiences attention by making it look like not enough informationis given. We want the audience really want to know whats goin to happen in the whole film as well as get interested in thriller genres in general. Another attention grabbing technique used were parks and other locale plasses, the audience are likely to recognise these areas.


Why would they want to want to watch your film

People would want to watch our film because it holds the aspects of a normal, proffesional thriller such as red herrings, cliffhangers and suspensfull music. Also there are young adults casted as the characters baring in mind our film's audience is targeted at 13-17 year olds.


Why would they carry on wathcing after our initial 2 minute opening?

They would carry on watching because the whole opening is a complete cliff hanger, we wan the audience to be on the edge of their seats. The end of the opening of our thriller shows two men and one of them is someone not seen as a threat or a "bad-guy" throught the film but at the end is bad.