Performance Research

As music video very heavily features performance as a main component of it and as such, it's important to make sure these shots look good and are similar to already existing performances. We did research into how similar bands look when performing so that we can attempt to to imitate this look in our own video.

Lights: All the performances shown from above have some sort of lighting involved to improve the look of the concert. There is a lot of lighting behind the performers, creating a silhouette effect coming through them, this seems to be a common theme with all indie band performances. The setting is usually quite dark with spot lights used so you can see the artists. 

Stage: The stage is pretty much normal, there aren't any gimmicks or effects going on to add to the performance other than lighting. For this reason we should make the location of our performance quite simple, but pack the scene with musical equipment to make it look realistic. 

Stage Presence: There stage presence are quite powerful as they have to show the emotion of their song across to the audiences. There isn't much dancing going on, its mainly acting and being energetic on stage.

When we film our performance we should take into consideration all of the research we have collected on indie band performance as it can help us create a realistic performance which will ultimately improve our music video.

Website Design Draft

This is the current design of our bands website. It has the same purple color scheme that we have used while editing our photos and digipack to create a uniform look across our different areas. There will be working links to the store page where people will be able to buy our merchandise and we also intend to add a twitter feed banner down the side of all pages.
One thing we also wish to add to the top left of the page is a constant looping video of the waveform that goes over our logo that will play. There will also be a link to booking tickets for our tour which will also have a list of dates and locations for our tour.
We also intend to add links to an interview that we recorded of our band that will be under the video page that has a link at the top of the main page. The gallery shows photos from our various photoshoots that users of the page will be able to browse through.

Digipack Mountain

In the original draft of the digipack, we had a mountain but because we didn't take that picture ourselves, we were unable to use it in our final pack. To get around this. I used a Cintiq tablet and Photoshop to paint a mountain similar to the one in the original picture that we could use instead because it was an asset we made ourselves. I used a set of customized brushes to get the right textures for our it and used the colour dropper to get the colours from the original edited image so that i could make sure it would fit in with the rest of the digipack. Once I had drawn the mountain, I copy and pasted it, transformed the copy and flipped it horizontally before adding a guassian blur to it to give it the effect of being a reflection in the water.

Wave Form video test

This is a video test made to see how the logo could work with a moving waveform to possibly use in our video or on our website. It has the waveform part of our logo replicated several times over and has it move along horizontally like a normal waveform would on an audio track and then the text logo of our band fades in at the end.
The idea is to try and incorporate this into the beginning of our music video is possible and to put it in the corner of our website. This would work by having the waveform constantly moving in the corner over where the text would be to have a continuous animation rolling while the user of the page is on there.

Merchandise

For our website we needed to have items on a store page that fans of our band could go to and buy. We did research products that other bands like ours sell and found that for the most part, they sell a lot of t-shirts with things related to the band like the name or the logo. Because of this we have a bigger emphasis on clothing in our store, mainly t-shirts, hoodies and hats. We also have a design for a back pack as well as our album on the store too.

Logo redesign

After our halfway evaluation we came to the conclusion that our logo didn't suit our band as well as we had initially intended. To rectify this we went back to our research to look at other similar bands to come up with a new design that is more appropriate for our genre of band. We found that a lot of these bands don't have a symbol or something like that for their logo and rely more on bold text to get their image across.
Keeping inline with this, we took the font we chose earlier for our bands name and added a waveform pattern to the top of it. We did this because it goes with the text to stand out more and be a more recognizable brand, and by having the text and waveform the same single colour, we can change what colour it is depending on where the logo will appear. This single colour concept is something I found that lots of other logos do in and outside of music. Colour being the least important part of a wide variety of logos as long as it can be recognized by the people that see it.

Filming Re-shoot Reflection

After putting together our first draft, we realised that most of the footage we had of our performance didn't come up looking as good as we'd hoped it would. Mainly, the shots were all too stationary and weren't lit as well as they should have been. The projector we had set up to project some of our flashback footage onto the backboard behind us also, hadn't shown up on the camera, making the entire narrative idea behind our video redundant.

All these problems made the first draft of our video a bit of a mess and so we had to scrap all of our performance shots and re-shoot them all. To make sure every problem we had in our previous shoot was fixed, we set up proper lighting, had more cameras, got more people to help out filming moving shots, used a different projector to the one we used last time and had someone working the light board at the back of the hall we were filming in to change the lighting during different parts of the song. 

After reviewing the footage from this, I can say that this second shoot was much more successful as the footage is much brighter, clearer and more varied. 

Website Second Draft

This is the newest draft of our website. It's now been completely overhauled from it's earlier state thanks to the feedback we received on the previous draft. We have altered the font for the band, changed the images that were shown in on the main page as well as added a twitter feed to the right of the screen. The band's new logo is now clearly on displayed clearly on the top of the page along side the links to the band's social media. We have also changed the side to be more colourful and visually engaging. as before people said they were confused about the genre of the band due to how dark the website was. The previous colour scheme also didn't match out digipack, changing it to be lighter and has helped create a more uniform identity for the band.

Photographic Techniques

This is a presentation talking a lot about framing and composition. There are a lot of techniques talked about here such as the rule of thirds, specific types angles and using depths of field to create different types of shots. In this presentation are also lots of examples that to making a magazine cover, something we will be doing to help promote our band.

Photographic Techniques from jphibbert

Photoshoot 3

Digipack first Draft

This is the first draft of our digipack that we have put together. It uses a mix of photos that we took of us as the band and some more abstract imagery. We don't have too many photos of the band members as our research into other digipacks made by similar bands did not rely on an overuse of these types of shots. There is also a shot of a mountain that matches up with our band's name. 

Font Choice

This is the font we looked at when trying to come up with a brand image for our band. We found that lots of other bands similar to ours had their names in a bold or striking font that will be recognizable. We liked this font because, like the ones we saw other bands use, it is bold and the M's resemble mountains, which fits in with the summit part of our band's name.

Music Video trailer

This is the trailer for our music video that would be likely be shown on the front page of our website or posted on our band's twitter page. It plays through the chorus of the song and shows lots of brief clips from our video to tease what is in it to fans than follow our social media or check up on our website.

Halfway presentation

Storyboard for our music video

This is the storyboard that i made for our music video. It has sketches of just over 100 shots that we have planned out to make into our video. To plan this out we got together to go over what sort of shots we wanted and how we would have the performance area set up so that we knew what sort of shots and angles that we would be able to take. 

For our flashback shots, as we wouldn't know exactly how the area we were filming would be, we had to just come up with lots of shots that we thought would look good and then try our best to find places to get those shots when filming on location. This meant that our storyboard was never going to be completely accurate to the music video make but it is still something good to use as a reference while filming regardless.

Second Photo Shoot

When putting together our website and digipack we found that the original photos we had taken in our initial photo shoot weren't as fitting as we'd thought earlier and felt that it was necessary to go take more photos outside with the whole band as opposed to the green screen shots from our first shoot. This time around we took lots and lots of takes of each shot in slightly different poses and occasionally swapping positions in several to make sure we had enough photographs and enough to cherry pick the ones we felt were the best.
This time around we tried to go for looks that were more fitting of an indie band like ours. Before, in the green screen room, we each had our instruments in the shot but upon reflection decided that this was something that was necessary and cluttered up the shot too much and this time opted for a more natural look. Each of these shots were outdoors and are meant to show each member of the band in frame.

Imagine Dragons Steal 'O' Matic

This is the Steal 'O' matic I made from the Imagine Dragons Music video "Gold." They are a similar band to ours with and so we looked at their video to find examples of shots we would like to use in ours. This video is entirely performance based so the steal'o'matic contains a short variety of shot types and camera movements that are used when filming a performance. This is significant for us because our video will have lots of performance shots in it and so we can take some of the shots from this and attempt to replicate them to make our video better and more interesting to watch. We can also look at how long or short some of the shots are to make a note of for when it comes to editing our video. The pace of a music video is important so having a good example to use for reference is very useful to us.

Robbie Williams Film Edit

Album Cover

As part of our digipack, we had to create a front cover for our band. This section of the digipack, I had the most input in as it required a lot of photo manipulation in photoshop and in our group I am the most experienced with this software. To create this, I had to extend the height of the wall from the original photograph. In the original, the wall was cut off by windows that, if were in the final edit would have got in the way with the band logo and the name of the album. I remove the windows I used the clone stamp tool to sample areas of the wall that were complete and replaced the windows with the wall texture that had been sampled lower down in the image. I also added a RBG colour filter over the image to alter the amounts of red, green and blue in the image. I lowered the amount of green over all as our band's image relies mostly on purples and reds.

To create the spray paint effect on the logo and album name behind use. I wrote the words in a text layer, white for the logo and black for the name and put them behind us. To make the 'Amplify' appear as if it was behind the band members, I cut us out using the pen tool to mark us out, duplicating is and pasting a version of us over the top of the amplify layer. I then rasterized the text layers to image layers and turned them the layer style to multiply. This makes them clear and increases the brightness of them. I then  duplicated the layers to exaggerate this effect and added a guassian blur to them to make it look like it had been air brushed. I then merged the layers back together and with an erase tool with a 15% opacity, erased bits of the words to make it appear faded and seem like it had been spray painted onto the wall some time ago.