Class Feedback Of Our Promotional Package

Having completed our music video and print ads, we screened them to our Media Studies class who gave us lots of valuable feedback and constructive criticism. This information was excellent for finding out what the strengths and weaknesses were of our production and will really help when we evaluate our work.

MUSIC VIDEO

Initial Impressions: Positive Feedback

• Video clearly focused on the main characters, easy to understand who it was we were ment to be watching.
• Time lapsed traffic was in time with the tempo of the music
• Liked the make up shots, giving the effect the camera was a mirror.
• Interesting narrative effect with the "rewind" through the day at the start.

Initial Impressions: Criticism

• Not enough light in the bedroom scenes, too dark.
• Artist not included in the video.
• Too much time lapsed footage, got a bit boring.
• Could of used more shots to keep engaging the audiences interest.

Use of Cinematography

• Liked the use of experimental use of cinematography, particularly the make up shots and the shots through the metal chair in the bar scene.
• Shots well framed and panning shots were smooth.
• Good variety of shot sizes.
• Bedroom shots could of been more detailed?

Use of Mise-En-Scene

• Nice and colourful shots throughout.
• Bar environment looked sophisticated and classy.
• Good use of props - mobile phones etc.
• Characters dressed appropriately throughout.
• Lighting on Nicola in the bedroom scene could of been improved.

Use of Editing

• Shots used worked well with the timing of the music.
• Looked professional, no amateur effects used etc.
  
• Could of included a few more shots in the bar scenes?

Suitability of Visuals to the Music

• Overall, worked well throughout.
• Could of included artist in the video, or perhaps shots of a DJ to make it more performance as well as narrative based.

Response to Brief

• More reference needed to Lawrence King - too distanced.

Production values and Technical Ability

• Effects used were good throughout.
• Some lighting issues, mostly in the bedroom scenes.

Suitability to the Genre of Music

• Ambient music, not too stressful or too much action.
• Made everyday scenes look a bit different.
• Overall, was defiantly suitable to the genre.

Suitability of Creating a Bands/Artist Image (Representation)

• Representations in the video included - nature, movements, relationships, intellectual, perhaps quite middle class?
• No representation of Lawrence King in the video.

Suitability for Target Audience

• Worked well at targeting our audience.

CD COVER AND MAGAZINE ADVERT

Initial Impressions: Positive Feedback

• Clever use of typography.
• Time & nature reflected well (which were strong elements in the music video aswell, helps to bring the 3 pieces together to create a promotional package).
• Suburbia and middle class represented (the house on the inside cover etc) - audience can relate.
• Suitable typefaces used.
• Photo used on inside cover very nice.
• Contrast between nature and urban environments apparent - worked well.

Initial Impressions: Criticism

• Some of the writing on the magazine advert could of been in a different colour to make it a little clearer to read, but no major criticisms overall.

Use of Images

• Linked to music video, mysterious.
• Middle class suburbia.
• Piece's connected as well as contrasted.
• Inside image tinted slightly yellow, nice effect.
• Magazine advert image was abstract, looked very good.

Use of Mise-En-Scene

• Good use of lighting, all the images well lit.
• Lawrence King dressed appropriately in the inside cover image - looked dark and mysterious.
  

Use of Fonts & Typography

• Clever use of "Night".
• Font used was sort of electronic/futuristic/like a typewriter font.

Use of Colour

• All images nice and colourful
• Perhaps more of the writing could of been in white?

Use of Layout & Overall Design

• Successfully created aesthetically pleasing print advert designs that worked effectively.

Production Values & Technical Ability

• Good technique
• Images used were of very high quality/high resolution.
• Demonstrated good photography skills (credit goes to Nicola for the images!) :)

Suitability of Creating a Bands/Artist Image (Representation)

• Lawrence King represented in the inside image of the CD Cover, shown as mysterious and anonymous.

Suitability for Target Audience

• Targeted a young audience with an interest in ambient music well.

Suitability and combination of all 3 promo package elements for Target Audience

• Good overall promotional package, elements followed through (nature vs. urban, movement, time).

Production Meeting 8

The promotional package has been finishes and presented to the class. We gained valuable feedback (see previous entries) and we will all now individually begin to concentrate on our evaluation. Jess has made some last minute edits to the the music video based upon feedback to improve the video further. Unfortunately we have hit some technical errors when trying to compress the video from Final Cut Pro into a Quicktime .Mov file. Our lecturer is looking into these problems and we hope to have a final version of our video up on the blog asap.

Final Print Designs

Nicola has completed the designs for our CD cover:


As well as the completed magazine advert...


I am really pleased with the final designs. Nicola has managed to convey the theme of movement and energy well by use of the long exposure feature on the digital SLR camera the original images were taken with. The typography is easy to read, the right size and overall the three pieces are aesthetically pleasing with a professional look to them (mainly because the images used were of such high quality and high resolution) and they really work well together to help create a promotional package (along with the music video) to help promote Lawrence King.

My Individual Print Designs

For my idea for our album cover, I wanted to go with the theme of the artist being unknown (so no photos of him etc), and also with the theme of having an abstract design, like artists of a similar genre of music to ours have done in the past such as Boards of Canada that I researched previously. Building on this idea, I had the thought of incorporating newspaper clippings of letters to spell out the name "Lawrence King" and maybe the album name, and also perhaps incorporating the themes of traffic and traffic lights that is present in our pop promo, with the time-lapsed cars stopping and starting at traffic lights as the tempo of the music changes.

One thing I was sure of when I started trying out designs for it was that I wanted to have simple, clutter free design, using very high quality images to give a professional and sophisticated look.

Front cover ideas:

The image below is my favorate cover design from the ones I created. The typeface and images I used make it immediatly obvious who's album it is. The photo I took of a red trafficlight (which is internationally recognisable as the colour which means stop), and the newspaper clippings that spell out the word stop, were very large high quality images at about 3000 x 1000 pixels. I then resized these down (whilst constraining the proportions so they remained the right shape) so that they were the right size for the CD cover. This image has multiple layers for each image and text, so it was easy for me to edit a particular object without effecting the whole image. I then used the "stroke" effect (in the Blending Options menu) to give a black outline 2 pixels wide around the image to make it look neat and professional.

Back cover:



If we were to go with my CD Cover design for our final piece and made a magazine cover for it, I would want to have a very similar design to the CD cover, but instead in an A5 size, with a longer quote at the bottom from a music magazine or similar giving praise to Lawrence King or the album, as well as a release date for the album.

Jess's Print Designs

Jess's Entry

As editor I'm pretty busy right now and I don't have too much time to experiment with Photoshop and create a whole digi-pack idea. However, Ive had a few goes creating just a rough album cover. By doing so it means that I am in a better position to support Nicola with the final designs should she need it. Please ignore any borders or mistakes around edges of the design- I saved screenshots in .tiff on the Mac and had to convert them to .jpeg on windows to upload to blogger and this has meant a few errors occurred.

Whilst Nicola and Maya are concentrating on Urban and outdoor shots, I decided to go a little 'crazier'. I shot a series of photographs using nature but tyring to bring in fun elements, after being inspired by Four Tet's album designs. The above picture is a leaf of a rubber plant with strategically place smarties!

Firstly I used the Magic Wand tool on Photoshop to cut out the grey background as it was quite dull. I also decided to flip the leaf as i thought it was more logical for the leaf to be that way around. I put on the text that I would need,- artist name and album name. I use the text bend tool to fit 'From the Earth' around the leaf.

To further progress the design I used the magic want tool and eraser tool to make a better cut-out around the leaf as the 1st edit still had some of the grey background remaining. I also changed the background colour to a subtle cream- many brighter colour didn't work and made it look quite amateur. I decided to move the text onto the leaf and changed the font style as I believe the 2 font styles were too conflicting before. If i were to complete this idea I would look into font styles more and add bar codes, copyrights and promotional stickers etc.

Another design I played around with was just the smarties on their own. I think the concept is eye catching and something that would make you pick the album up- and also remember it. The original photograph was the similar to the finished design but I just had to alter image size and canvas size to make it an appropriate size for the album cover. If I had more time I would have cut the background out- however this proved too problematic when I first tried- and added logos etc.

Nicola's Print Designs

Nicola's Entry

My initial ideas for the digipack were to show the contrast betweet nature and urban life. I took various photos of sunsets and then used photo shop to contrast the colours to make the sunset stand out, for the urban photos i changed the shutter speed on my camera to create the effect of rushing traffic.

Original Image

For this Digipack design i used a computer style font to show the electronica side of the music and i used the sunset picture to show the nature influences that inspire Lawrence.

I decide that night would look good in white and i placed it on the black part of the digipack, i later decided that it didn't look right her so i moved it to fit in with Lawrence's name.

I then tried out a different font to see if this worked better i decided against it as i didn't feel that it worked as well as the original font, i also moved the album name into the artist name and i felt this gave a good look and feel to the digipack.

With this digipack i tried changing the colours to see is they would stand out more and i tried bue and as you can see it blends into the background.

This was my last idea but i still wasn't happy as although i liked the way the album title and artist name are positioned i still felt that the album name need to stand out more. I put the copyright information in white on the black part of the background as it made it stand out and i used white for the song tracks as this went with the style that i was going for and i didn't want to overload the digipack with colours.

Print Ad Ideas

Original Image

I took lots of photos for the print ad and i thought this one may be nice to use as it shows the artist is a anonymous way which fits in with our genre as the artists are usually faceless, this photo also has the rushing traffic which ties in with the themes of your pop promo and didipack.

I decided to use the same font as the digipack to help tie the two together and i used the same arrangement of "Lawrence King" and "night" to again tie the print ad to the digipack. I found that with the text on top of this picture the print ad became to busy and i decided it would be nicer to use a simpler image.

Original Image

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I then found this picture which i thought summed up my idea as it was abstract like other album covers in this genre but it also had the traffic theme that follows through the promo and the digipack. After this i started to change the font colours to see which looked best, black stands out the most in some places for example in the album/artist title some white was need to make it pop. i tried other colours such as bright green to give a computer theme to it and i also tried red to go with the colour of the rushing traffic but they got lost against the background.

As you can see from this example i was trying out different colours and her i was trying our green and i didn't work as it didn't fit in with the print ad at all. i was also experimenting with the text placement here,i knew i wanted the date in the bottom left corner and the album/artist title in the top right corner but i was trying to figure out the best places to put the quotes from magazines and celebrities i wanted them to go along with the traffic but be cause of the colour they didn't fit.

As you can see from this idea, i changed the font to red and this still didn't pop so i decided against this font,

Production Meeting 7

Learning to use Photoshop was frustrating but we eventually discovered that it was a very powerful tool when harnessed properly. Nicola had now complete the first draft of our album cover using both images of nature and city life. We wanted to create a link between the video and the album design and the inclusion of lights and traffics helps with this. The nature image on the front has had the colours altered to appear artificial and more 'electronic'. For the inside image Nicola experimented with exposure time. Using a busy road she increased the exposure time to create the blurring of the lights which give the appearance of fast moving traffic. We are particularly happy with this.

Editing of the pop promo is nearing completion but has hit some errors. A problem with the Macs effected the whole class and resulted in some footage dropping frames or footage becoming jerky and clipped. Unfortunately we do not have the original footage to re-capture to resolve this problem, but as explained it is through no fault of our own. We will try and reduce the damage caused by using alternative footage that is unaffected. Luckily Maya shot quite a few take of the same scenes so we should be able to find some footage that is good to use.