Final Draft of the Myspace Thoughts

Our myspace has turned out, in my opinion, to look very professional which is largely due to the HTML coding skill of Nick. With that said we all contributed the ideas and graphics which make up the myspace. The image at the top follows the conventions of tradional myspace covers and hits viewers as soon as they open the page. The branding of the album is shown clearly straight away. The pictures of the band members are located just below and turn a specific colour for each member when you hover the cursor over it. This is important in making our myspace look and feel professional. Further below that you get the traditional myspace layout with picture on the left, playlist on the right all of which promote our new album and hit single Start Something. The whole myspace keeps to the nautical branding we have given to the band which gives the audience something clear to recognise us by. The myspace also has the video to our new single, a list of tour dates, contact infomation, sponsors of the band, and a biography of how it all started and where were heading. We also have some viral marketing on our page which allows the fans to create a t-shirt for the band which will then be sold as band merchandise. Merchandise is very important for this genre of music as it makes fans feel a part of the band. In particular t-shirts allow fans to display their love for the band and they are proud of it as its like a statement about you as a person.

Final Draft of the Album Cover Thoughts

The album cover is looking pretty good in my opinion and its got a profesional feel to it. The stock image of the sea originally didn't look visual enough to be on the front cover. However, with some brightness and contrast, an ajustment of the vibrance and a change of colour it started to look really deep and interesting. That coupled with our text on top gave a nice powerful, striking effect for our front cover. Another thing I like about our digipak is that it contains images of all the band members playing live. This gives fans more content for their money and gives them something the video and myspace does not. The cover which features the portrait pictures of the band members is also a nice touch as it builds on the image of the band, which even though is not the focus, is still present for the fans. Moreover, the different colour backgrounds gives each member an identity, which is a technique we saw used in The Saturdays brand image. Overall I'm very pleased with the way our album cover turned out.

Further Reflections On The Editing

We are nearing the completion of our music video! I feel so relieved and also very proud of what we have achieved and although in hindsight I see a lot we could have improved on it is still a great music video in my opinion. One person in our class even stated that the video has even started to make them like the song.

In regards to the edit, we have only the introduction of the song to complete which is proving difficlt to make look unique. The shots in a general order look a bit boring and need something extra to the visual style to bring it to the standard of the rest of the music video. We have edited the framework of the introduction in order to prehaps get some inspiration on what to do. I feel that due to this part of the song being slow paced we need to emphasis that with slow fades and transitions which will in effect improve the fast paced sections of the song, making them look even more intense than they already do.

Editing Our Music Video

We have started to edit our music video togther and have come up with a clever way of achieving the fast cutting, to the beat editing we wanted. The idea involves getting all the takes of our performance and stacking them up in the timeline while also being in sync with the music. This way we can scroll through and be aware of all the footage we have at that particular part of the song. Moreover, using the razor tool we can cut up all of these clips on the beat of the song before deciding on the final shots. This allows us to simply delete the clips of the song we dont want, thus leaving the ones we do.

The edit has been going very well and we have been picking intervals in the song to edit together. We chose not to start from the beginning and finish on the end but rather work from the points in the song we feel most comfortable with. We happened to start with the day to night transition - a crucial moment in our video where the energy in the performance explodes!

The editing within the group is very even and we have all got our hands on the mouse aswell as given input in to our thoughts on how we want the video to look and play out. The great way about the way we edit (as mentioned above) is the fact that while one person may have his hand on the mouse, he's doing the same amount of work as the person sitting next to him. This is because they both have the same input in to what clips to keep and what to get rid of while the person at the computer simly deletes the unwanted clips. This has turned the edit in to a discussion which has really helped the development of our music video as all the group members are getting an equal say on how they want the video to look and also putting their stamp on the video itself.

Captured the Footage

Today we captured all of our footage and put them in bins on Adobe Premiere. The footage is looking good and I really want to start editing the video together. The whole group are spending a lot of time in the editing rooms getting ideas together for the final edit. We have been editing key parts of the sequence together such as the day to night transition and have some good ideas down which will be important for the future.