Friday 30 January 2015

Image ideas for my poster...

For my poster, I was unsure wether I wanted to use an image of the band, or like the digipak, a landscape picture that represents the style of the band. In my bedroom at home, I have a number of band/artist posters ion my wall, therefore I examined those and took ideas from them to incorporate into my own. With bands like The 1975, Kings of Leon and Catfish and the Bottlemen, all similar to Two Door Cinema Club, None of them used images of the band. Album covers were used, or landscape imagery of cities and towns etc.

The following pictures are images I have thought about using for potential Poster images...






Thursday 29 January 2015

Favourite music video...

My favourite music video is The 1975's video for their single 'Robbers'. The official music video was released on 28 April 2014. Directed by Tim Mattia, the video depicts a pair of lovers, played by band frontman Matthew Healy and model, Chelsea Schuchman, who rob a shop to obtain money to fund their alcohol and drug addiction.

Tim Mattia has directed many other music videos for artists such as Tine Tempah, Marilyn Manson and Conor Maynard. It was interesting when researching Mattia and noticing how different in genre the artists he has worked with are.
  • Tinie Tempah - British rapper Tinie Tempah released his debut single "Pass Out" in February 2010. Featuring the track's producer Labrinth, the single debuted at number one on the UK chart.
  • Marilyn Manson - Marilyn Manson, is an American musician, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, actor, painter, multimedia artist, and former music journalist. He is known for his controversial stage personality and image as the eponymous lead singer of the band Marilyn Manson
  • Nicole Scherzinger -  Nicole Scherzinger is an American recording artist, actress and television personality. She signed with Interscope Records in 2003 as a member of the Pussycat Dolls.
The range and differences between these artists were interesting, however, when looking at the videos of the artists that he directed, there is an ongoing theme of colour and shots. He seems to use the same filter on his videos creating a dusk effect.

This is my favourite video as the narrative is beautifully put together.

From my knowledge and interest for this band, I originally knew that the video is a recreation of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'. It shows the love and death between the two characters.

It is a fantastic video that really draws its audience in as the whole band feature in the video, and the lead singer, who is an icon for their female audience, plays the 'Romeo' character.

Wednesday 28 January 2015

Font styles for our artist...

In Wednesday's lesson, we looked at different types of font on a website called DaFont. We wanted a font that would represent us as a band. We looked at other bands that have a font that people recognise as 'being their font'.

When you look at classic rock bands, they all have a font/logo that represents themselves as a band. Bands such as Metallica whose font has a lightning strike looking symbol coming off of the first and last letter in the word. The font is black, representing their dark aggressive image of the metal music they produce.






The original artwork of the Rolling Stones lips and tongue logo is one of the world's most instantly recognisable symbols of rock and roll. Their red font is also a key recognisable symbol of them as a band.






Oasis are known for their Italic white font in the black box. When this style is seen, or a similar font type, the general audience would instantly think of or assume it was the band Oasis.






In more recent years, bands like Arctic Monkeys are known for their white font in the black circle, and their sound wave logo from their fifth studio album, AM.

Monday 26 January 2015

Slow-motion effect

By owning an iPhone 6, I had the accessibility of using the slow-motion effect on the camera. We thought it would be cool to have a section in the song that was slower than the rest, to contrast with the fast paced audio track. During a shoot, unplanned, Shaun filmed a scene on the iPhone and we were overly pleased with how it came out. We ended up using the following clip and we think it looks really great in contrast to the lively performance on the rest of the track.

Wednesday 21 January 2015

Feedback 21/01/15

In today's lesson, we showed our second draft to the class, and we got feedback via these sheets.

The main feedback we got, was to change the drummer as he wasn't very realistic when playing the drums in our performance sections within our video. We are going to reshoot and focus a lot more on what drums are being played at that specific moment in the song, and try t replica them to the best as possible. If that fails, hen we will have to change the drummer overall.





Saturday 10 January 2015

Plan for band poster...

I have decided to use this image as it has a great contrast with the overall look of my digipak. The sepia style works really well, giving a vintage look to our digipak, linking in with our bands interests of vintage clothing and 80's music. The picture of the pier resembles a beach linking in with the name of our band, 'Waves'.

The text I have added, mainly to get a feel to see if it works among the image, matches the font that features on the front of my digipak. I have kept this font to write all information featuring on both the digipak and poster. I think it works really well and stands out as being the font used for 'Waves'. Linking in with another blog post I did, I wanted to get a font that would resemble the band and be noticed for being the band font, almost acting as a logo in itself.


Friday 9 January 2015

Transitioned Digipak tracklist...

This is the track listing actually transitioned onto the digipak. I think the font really works against the 'Waves' background. The shadow on the font works and relates to the shadowing on the water/waves from the sun on the background image. There are 10 tracks. This is because a number of indie albums I looked at, had either 10 or around 10 tracks. I didn't want to over do it and make it look un-realistic or make it not match the indie genre and style of bands. The barcode creates a product-like feel to it and  finishes off the panel for my digipak.

Thursday 8 January 2015

Track listing on my digipak...

On my digipak, my middle panel at the bottom, is my track-listing panel. I looked at a lot at my favourite bands albums and their track-listing/song names. I chose to have 10 songs on my album as I think that is the right amount for an indie bands album. I then had to choose the track names. I chose 10 of my favourite songs, but still had to think about ho they would match and work with the style of our artist. Therefor, I chose mainly indie songs.

  1. Intro (original song by The 1975)
  2. Robbers (original song by The 1975)
  3. Undercover Martyn (our music video track, original song by Two Door Cinema Club)
  4. Alaska (original song by Josh Record) 
  5. Sex (original song by The 1975)
  6. Antichrist (originally by The 1975)
  7. Naive (originally by The Kooks)
  8. Fallout (originally by Catfish and the Bottlemen)
  9. Tulips (song title made up by myself)
  10. Reflections (song title made up by myself)
I think these song titles match our artist and it's profile.

Wednesday 7 January 2015

Change in music video cast.

Due to difficulty in scheduling times, we have had to change the characters in our video. Originally, we had our friend Beth and her boyfriend. However, he was not available until after 17:00 on weekdays which limited our time with lighting and general filming. The scenes they would have featured in, were the driving scene where the couple are on their way to one of the bands gigs.
So now, we have changed the couple to myself and my girlfriend as we are both flexible with filming times and dates. It is also ideal as my girlfriend drives and we would have needed a car and drive for the scenes. I am overall happy with the change of cast, as I now know that I have the freedom to film when I want, need and can. Also, I can play the character comfortably the way I had planned when thinking of the idea. We have our second draft of our music video with me and my girlfriend playing the characters, and it works a lot better than the original first draft video.

The first two actors...
Despite them looking great and matching the style of our target audience, it was a shame their availability couldn't work for us.




Our final actors...
This is me and my girlfriend. Due to it being my group, my time management and availability was more suitable. Also, with it being my group, I knew exactly how I wanted it to look and what I wanted happening at certain points. I feel we got as much as possible out of our performance and I am happy with how it came out overall.


Tuesday 6 January 2015

Re-filming our live performance...

Now we are back to school from the Christmas break, my priority is to re-film the performance for our music video. Despite the first shoot not being too bad and actually coming out looking fairly good, we always knew we were going to re-shoot no matter what. Looking back at the original footage, and looking at the feedback sheets, there were a few adjustments we needed to touch on. 

Our friend we had used as our drummer, was not good enough. At this level of media, every slight issue should be dealt with. With James on the drums, we felt that he didn't have the natural look of a drummer, and did not have the right rhythm or timing. Therefore, we have decided that when we next shoot, we will definitely use someone else. 

Also, from analysing our first shoot, we realised that we had made a really basic error. The error was the fact we had not plugged a cable into the back of the microphone. As I said, it is nothing major, but we wanted our video to look as professional as possible. 

In the next shoot, we need to definitely get more shots giving us more of a choice when it comes to editing, and not having the same shot styles over and over again creating a boring 'samey' video.