Website - Final Update

A lot has changed about the website since the last post. We have made it a lot more visual and have added more ways for fans to interact with the band.

We added a lot more social media posts to the homepage as well as a couple of promotional updates for events that the band will be playing at. We also added a sliding banner at the top of the page that advertised different parts of the website and links to the relevant pages when clicked. The 'Win' banner links to the competition page, the 'Tour Dates Announed' banner links to the tour page and the '20% Off' banner links to the store.

To increase interactivity between the band and the fans, we added a 'Contact Us' page, allowing users to contact the band without signing up for promotions and advertising. This means people who perhaps aren't as passionate about the band as others can still interact without being sent unwanted promotional material as that may put some people off from interacting.

We decided  to make a page for a competition, again encouraging fans to interact with the band. We designed a banner for the homepage that links directly to our 'Win' page. We gave fans the opportunity to win a day with the band as well as a signed copy of the album and VIP tickets to a London gig. To be entered, they had to tweet their favourite childhood toy with #TTTN. This relates to the 'Talk Through The Night' music video and incorporates social media, giving the band another below-the-line advertising source.

Continuing with the idea of creating a connection between the fans and the band, we made a behind-the-scenes video of the 'Talk Through The Night' shoot. These videos are fairly typical for indie artists as they make them seem more real and relatable. We all put a bit of time into editing this video although Mahlia did the majority of the editing.

Here are some other examples of behind-the-scenes videos from other indie artists:

 

 

Here is our behind-the-scenes video. It can be found on the 'Video's section of our website.

  

 

 

We spent a lot of time editing all of the photos that we wanted to put on the website. All four of us worked on this, working our way through a folder of our favourite photos that we picked to put in our website's gallery. We sorted them into 'Promo Shots' and 'Music Video' shots from behind the scenes of the 'Talk Through The Night' shoot. Then we went through, editing the pictures one by one. This process took a really long time, even with all four of us working on it to varying degrees.

  

We also added some more insitutional information at the bottom with links to our website, a 'Contact Us' page and two legal pages.

Terms and Conditions page

Contact page

Finally, we added a picture at the top of our 'Tour' page since we had received feedback that the page was not as visual as all of the others. We used the banner from the homepage as we felt the pink complimented the blue nicely and made the page a lot more appealing.



Digipak Final Update

There are conventions that are followed by albums of all genres in the design of the back cover. Below are six album covers. All of the albums are indie or some variation of the indie genre, (eg. indie pop, indie rock). The top three designs use images that are similar to the images on the corresponding front covers. The bottom three images are plain with just the tracklist down the middle and institutional information.

 

The Libertines - Up The Bracket

 

Palma Violets - 180

 

Darwin Deez - Songs For Imaginative People

 

Ed Sheeran - +

 

Damon Albarn - Everyday Robots

  

Royal Blood - Self Titled

 

We preferred the plain designs to those that used photographs and felt that this style would suit our album best. Building upon the previous design for the back cover that Alice made, we thought of some track names and added some more institutional information. Our back cover now consisted of a track listing in the centre with a textured background, (the same texture from the front cover), as well as a barcode, a QR code, URLs for the band's website and Facebook page, a Twitter name, a copyright logo, the record company name, (Alma Gavon Records), the parent company, (Beggars Group) and a couple of other bits of institutional information.

 

We also changed the spine to be a plain blue instead of continuing the texture over the spine as it made the text much easier to read.

 

 

We also got some feedback on our inside cover from our teacher and some classmates. Most people agreed that they liked the picure that we used but felt that the left panel was too empty. Many people suggested filling the left panel with another picture of the band. We decided to move the picture on the right panel to the left and put a different picture on the right. We tried to pick a picture that was a bit different to the ones we used in the left panel and the front cover to show a different side of the band's personality.

 

Our previous design

 

Our final design

 

 

Website - Free EP

One thing I noticed was that bands sometimes give away Free EPs on their websites in order to promote their album and encourage people to sign up for promotions and newsletters. For example, Ed Sheeran has released a free EP alongside both of his albums. Dog Is Dead and The Vaccines also have free EPs available to download on their websites as shown below. By downloading the EP, you agree to be sent lots of promotional material that is intended to get you to spend money on the artist, either by seeing them live or buying merchandise. It also encourages you to buy the full album if you like what you hear on the free download.

 

Dog Is Dead

The Vaccines

I thought it would be a good idea to do the same on our website. We added a Free EP button at the top which takes the user to a page that allows them to enter their details and download an acoustic EP for free. Like with the other websites, they will then be sent promotional material and hopefully spend a bit of money on band merchandise or on the full album if they like the EP.

Our 'Free EP' Page

Music Video - Final Touches

After grading the video, there was very little left to do. I noticed that some of the shots looked a bit empty around the edges as all of the action was going on in the middle of the frame. I decided to go through the video and scale up any shots that looked empty. I didn't scale the shots past about 115% since making them too large would result in an obvious loss of quality. The change is pretty subtle but I do think it improves the video and makes the edited shots look a bit fuller. You can see the difference below.

                             Before                                                             After

The final thing that we did was add the the words to the final shot. As well as this, we blurred the footage a bit. We felt this gave the video the closure that it was lacking before and looked really nice, as well as imprinting the band's name into the viewer's mind as the video ends. We felt it was a really good way to anchor the band's image. It is also fairly typical of indie music videos to have the name of the song or band on the screen in some form.

George Ezra - Blame It On Me

Dinosaur Jr - Watch The Corners

Bombay Bicycle Club - Luna

M83 - Midnight City

J.Roddy Walston & The Business - Take It As It Comes 

Peace - Money

Dog Is Dead - Teenage Daughter

And finally, our music video.

Music Video - Grading

After we finished the third cut of our video, we were all pretty much happy with how it looked in terms of the shots we used and the order of everything. The next step was to grade the shots. We did this entirely in Adobe Premiere using the 'ProcAmp' and 'Three-Way Colour Corrector' tools. We could have done this in After Effects and used masks to isolate the background and really bring out the colours but this would have taken much longer and we just didn't have time.


ProcAmp

 ProcAmp allowed us to adjust brightness, contrast and saturation. In general, we tried to increase the saturation as much as possible without making our skin too orange and then adjusted the brightness and contrast depending on the shot. The changes were pretty subtle and we rarely changed anything by more than 5 or 6 values. The split-screen images below show the difference that the ProcAmp tool made to our shots. The left half is with grading and the right is the untouched footage. The colours on the left are more vibrant and the shots are lighter and have more contrast than the images on the right.

This video also shows the difference between our graded and ungraded shots. Again, the right half is not graded and the left half is. The difference is more obvious in the MCUs than in the moving shots but there is still a noticeable change between the two halves for all the shots.


The Three-Way Colour Corrector tool made more subtle changes to the shots. It allowed us to change the shadows, midtones and highlights separately. In general, we added blue to make our skin less orange. There were some shots that required something different but generall we just stuck with making the shots more blue. Again the changes were subtle but the shots did look better with the changes.


Three-Way Colour Corrector

We had all used these tools before in our AS project and at other times prior to that so we were all familiar with how to use them. This meant we all took turns grading the shots so the process didn't take too long. We did have to go back and regrade a couple of shots but the changes were only very minor. Overall, I think the grade has really improved our video. The colours were already one of the best features of our video so this process really helped to bring out those colours and improve the video more.

We took a lot of inspiration from the video for George Ezra's 'Budapest' for our grading.

 

 

Here are some screenshots from our video for comparison.