Evaluation Question 2

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

For our band's digipak, we used most of our own designed products and designs for our media film and digipak.

Logos and Digipak:

For the digipak, we designed a new album cover for the album "Empty Days and Sleepless Nights" using our ownimages and also a newly designed band logo, including screencaps from our own video onto the different panels of the digipak. Our logo also features on the opening of our music video to signify the band. Considering we asked the record label if we could use the song, to which they happily agreed, we thought it would be best to use their record label's (Bridge Nine Records) real logo. This features on the front, spine and back of the digipak.

The font for the logo is in a neat but handwritten font, somewhat similar to Defeater's actual logo. We thought this would be best to suit the theme of the video and also the whole album. Dom did it by hand and we scanned it onto the system, where we could use it in our digipak and the website etc. We feel it somewhat resembles the original logo (above) and gives off the same kind of theme to it. 

We also created a logo for our own Media Productions, called CLDB Productions. This is somewhat similar to the Bridge 9 Records logo, as it appears simple and suits the simplistic kind of genre of the music. This allows the audience to authenticate between our logo and the ones Defeater and Bridge Nine records already use.

The Video

In the video we have kept to the story of the album itself; I Don't Mind is a song the lead character singing about his wife, who unfortunately died. We have added our own modern twist to it, using modern day clothes etc despite the album itself being set around World War II. We have kept a similar location as to what the lyrics portrays, such as the lake. We also have a lot of black and white parts in the video, which represent the depression the lead character feels after the death of his girlfriend. 

The Digipak

Like the music video, we have added our own modern twist onto the album cover. The album cover is a photoshoppedpicture of the lake we filmed at, this again relates to the modern twist we put on the album. We have also included important aspects of the album and the music video, such as the train track and a much clearer shot of the lake, with the lead character looking out onto it. It repesents all of the main events not only in the album but in the music video for the song as well and we think they are the most significant parts. The main focus is the character and the events leading to his death which is why we fell it is much more important. In comparison to the old broken 1940's house on the original "Empty Days and Sleepless Nights" cover it is a much more modern aspect having the lake being photoshopped onto it as it represents a much more modern take on the album, which is more relatable to our target audience.

Evaluation Question 3

I have created a Prezi for my answer to the evaluation question: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Final Video

Final Website

LINK TO WEBSITE CLICK HERE  

This is the link to our band page that we have created. I think the design works well and that the page fits with all the codes and conventions we have worked to follow although I think it can be a little too dark in places.


I have asked some of my friends over Skype what they thought of the website:

[14:43:32] Daniel: I really like the design, I like how you have made it original but it still looks professional.

[14:43:33] Katie: I think the colours really suit the bands genre :)

[14:43:33] Kieran: It's a little slow to load sometimes but other than that I think it looks great!

[14:43:35] Becky: although the band isn't one i'd listen to personally, i think it will appeal to people who like that music and i like that the buttons are clear.

Making the website

For the website we first decided that we needed to find a site to create  it on, this site needed to be accessable at school so our original plan to create it on Tumblr had to go, since although it was easily customisable with free themes it was unavailable at school and therefore we would not be able to edit it if we were in class.
After considering several websites (such as Weebly, Freewebs, webs) me and Ben decided to use Wix since it was available and unblocked at school, it was easy to edit and alter and it gave a good design.

Using images we had created for our digipak, including the cover and fonts we uploaded them onto the website, this is because when researching into other band websites we discovered that many of them did this as a marketing technique, using the same image so that it is a symbol of that band and retains in your memory. By using the same image it will help with sales and works to cross-sell products.

With creative suggestions, Ben organised the design of the website since he was most familiar with the website, and positioned the navigation bar, banners and positioned the background so that the light source of the photo-manip was in the centre of the page. He then positioned our created font/logo where it could be easily spotted and at the top with the navigation system, this was in keeping with similar codes and conventions from other sites. We decided to keep the colour scheme the same so that it looked smoother and so that everything complimented each other. This was important as other band websites I had looked at used similar palettes throughout their pages.

We felt that the video needed to be the most important aspect of our design so we placed it in the middle of the page so it immediately drew attention to viewers and so that it also was easily accessible. (this would help as a marketing technique to increase sales and views).

Overall I am pleased with the outcome of the design and think it works well to stick to similar codes and conventions of other band websites, but also includes our own original designs too.

Digipak

This is the Digipak that we have created after several designs were suggested, as a group we decided that the design would need several features that included both the band and the managers logo, obviously the album title and song titles. I wanted the album to contain a photo that we had taken so that it would link into and relate to out previous work.

Ben was the best at Photoshop out of our group, so with suggestions we both decided what would be best for the sides of the digipak and he edited it on Fireworks and Photoshop until we were both happy, this included altering the contrast, colour boosting or reducing saturation/opacity (transparacy) on images and also adding titles to the sections so that we could include a track-list.

To create the reflected effect the original image was cropped and then mirrored to get the final image.

We wanted to keep the logo of the band in the image but since it was copyrighted we needed to design a new logo, Dominic created one that looked similar to the font which I think worked really well because they look comparative which is convincing to people viewing the logo.
Lastly, we created a logo for our group which is made up of the initials from each of our names. It was created on Photoshop with input from the whole group until we were all happy with the final design.

I then asked several people in our media class what they thought of the digipak, they said that it was "interesting and detailed and something that they would notice in a store since it stands out amongst plainer covers", the positive feedback settled the final design.

Before it was done however, we needed to fix some problems with the design since not every panel lined up accurately with clear spaces for the spine. We found this when we printed the digipak out and it was a little off, after some tweaking this was resolved however.
The canvas size on Photoshop that we also created was very large and when it printed out it took up too much paper since it did not re-size it in scale, this meant we had to alter the size of the design when printing.

Film and Audio post on band websites

I have recorded several band websites (Defeater, the band whose song we are creating a music video for, Paramore and another band called Nico Vega) and discussed common Codes and Conventions found on these and other band pages. These features will all go towards our final website design for our own band page.
I used an inbuilt sound-recorder that was installed into my computer and a headset with microphone to record my voice and I used a registered Hypercam 2 to record websites that I had chosen on my computer. This was all edited together using Windows Live Movie Maker to edit it all together, this included clipping and trimming clips to fit the audio and exporting the file into my documents.