The Final Product

After finishing and tidying up the tiny problems, we have been signed off on the video. 

Here is our final cut of our music video:

Final Digipak Covers

The final things to do were make the spine of the Digipak and then format the photographs so that they were in CD format and measurements. We wanted the spine to be simplistic, yet stand out to an audience so that they will be attracted to the CD. 
We formatted the CD on photoshop through searching the right measurements, and then applying these to our Digipak. 
Here is the final CD : 

(front cover)

(inside cover)

(CD)

(spine)

(back cover)

Final Website Designs

The website went through a variety of stages when designing it. We wanted to try and find a style for our artist through the website and feel we have done this through the darker colours it keeps synergy with the album colours, however by adding the subtle pinks and whites throughout it still gives a feminine feel. We wanted a slick, polished finish which we have achieved. 

Below are some of the ideas we started with for a website we looked at the Coldplay website and we liked the idea of the black background with bold colours which stand out we have tried to emulate this with our own style

 Originaly I looked to play around with a record disk in the background but we felt for our artist this would have been to cliché and we find our artist is simple with an edge.  text was always going to be important and something we have taken from start to finish in the production of the website is font we have found a font which stands out and looks profesional

this image below shows a progresion to a more profesional sophisticated look that we ended up with 

Our website is a blog type website because we liked the flow of how you don't have to continually click round the website, what you see is what you get and we feel this reflects the artist young vibe. In comparison to other websites it has everything a industry professional would need.
home page to sell their latest work
Bio to give people an understanding of the new artist
Links to buy the music
Pictures to help the audience feel more immersed linking to Dyer's star Image
Talk about people from the video who will be featuring on the tour
a tour page
and a contact page

This is a screen recording of the website :

All which can be seen with the pictures below:

this is a link to our Website:

http://bigben999.wixsite.com/lovaoffical 

Blog post : Ben South

Evaluation Task 1 : In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation Task 2 : How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Task 3 : What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to complete this task, we had a focus group in order to get some feedback from an audience. This is what we found :

Evaluation Task 4 : How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

3rd Digipak Draft

We received further feedback from our 2nd Digipak draft. This was the conclusion: 

• Our front cover photo was liked and disliked equally, which meant that it was a good idea to try out another photo to see if this would get more positive feedback. 
• Everyone loved the inside cover, so we are going to leave this. 
• Important to finish the product to get better overall feedback.

I decided to go with this photo as it was everyone's second favourite. This was what the front cover came out as:

This was a lot better as it was more slick and looked a lot better with the font. 

I then took the font from the front cover and wrote the song titles out with this to keep with the theme of the album cover. I then wrote my own 'rights' warning at the bottom; a common trait found on all albums: 2016 BEEZY recording production. Manufactured in London in BEEZY recording studios. 26 Berkley Square, W1 2SP. All rights reserved. Warning. Any attempted re selling of this CD is strictly prohibited by the federal government and is subject to federal prosecution. I also added the production company name in the corner 'BEEZY' and created our own font with TM at the end to show it is trademarked. I finally added the barcode, to make sure it looked professional. 

Finally, this was the CD page. We wanted to keep this simple to keep with the minimalistic theme of the Digipak, however ensure that the artist is constantly publicised. 
All these received very positive feedback, the only concern being that the CD page may be too simplistic.

2nd Digipak draft

After creating the first draft of the Digipak, we decided to get some feedback from our peers to try and develop it further.
Everyone seemed to like the black and white theme.
They liked the style of the photos.
The main concern was that there was not a huge amount of variety between the photos. They felt this would show in the inside covers of the CD. 
After receiving this, we decided to do another photo shoot, baring in mind the black and white theme as well as the concept of the photos. 

Here we had our artist dress topless with a leather jacket. This kept to the sexualised star image as well as gave an impression of her personality through the naked/raw look. We flicked water on her face [as seen in image] so the photos kept to that steamy/wet look. We emphasised this through slicking back her hair with water.

We took a lot of photos to ensure we had variety during the Digipak editing process. From this, it can be seen that we kept to a very similar theme to before, but just made her image slightly darker. This was successful for us as it furthered her star image. 

Then I began the editing process:

 This is the first attempt at the front cover. We wanted to keep the same font as we felt it was simplistic but professional and stood out. We also kept the parental advisory warning. We thought this photo might work because the smoke gives the dark impression to her character. The smoke also leads to the name of the artist, so the audience eyes will attract to it, which is important for new artists(like ours). 

I then needed to create the inner cover. We had always planned for this to be like a contact sheet, so I took this from a photography page and used Photoshop to edit our photos onto it. This is what I created: 

This gives the audience a further idea of what her character is like and the kind of artist she is.

The next thing to do, was get feedback and create the back and the CD page. 

Album song names

1. You & Me (feat. DoubleÜ)

2. Loyal

3. Golden

4. Fantasia

5. Fever

6. Right There

7. On & On (feat. Caroline)

8. Static

9. Poplar Trees

10. Regression

11. Settle

12. Amelie

Digipak development

To try and gain inspiration for an album name we could possibly use, I decided to scroll through my music and see if there were any songs or artists that had names that we could use as a jump start for our own.

Whilst doing this, I noticed all the different album artwork. I decided then to google this and see if I could gain any inspiration from album artwork that had similar concepts to ours.

After doing this, I could tell that most albums expressed the meaning of the album or the title. I decided to look up synonyms or other meanings for Isolation, Entrapment Or Going back. From doing this, I found the word 'regression.' We felt this was perfect for the album name as it expressed our music video song, the look we were going for as well as expressed her character.

Here is an example of an alteration of the album artwork with the name of the album:

After attempting to add the name of the artwork, we were not sure whether the set up was right and looked professional. I decided to play around with different layouts to see what looked right :

We are still unsure of what album artwork to go with, so we need to take some more photos to see what else we can work with.

Audience Feedback

Now we had finished our video. We wanted to get some audience feedback to see what the end opinions for the video was. 

The audience felt that our strengths were mainly through our dance, choice of lighting and pace. They said that they were constantly intrigued and never felt bored. 

The only weakness they said was that they might have liked to have seen more of the dance as they thought it was so good that it was a bit of a waste. 

Another positive is that the audience seemed to have understand our concept; isolation/entrapment. As well as this, they also understood that the dance was a reflection of the artist's song. 

Overall, a successful audience feedback. 

First attempt on the Digipak

Today we discussed several ideas that we could use for our album artwork. This included ideas for the front, inside and back cover. I came up with the idea of using a 'contact sheet' inspired inside cover. I feel like this is effective as it gives the audience an idea of who the artist is as well as upholds this dark persona. 

As well as this, I played around with making the front cover. I wanted to try out different layouts and ideas to see what would work and what wouldn't. This was what I came out with as a start point.

I had to ensure I kept with the same font and idea of the name as the website. As well as this, with the image behind our artist we felt it appropriate to add the 'explicit content' sign as it is a subtle furthering of her dark image. 

Performance Cut VS Final Cut

Here is a comparison between our performance cut and our final cut. There are several differences that can be seen between the two. 

• The beginning in the final cut has been made a lot slower. This is to allow the audience to be introduced to the artist and have a feel for her character. As well as this, it also allows for a more impacted build up as the song progresses. After receiving feedback, we were also told that slowing the beginning down might be more effective as it was quite fast paced. 
• The colouring of the video has been altered. This is because we wanted to make the video more professional by slicking the shots up. We played around with contrast, brightness, saturation and more. 
• We spent a lot more time focusing on cutting the shots on the beat instead of on the lyrics. This was better as our song was very fast paced and it worked better by cutting on the beat.
• There was a section in the middle that cut to black on a certain beat. After receiving feedback, we decided to change this. We replaced the black shot with a moving shot so that we still had the same effect, but it still maintained the pace of the song.
• Finally, we were able to add in the dance element and the other lip sync which we had not been able to do as a result of the power cuts. Through editing we can see that the dance and other lip sync became crucial in maintaining the theme, concept and audience interested throughout. The dance was particularly effective as it showed both the story of the song as well as added something extra to the video. 

Editing the final cut

As we now had all of our footage. It was time to edit the final cut. It was important to make sure that all the repetitive bits be removed and replaced with the new footage to have a slick and effective final cut. To ensure this, we watched through our performance cut and made note of all the places that need to be replaced by the new footage. Once we got started, it was slightly challenging as we did not have a clipboard on the shoot day as there was another shoot happening on location that needed it. This proved to be more challenging when matching up the lip sync with the music as we had to take our time to ensure it was accurate. 

From watching the performance cut, we realised we should probably slow down the beginning as there was not much build up. This was where we decided to put the beauty light set of Genny. It worked well as it was vibrant and strong, but also gave the audience a moment to establish who the artist is. 

However, whilst editing the beginning we came across some problems. We found that we did not get enough footage of Genny and this new set on the shoot day. This was because we were finding it hard to create a punchy opening that wasn't too repetitive as we had not been very creative with the shots. As well as this, several were out of focus as there was a problem with the exposure which we did not realise on shoot day. However, after a few days we managed to edit an opening that ticked the criteria, by bringing in the dance earlier than planned. 

The next bit which we needed to change was the middle. We received feedback from our peers who all said that the beginning was great as there was a really effective build up that keeps you intrigued, but then it suddenly slows down and loses pace during the middle of the song. We found that the best way to solve this was to add more dance. However, this also proved to not change much as it was missing pace still. We then came to the conclusion that the problem was the pace of our cuts. We spent a few hours re cutting and making the edit more fast and slick. This thankfully proved to solve the problem. 

Our teachers watched the video and gave us several different pieces of feedback. One was the opening and ending shot. This needed to be changed as we want the audience to feel intrigued from the moment they watch it till the last shot. Another was our choice of cutting on the dance shots. We were told to change them so that the shot would cut before they finished their movement. Lastly, they said that we needed to make sure that all our shots of Genny were in focus as there were some that looked as though they were out of focus and not on purpose. 

As we had spent so much time on the edit this week, we found it was best to leave it till Monday and finish the edit then.