Behind the Scenes: Front cover photoshoot

This is my completed behind the scenes video for my front cover photoshoot for my music magazine. One of my friends volunteered to film it and she did using my Flip Ultra HD camcorder. I edited this footage using Adobe Premiere Pro, editing was a short process as a whole as I only created titles, sped up and slowed down footage, put a song in the backgound, added transitions and also added a few little effects here and there.

The song I used in the background is "Summerlong" by Kathleen Edwards, one of the artists that inspired to theme and genre of my music magazine (see below for fully study of her). Ultimately, the song was too long to use with my footage as the song is originally 4 minutes and 5 seconds long. To make this song fit with the footage without having to change the song completely, I sped up the song by another 2% which changed the duration to a good 3 minutes and 44 seconds which fit with the footage perfectly. By only speeding it up by 2% was also effective in the sense as it still sounded very similar to the original and wasn't unrecognizable like the song is when you speed it up over another 5%.

The video took a good 30 minutes to encode before publishing. Once this was complete, I watched my video only to notice that the logo of my music magazine had not appeared on the first title, instead it just says "logo". As I didn't have time to solve this issue and encode the video again, I decided to deal with this issue and just address it like I am now.

This is what the logo should have looked like:

This is also the masthead I'm planning to use for my music magazine.

Overall, I am very pleased with my behind the scenes video, aside from that one small problem. I took inspiration from the Vogue behind the scenes video shown earlier in the sense that there were titles at the beginning with the artist's name and footage with music in the background. As for improvements I would have liked to take the inspiration even further by interviewing my artist and interweaving that with the behind the scenes footage, as this was done in the Vogue behind the scenes video.

Front cover images

This prezi contains all of the images I took for the front page of my magazine. I have split them in 3 categories to make them easier to analyse; best, worst and other. 

The pictures in the "best" category are all images that I consider to be the best. This is due to the great angles, good focus and good quality of lighting. These are all pictures that I may use for my front cover.

The pictures in the "worst" category are all images I consider to be the worst. This is due to bad lighting, blurriness and bad angles. It is very rare that I may use any of these images for my front cover.

The pictures in the "other" category are all images that are not good nor bad. They are good images but not good enough to be considered "the best". Overall, these images do have very good lighting and focus, but some of their angles mean that it will be unlikely that I will use any of these images.

Behind the scenes video inspiration

The video above is my inspiration for my behind the scenes video of my photo-shoot for my magazine front cover. I will be editing the videos my camera operator took and editing them in the same style, with captions, change of speed duration and music playing in the background, which suits the genre of music my magazine is based around.

Country music genre

Even though I specified my main music genre for my magazine a while back, I thought I'd explain it in some more detail:

It began in the rural regions of the Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from southeastern American folk music, Western cowboy. Blues mode has been used extensively throughout its recorded history. Country music often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonies accompanied by mostly string instruments such as banjos, electric and acoustic guitars, fiddles, and harmonicas.

The first main country artist was Jimmie Rodgers, who rose to fame in the 1920s. He was a spark which eventually set off a big popularity in country music. The "Golden Age" of Country music was considered to be the 60's, 70's and 80's. With artists like Lynn Anderson and Dolly Parton. "Country Pop" was also established during this time as a new sub-genre of country music, this is the most popular country sub-genre today with classic and modern artists like The Dixie Chicks, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Shania Twain, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert and Hunter Hayes.

Nashville, Tennessee, is considered to be the "birthplace" and "capital" of the country music genre as many of the big country artists were discovered there and it is the home of most country music record labels. The city also holds the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Pictures:
Top middle: Stereotype of country music
Top right: Nashville skyline
Middle right: Country music hall of fame

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_music

Kathleen Edwards

The image above is of Canadian country and folk artist, Kathleen Edwards. Aside from Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood, she is my other source of inspiration due to her unique style of music and appearance. Unlike Taylor and Carrie, Kathleen is a much less mainstream artist as she is not very well known, incredibly underrated in my opinion. Her music is also very different as it ranges from alternative country to folk, whereas most country music singers just stick with the trademark country or pop. This shows Kathleen is much more divergent as she isn't afraid to explore other genres of music to build up her repertoire. Kathleen's anti-mainstream music, unique style and diversity has helped her become one of my favourite artists. Kathleen has four albums out to date (with the latest released in 2012). and has a recording career of over 10 years. Compared to the other two country artists that I mentioned, Kathleen is much more mature with her music which means it appeals to late teens as well as middle-aged women.

Current Music Chart Analysis

I decided to identify the current UK top 10 chart for the week beginning the 9th of December. Before looking, I predicted that the top 10 would mostly be Pop with some R&B. But I discovered some things that I wasn't expecting at all. It shocked me to find an Indie/Folk song at No1, as this isn't very common at all. I was expecting a Pop song which explains within itself is that the contemporary music charts are dominated with Pop music. I do expect though that next week's No1 will be the single from the latest winner of The X Factor, which will be a Pop song. Another thing that surprised me on the chart was to find a Funk song at No2, this is just as uncommon as having an Indie or folk song this far up in the chart, as Pop dominates most of the charts. The last thing for me that was having a K-Pop song in the top 10. Obviously, Gangnam style has been wildly popular internationally, being the most viewed and most liked video on Youtube and holds the record for the first K-Pop song to reach No1 in the UK. This is even more uncommon as K-Pop music only seems to be popular in its native continent of Asia. As it is in a different language, it is unusual and rare for a K-Pop to get this popular.

I created a pie chart containing this information in Microsoft Excel to further prove my statement that pop dominates the current charts.

Masthead font styles

While in the process of choosing the font for my masthead of my music magazine, I looked at Dafont.com due to the large amount of fonts on the site. I chose a wide variety of fonts which are pictured above before choosing my final font. My idea for my masthead was a very western and distorted style which fitted perfectly with the genre of my magazine, country. Back while I was choosing the masthead, I had decided that the name of my magazine would be country, but I felt this was too specific and cliche for the genre. So I eventually went with 'Acoustic' as it is a characteristic of country music, which makes it relate to the genre without being too specific.