Completed Digi-Pack

(Front & The Back)











(Inside right and left)

Some of the themes used for my digi-pack was playing upon the 4 cardinal virtues, and the 3 theological virtues of prudence, justice, restraint or temperance and courage or fortitude. Faith, hope, and love are the theological virtues. These make it interesting by adding a semantics of religion, but with the lonely tag line at the bottom stating 'Just lift the page...' this gives the audience a hint that this album, will have a dark and ambiguous edge to it. The 10 songs I chose I made up the titles too, I wanted to make them interesting, but not full of a lot of meaning. But the meaning becomes apparent after listening to the song itself. I believed it to be key, to have band member/members on the digi pack, this helps give the audience an intimacy with the band, and allows them to actually see them. The back cover is also similar to my advert to promote the bands UK album (different colour scheme used) - This is a marketing technique as people will see the advert/or album and associate one with the other.

I uploaded this onto Facebook, for people to express there opinions on it. This is a screen shot of what they said - -

Advert

This is my final copy of an advert in a musicmagazine, promoting our bands UK tour. I used Photoshop as the software to help create this advert. I used similar techniques for the digi-pack itself too. (Below) is a screenshot of my advert in photoshop, to help illustrate what and why I used Photoshop. Photoshop is useful in this context, as it's so diverse with tools to help express exactly what effect you are going for. For example, highlighting areas, layering pictures on top of one and other. I use the application 'Iphoto' to edit my pictures. Iphoto is a simple but incredibly effective way to edit your pictures. You can highlight the whole picture, or just retouch certain elements. Likewise with our music video, which is a dark and gloomy setting in a forest, I've made the picture have a darkened tint to it, and also the image itself has trees in it (forest setting) and also all three members of the band.

The below images help show the applications in action (Photoshop, Iphoto) The 3rd picture shows a more detailed part of Iphoto, where the main colour editing takes place. As shown I put it in black and white, and also boosted the colour to help capture the right setting I wanted. Also there is a 'adjust' section. This accompanies the editing, it allows you to create the main bulk of colour & saturation then adjust parts, for example, you can highlight sections, or darken just small parts, this is through using 'exposure, contrast, temperature and tints'

- - Photoshop In Use

- - Iphoto In Use

- - Fonts & Styling (Photoshop)

- - - - Effects (Iphoto)

- - Adjust (Iphoto)

With making this advert, I wanted to base ideas through analysis of two other adverts, with a similar target audience. This helped me get ideas about colour techniques, layout/presentation , the context of the image (what should I actually include on the poster)

The first advert I looked at was - - "Kings Of Leon, Because Of The Times"

I liked this advert, as it fits the category of mellow but indie rock genre, it is also recommended as 'if you like this band, then listen to these bands' section on Last.FM. The obvious intentions of an advert is to promote something. This does this well with clear indication of what they're trying to sell, and places in which you can buy it 'amazon.co.uk' I think the imagery is good, it's an x-ray image of a human skull. This helps link with the pragmatics of the album 'Because Of The Times' (with life/death being the subliminal image) I like the use of black and white, It's simplistic but works very well, it helps give it a dark but elegant touch to the advert.

The second advert I looked at was - "Temper Trap. Indonesia Tour 2010"

This advert helped me as it is a poster promoting the upcoming tour. This is what my poster promotes so I thought I'd use similar techniques too it, For example the block & bold visual of the bands name, helps draw the readers eye in and allow them to notice the band.

The poster also shows the members of the band, I like this technique as it allows an intimate relationship with the band (as you're able to see exactly what they look like) Also due to it being a poster promoting the tour, it gives specific dates to the shows, and where they will be hosted. I did this too, but made my tour a bit bigger as it's Mumford's UK tour, so I placed extra dates on there (to help build up the bands popularity)

I have asked many people as to their thoughts about this poster. I did not say this was mine, and said that I was doing this on behalf of a friend, as this removes the observer's paradox (Where the observee changes his/her behaviour based on something that the observer is doing e.g. Speaking in received pronunciation when being recorded with a camera).

The responses that I got back were mostly positive. Most commented on the image, and how it has a lot of visual impact. People enjoyed the colour scheme to the poster, and also the vintage style look of bands name. This helped link in with Mumford's style of clothing that they wear. The negative points I recieved was how words listed at the bottom should have more to it, I.e. more text of writing, or use an effect to enhance the already stated words. Below is a print screen of my image that I put on Facebook, below are the comments by other users.

This is my preliminary drawing of my advert, I had quite a fixated idea of what I wanted it to look like, and how I was going to make it. As with a lot of the other designs/our video, I wanted to have ambiguity in the video, so I included words of a semantic field of 'mystery'. The three band members on the front walking away into the distance adds to effect too. The colour setting will be darkened, with tints of grey and black. I used www.dafont.com to create the Mumford And Sons label in the top left corner, this is because this website is very diverse and professional with fonts and styles, with thousands to choose from.

Initial video creation.

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B0DnGj06WOfoNGUyYjRmYTUtZGFmZC00NGJiLWIzM2MtNGYxODBhOTJjNDE3&hl=en&pli=1

This is my groups version of the Teenage Dirtbag video by Wheatus. Here is a link for the original video on Google Documents.

When making this video, I learnt a lot about how to use the camera and about successfully putting together the scenes to make up the video. We were shown what buttons to use to change the light and contrast on the camera and how to zoom in and out. We were also shown how helpful using clapper boards are as when it came to editing the video we were sure on where each scene needed to go. This is something we will be using in shooting for our final video.

Doing this preliminary short video also taught us some skills about how to use the editing equipment on the Macbooks. We were taught basic skills such as how to cut out takes we didn't want to use and then other skills such as fading out a take. These are all things that we will want to know when it comes to editing our final filming.

In lesson we learnt how to correctly use the recording camera that we will be using to shoot our music videos and how to use the tripod that the camera sits on. By learning this we now know how to safely use the equipment and how to steer clear of breakages. We were shown the on/off button, how to change white balance and exposure and how to zoom in and out. We were also shown how to fix the camera onto the tripod using the screw on plates and how to adjust the tripod in height and also so that it will give the camera a different tilt and panning speed.

We also learnt how to use a shooting script. A shooting script is a version of the screenplay that is used to assist the directors, camera-workers and actors etc on how to produce the scene. The shooting script can be used to determine whether a take was successful or not and can speed up editing when used alongside a clapper board during filming which can tell you which takes are being filmed.

We were taught about:
White Balance and the 4 different settings;
- Automatic White Balance (AMB) - Which can prove unreliable
- Indoor Setting - Picture of a lightbulb
- Outdoor Setting - Picture of a sun
- Manual Setting

Exposure;
- Shutter speed - 1/12, 1/50 & 1/1000 - (This is the fastest)

How to use the controls;

- Press the middle button 3 times = Automatic White Balance
- Use controls to select setting
- Bottom button = Shutter Speed

We were taught how to edit our shot in Final Cut Pro and how to connect the camera to the laptop using a FIREWIRE cable. The camera connection was recognised by changing the setting to VCR/Playback. In this country, we were taught that the PAL (Phase Alternating Line) should be set to 24 frames per second. We were also taught about Scratch Disks and their use, this is te destination for all captured footage. We also learnt that we can actually control the camera via the computer through 'Device Contol'.

When editing, it was important to distinguish which shots were good enough to include in the final edit. The shots that we didn't want to use could be removed using the 'Razor' tool. An 'Assembly edit' could also be used to seperate the poor shots from the good ones.