Monday 19 December 2011

CD cover Evaluation - Fever Ray

Here is another CD cover that we analysed that got top marks from the mark scheme.

Front

 Inside

It is very evident by looking at this CD cover that there is a lot of use of editing and technical ability. The use of green rays added to the image is very well done and fits in with the text on the spin of the cover. It stands out very well and the use of neon green and white fit together quite well which would not be normally expected. The use of language is relevant and effective. 

CD cover Evaluation - Temper Trap

When we were trying to come up with ideas for our CD cover, we looked at past students work and compared with the mark scheme to see their ideas and how they were graded on their work. There is a mixture of top band work along with some lower graded work.

Here is the front and back cover of a Temper Trap cover, they were given top marks for their cover.

Front

 Inside

When looking at this CD cover, you could tell that they were given top marks. One the front cover the use of putting a image of the band within the frame is a very clever technique to use along with the corresponding fame turned round which could represent the "lost" part of the title. Also the colours and the font fits in with the conventions of the artist and goes with the criteria.

On the inside of the cover, the use of different images put in frames is quite clever and fits in with the frame and image idea on the front and fits in well with the website as a whole package between the 3 products: music video, CD and the website. Also the use of the blacking out of imagery shows the use of editing and lighting on the black silhouette is effective and gives the impression of those old blacked out portraits that people use to have. It fits in with their style and shows quality.

New Shooting Date

We are reshooting on Thursday 22nd December at the same location, this means we can get improved footage and also give us enough time to edit well after the holidays!

Friday 16 December 2011

Back up dancer

As said by Amber, unfortunately due to work demand, Sancha will not be able to be in our re-shooting next week. As a last resort, I said that I was willing to be the female dancer as I use to do ball room dancing a couple of years ago. It's not great as I am not going to be behind the camera much and George will be the same. However we will all look at the footage and all have a valid input on how good the shots are and any ideas we have.

I took a picture of myself wearing the dress to make sure it fitted. If I am going to dance, I will have the same make up and hair styles and Sancha would have had so my hair isn't in my face and to go with what our original idea was.

Thursday 15 December 2011

Replacement Actors

Because we have to re-shoot we have found that we may have to replace our female dancer. We have tried to ask a few other people we know, but if they can't make it, we have considered using Charlie. We hopefully have access to the location we had before.

Our website on IWEB

This is our website put into IWEB with links put in.

Completed outside of digipak

Completed inside of Digipak

This is the inside of our digipak. We have used pictures of our singer to promote the fact that he is a single artist rather than part of a band.

Completed Photoshop Website


This is the finished version of our website, created in PhotoShop. All we need to do now is upload it to Iweb

Wednesday 14 December 2011

Second Shooting

After doing our filming at Trent Vale for our first shooting, we decided when looking back at the footage that the quality of the footage wasn't of the greastest standard and we ran out of time to film all of our shots. One of our group members has asked again to see if we can use the hall again before the christmas holidays starts when we won't be able to use the school. Hopefully, if we can get the hall for next monday, and all of our actors can make the date, we will be able to re-shoot and have more suitable and better quality shots for our music video.

Tuesday 13 December 2011

Photos taken at first shooting

Here are some of the photos I took with my camera when we did our filming at the Trent Vale School. Some of them are not as good due to bad lighting and positioning. However, most of them are quite clear and there are two particular images of our dancer Sancha that would be god to include on the front cover and one of our two dancers together to possibly put on the inside:








Monday 12 December 2011

Website progress

This is our website with most of the internet images replaced by our own. Now all we have to do is finish our CD cover and add it to the site.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

"Completed" Website

This is our website in its completed state as far as we can get it, without the images we need to get from our shoots.

We will be editing our actual images into the website once we have them

Website progress

This is our website so far. It is almost completed:

Band Replacements

Bruce McCullen our replacement drummer for Tim is now no longer able to do the filming date resulting in me (George) replacing him on drums, we have also drafted in Louise Schofield as a bassist due to her actually being able to play the instrument which will hopefully make the live performance more believable.

Band changes

We have completely cut out the keyboardist and backing guitar elements of the band due to our actors Leo and and Ewan being unable to make the filming date, as a result we only have the integral band members left, the drummer, lead guitar, vocalist and bassist left.

CD Cover development

The outer cover
this is the front and back of our CD cover at the moment George has started to do the lettering and the fine details such as the Columbia and Sony logo. we will be able to put the image onto the CD cover when we film later tonight as we will be able to use a digital camera to take photos!

Then after looking at Miles'  CD cover and changing the design of our own CD, we decided to go with the pink and white colour scheme as it would be more suitable and would match our website to make it a complete package.

We also found that when we placed our images we had to move the title quicksand, because otherwise it wouldn't fit in properly, and the cover would look very amateurish and the text would be hard to read. So after re-arranging the text we replaced the images.

We chose to use these images because they suited the style of Miles Kane being very simply laid out, but after taking another look at previous Miles Kane covers we decided it was too colourful to match him as an artist and the website that we had designed. So we decided to change the images through manipulation on photoshop so that they would be black and white.
After editing the opacity and changing the colours to be black and white, we added layers over the originally placed images, allowing for some of the original colour to leak through. We thought this made quite a good effect and decided that we liked this as a finished product for our outside covers of the digipak.



The inner cover
This was the template we were given at the beginning, and though we had some trouble trying to figure out what to do with the inside cover we eventually came up with some ideas we thought would suit Miles Kane.
We then chose two pictures that we felt were good quality and would fit with the idea that we were formulating. Since Miles Kane is a solo artist who focuses a lot on his own performance we thought that these images would be best to use.


We then thought it was still too colourful and that we needed to change the image colours to match not only the website but the outer covers. So we changed the left hand image by over laying it with their layers that had effects added to them and the opacities lowered. The first thing we did was add a dissolved layer over the top.
After that we added a layer that had a glow effect and the colours converted to black and white. We thought that this looked good and it fitted the outer layers of the digipak.
We noticed that there was no follow through with the pink that was on the front covers and the website so we added a pink layer and reduced the opacity so that it gave the image a pink filter which we thought looked decent and linked well with the colour scheme we had chosen.
We thought that so far our cover looked quiet good and the pink contrasted well with the black and white on the right hand side. We then decided that we needed to edit the CD because white wasn't the right choice for it, as Miles Kane's own CD was plain black, and had his name on it.
 We spent a while thinking about what we could do with the CD since we didn't want it to just be plain as it wouldn't fit the criteria of the board or match our designs very well. After some thought we decided that since Miles Kane likes to promote himself as a solo artist that plays his own instruments, an image of him singing on the CD would be a good idea.

We felt that leaving the image with its original colourings wouldn't suit our theme so we reduced the opacity of the image and added a colour burn to it, so that it would stand out from the cover. We thought that the effect looked quite good but the colourings were too faded.

We enhanced the colours by overlaying the CD image with a black circle shaped that fitted over the top. It made the colours of the under image brighter more defined. We though it contrasted well with the back and white image that it covered. We also added a smaller white circle and reduced the opacity so that it looked like a proper CD.

After looking at the cover we had so far we decided that the left hand side  needed something else because it looked too empty. So we looked at some other CD covers to see what we could add and after some searching we decided that the lyrics to the song we were doing for our music video would be a good idea.
We had an idea for the left hand side then but we needed to make it fit in well with the rest of the digipak design. After some shuffling and re-shuffling we chose a white font as it was the one colour that fitted in well with our colour scheme and could be read on the pink filter. We also chose to lay out the text in one  on running line as it meant we could fit all the lyrics in and it didn't leave too many blank spaces. 


This was the cover we had when we decided that it looked good enough and fitted well with the rest of our digipak.






Tuesday 29 November 2011

LOCATION CONFIRMATION! - George

Trent Vale have gotten back to me this morning confirming that we can use their hall for the music video. We shall be filming there next wednesday from 6pm onwards. This means we now have over a week to organise instruments, actors and other props for the shoot.

Monday 28 November 2011

Photoshop CD Cover Tutorial

This video shows different techniques etc. to use on photoshop to make a good album.

Trent Vale Location - George

I have recently contacted Trent Vale Infant School about using their hall for our music video, it has a stage and is very similar to College House's hall so it would be ideal, their Headmistress has said that we should be able to film there next Wednesday (7th December) but is just going to check with the Governors before she fully confirms. She is going to phone tonight about it.

IWEB TUTORIAL


We found this tutorial for Iweb on youtube, which showed us how to use Iweb to create our own layout etc

CD Cover Evaluation - Florence and the Machine



This CD cover got 5/10 due to the simplicity of the cover. It would not take very long to make this due to it only being pictures and text which would not involve much effort because it wasn't edited much. It also has a lack of information e.g. fine print, record labels etc. The inside photo is also ridiculously similar to the front cover showing a lack of variety.

Miles Kane's Website

This is Miles Kane's website, it is good due to its easy to understand format and font whilst making it look very bold and stylistic whilst doing so. It has a distinct colour scheme (Red, black and white) which makes the website nice to look at; it also incorporates videos and images of Miles Kane so it doesnt look boring. Therefore achieving appropriate integration of illustration and text e.g. videos and images. Headlines e.g. 'LATEST NEWS', 'GIGS & EVENTS' etc. are larger than other text to add variety and make sure they stand out to draw attention. There are different links to his Facebook page, record companies and youtube videos, showing that he is keeping up with technology so he can keep in touch and gain more fans.

previous students website - Kate Nash

This website got a 5/10, this is understandable due to the text and layout not being very easy to understand, the format is uneven and has a majority of white space around it, this was done on photoshop. me and george don't think that photoshop would be appropriate  for the website due to the white space being around the edges. it doesn't to look professional or formal enough whilst also taking a lot more effort, this contributes to the fact that it wouldn't fit into Miles Kane's image.

Filming update

After searching around various venues in Nottingham, we have decided to film at college in our theatre and then include some domestic at one of our houses. We feel that by doing this, the story line will be easier to follow and will make more sense. It also means we will have more than one location which will make our video more interesting.
We have asked our actors to bring in their costumes today as we will take photos of them and do some filming to see how the location and the positioning of the actors and equipment appear and whether we need to change the set design to fit in with the location.

Photos from the shoots and the filming will be uploaded later on and the images will be edited and used for our CD cover.

previous students website - The Wombats

this group kept to the conventions of the wombats via there image choices, colour pallette whilst using a clear and easy to read font. it uses appropriate use of i.t.  from the links to social networking sites, email and RRS news feed, they have video links, links to a shop as well as being able to sign up to to there private members list.

Further news on the shed

I have tried to call Julie Lord, the woman in charge of the hall at the Shed many times, along with my group members. She has yet to answer her phone or answer our messages. Because of the lack of response we have decided to rule out the Shed as an option.

Other Locations

On wednesday I went down to the Shed (Beeston and chilwell community centre) to see if we would be able to use the hall they had there. When I got there the woman in charge of renting out the hall wasn't around, and so I was given a number to ring. I plan to ring them during the day.

Previous students website

Before starting our own website, we decided to look at last year's websites, to get an idea of the layout and the technical skills that are required to get into the top band of the mark scheme.

Here are some examples:

This website scored well, getting high marks for the layout, the skills used to create it and the appropriateness to the genre


This website also scored very well with the marking criteria. The background and font style is appropriate to the band and the website was well planned and set out. The images used were effective to the style and the correct use of language.


Here is the marking criteria:


mark+scheme+2.jpg

Monday 21 November 2011

Possible font Choices for our CD cover

A year without Rain.

Ale and Wenches
Anarchist
Adam warren
Anke Calligraphy
Antropos














Blue=Dafont.com  Red=Urbanfonts.com