Welcome To Our Blog!

Hello! We have had a great time creating our coursework and have really enjoyed the tasks we have been set, as a group we have learnt so much in terms of technology and through the research we did. We feel that this half of the course has made us into much better media producers. We hope you enjoy our blog.

Jack Mugglestone, Bradley Essex, Liam Cooke and Todd Whitsey.

Mothership

Final Music Video

Final Digipak and Album Poster

Here is my final Digipak:

 I am very pleased with the outcome of my digipak, as you can see it has improved vastly from my draft and throughout the development. I used the alien writing to fit in with the band name 'mothership' and fit in with the connotations or the name and the genre. I used Photoshop to invert the 'alien writing' into the circle in the top panel, i believe this is very effective and adds a good twist to the product. I also adjusted the brightness and contrast slightly on the background image, this was too make the cover stand out a bit more and look more proffessional. I also re-arranged the album title and band name, after my development i believe i chose the right position for this as it looks the most effective and professional. You can also see the inclusion of the 'thankyou's' on the right panel, this was to create a sense of realism, as this is the bands first album it is common to give out thankyou's to other bands and the people who helped them create the album. I also added the record label i made 'Havoc Records', this creates a sense of realism and fits in with the bands genre and style.

Here is my final Poster:

I havent altered the poster as much as I have the Digipak, the only changes from the draft were the inclusion of the image for the background, which i felt worked very well and brings the rest of the poster forwards making it stand out to the reader. Also, I got rid of the green 'lazer' lines, which I wasnt too keen on doing as i thought they were very effective, but with the background they didnt suit it and looked out of place and wrong. Plus I shrunk the size of the websites at the bottom as they were too big and I wanted to make it more realistic. Since the development, I also adjusted the brightness and contrast of the background image to match that of the album cover. 

Here are actual photos of my printed out digipak. I am very happy with the way they turned out.

Final Digipak & Album Poster



My Final Digipak

From the feedback I was given I made some changes from the draft and then applied them to my final Digipak. I needed to make all the fonts the same so it had correlation, Similarly I used the same font within my poster, the reason behind using this particular font was because it fitted the genre in which we chose, I don't think it would look the same if I was doing a genre such as pop. I also added a record company that was made by one of the group members as we were told that we could not use one that already existed. On each side of the Digipak casing, within 'Mothership', I added a skull instead of the 'O' this conveys the genre better and relates to the poster due to that also including the skull within 'Mothership'. It seemed that my panels were bare and needed something on them, I decided to include the 'eagle' graphic to one of them and it looked appealing so it was kept, this relates to my poster as that shows the 'eagle'.


My Final Album Poster

I took feedback from my draft album poster and worked on it to make a final album poster, this is what I ended up with. 

In order to make it look right I had to make it look symmetrical at the bottom quarter of the page, I had to aline everything in position to exactly the right place such as the 'HMV' logo and the record company logo. Other things needed changing like the size of my fonts and lettering, for example, the websites at the very bottom of the page needed shrinking so it looked professional.

My Final Digipak and Poster Design

Todd W: Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 4: Video Blog - Brad E

Evaluation Question 3: Director's Commentary - Brad E

Brad E: Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 1: Article - Brad E

Media Studies - Evaluation Question 1 by

Todd W: Evaluation Question 3

Todd W: Evaluation Question 4

Updated Poster

Todd W: Evaluation Question 1

Media Evaluation Question 1 Final.jpg by toddwhitsey

Final Album Cover 2nd Version

Evaluation Question 4 - Jack M

Evaluation Question 3 - Jack M

Evaluation Question 2 - Jack M

Evaluation Question 1 - Jack M

Evaluation Question 1 by JackMuggy

Liam Cooke Evaluation Question 2

Media Evaluation Question 2 by Liam Cooke

This question is formatted as a letter written from the record label to the band congratulating them on how well they have created a brand within their 3 products.

Liam Cooke Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation question 4 by Liam Cooke

This is a magazine article, as Scribd seems to have jumbled up and missed some words I will include the transcript here.

"The idea of the big, hopefully iconic M, was simple enough to be produced in Microsoft Publisher. As a small independent band, with lack of funds, it is practical for us to be able to use these programs, because they are accessible and easy to use, meaning we can design whilst being on the road or whilst in breaks of recording, on our laptops. This allowed us to produce what is hopefully a memorable image in our digipak and advertising campaign, whilst still being able to do our job. Our video was filmed with a Fujifilm mini SLR, a portable camera. This was practical for our video because we wanted to create a lot of energy and really introduce the band and show what we are about, and therefore the lightness and size of the camera allowed for 100% handheld and moving shots, which really helped with the energy conveyed.  It was also a camera that fits in well with our budget whilst also proving relatively good in quality, whereas other high quality cameras such as the Cannon EOS 650D were out of our price range. My MacBook pro is another piece of technology that was used in the process of video and digipak production. As mentioned it was used to access publisher and therefore create our digipak but  before we could even think about making our designs we needed inspirations, so going on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Bandcamp allowed us to take inspiration from other bands designs, such as Enter Shikari, Don Broco and Hacktivist.  iTunes was also used, where I had the song in my iTunes library, I then imported it into Garage Band. This was necessary because as the song starts instantly, in order for us to be able to perform it live on the video, we needed a count in to know where to start, so I added that in on Garage Band. After importing the video onto my laptop via SD Card, I then imported into iMovie, along with the edited, count in version of Zzzonked. This program was very useful, it allowed us to mute the original video, and therefore sync the footage up correctly to the song. It also was easy to change the colour to black and white, which was  an important asset to our video. It was easy to crop out bits of footage and remove very small segments, such as 0.1 seconds from the project to perfect the lip syncing. In terms of feedback and promoting the video, youtube, was of course the place for us to upload the video,  an easy site where anyone can make an account and add videos, and iMovie has an option to upload directly to youtube so this was practical. It also allows for comments and a like/dislike bar which means we can learn from feedback and see what people think. This site also allows a link straight to the video, so you don’t  have to download the video to watch it and it is therefore accessible. This means we could paste the link directly onto our band, and also personal twitter/facebook profiles, which again also allows for comments and can be broadcast to a large amount of people, again helping with feedback and popularizing the video. Therefore this was a big part of how we understood what we had to do to turn our draft video, into an exceptional finalized video. A massive part of our music video was blogger. We have a blog where we have documented all of the research and planning involved, in order to convey the journey that we have taken and how our ideas and original videos have developed. It meant that when designing digipaks and filiming our video, we could look back on our ideas in case we needed to add anything or to improve.  We originally made an animoto presentation to pitch our ideas, which went down well. It allowed us to show the basic feel of our video along with a song which also adds to the feel to a group of people, and get feedback, this showed that we had met the correct target audience so we went through with our idea of purely performance in our video. Other pieces of technology use include a wire  adapator that allowed us to connect one half of the wire into my laptops headphone port, and the other end of the wire into the room where we filmed’s P.A. This projected the music incredibly loud so we could use a live drum kit and get into the music, enhancing our performance.  In order to book the room we had to google search for a telephone number, and ring them up on my blackberry phone, another piece of technology.  From this we can see that technology is essential in creating and broadcasting music video’s, as well as digipaks and promotional posters."

Liam Cooke Evaluation Question 3

This is a artists commentry of the video explaining what I learnt from audience feedback. THIS IS QUESTION 3 NOT 4 AS I STATE IN THE VIDEO.

Liam Cooke Evaluation Question 1

I decided for question 1 to produce a video blog or 'vlog' acting as the singer of the band, I was responding to comments criticising the bands products unoriginality.