Evaluation

 

Here is my evaluation on my media productions. I have presented my evaluation on a powerpoint. 

 

 

 

Completed Website

After doing some the last couple of pages and making some final edits, this is the official website for Ed Sheeran:
http://scondysodimu.wix.com/edsheeranofficial

Completed Digipack

This is my second Ancilary task.  A digipack including a front cover, inside page and back cover for the official Ed Sheeran single, Grade 8:

Front cover



Inside cover

Back cover

Nearly, but not quite...The Digipack

I am now very close to completing the digipack. I have completed the inside page and am now currently working on the back cover. I strongly believe that my inside page is the strongest page of the digipack. The design of the inside page has manage to sum up the type of artist i attempted to portray rather finely.  I am very satisfied withthe inside page and as I said I am now on to the back cover. I am running low on time now so it seems as if the back cover will be rushed in order to complete it in time for the deadline. The making of this digipack has shown that before making such productions, i need to plan and draw up a design of what i want. Doing this may have made me a lot more satisfied with the end product of teh digipack.

The adventures of the Digipack & Website...

The digipack is starting to come along better than it was before. I definetly feel it has improved from the last time i spoke about it and i think that i was able to congure up some ideas on how to create a intersting looking CD cover with the simple and basic photos I had. I ended up using only one photot of Darren which I copied and roatated 90 degrees horizontally. This meant that there was two of the same pictures, one being fliped and facing the other way. I believe that Using only one photo and editing it gave the cover the simplistic yet artistic look i was intending for and so I am quite happy with myself for this idea.

Though I believe that I have found a way to make a simple picture more interesting I still do not blieve that the CD front cover is as good as it should be. I am very close to finishing and I cannot think of much else that  I can add to the front cover.

Website

I think i am most pleased with my website. I have nearly completed the whole website and i only have the page tour dates left to complete. I was actually told yesterday that we were only getting graded on our home page of our website and the other pages werent meant to be done. This has meant that I wasted some unneccessarry time doingthe other pages on the website like 'Live tour dates' 'Gallery' and 'Contact us'. However i do feel that doing these other pages has given me greater insight into Ed Sheeran as an artist as it promted me to do more research into his website and other of his murchendise. This has been quite insightful and making the other pages has been very interesting and so i dont actually believe it was a waste of time. When i do complete the website i will definetly post the full website up on blogger for people to see the whole website.

I an really pleased with the development of the website. Choosing a blank document was definetly a= the best choice and worked out best for me. I felt that through looking at my website i managed to sell the Artist effectively to the young target audience. i think i still managed to portray and sustain the authentic image of Ed Sheeran so all in all i am very pleased witht he development of the website and hopefully next time i speak on the website it'll be to post the completed version of the site.

I need more pictures!

I am in the process of creating my website it is quite evident that i will need more pictures of our music artist. I did say in my other post that i felt that we needed to take a few more photos as i didnt think that we took enough. Bradely and Darren felt that they did have enough photos and didnt feel the need to take anymore but i feel that my website could do with a few more pictrues. I have got on to creating a gallery for my musician and a gallery worth of 5 pictures in my opinion doesnt look very good. For this reason, alongside having a variety of pictuess i asked darren if i could take a few more pictures of just him just so i can use to help promote the artist himself. Darren agreed to have more photos take of him and so this is what we got done today:

I felt these pictues focused on him as an artist and would give audiences more of an insight into him as an individual. The use of the gallery on my website is suppose to create this and help show a number of photos of Darren (Ed Sheeran) on a normal day. Once again i am attemting to portray this very genuine and authentic image of my artist through these pictures.

I was wrong...

Following from my last video post where I was exploring Wix and stated that "If it really is this easy I'll surely tell you guys", well unfortunately its not. After exploring the template and attempting to just put in my own  pictures as i stated in my video post i realised it wasn't very simple. The problem with he template is that seeing as the format is already set out for me, there are some things that i would have liked to change but i couldn't. There were many things that i wanted to take out and put in but seeing as it was a template that was out in front of me i could only use i=my individual creativity to a certain extent. Another disadvantage of the template was that when i had an image in my head i could not create exactly what i imagined in my head seeing as the template would restrict . what i wanted to do. I also found it difficult to alter and edit the template and it generally seemed much more complicated than and much more of a bad idea than i first thought of it.

When speaking to another media student in another class, she told me that she attempted to create her website on a template at first and also found it very difficult. She told me that she therefore created a blank Wix page and started it from scratch. I wasn't too sure about this idea as it seemed very time consuming but she assured me that its not as hard as it seems and that is actually much more convenient than using a template. She explained how using a blank Wix page would mean that all your thoughts and ideas could be regurgitated on to the page exactly how you imagine it. The  fact that doing it this way cannot put any limits on my own individual creativeness i listened to her advice and started a blank paged one. So far i feel i am getting along just fine and fine it much easier to operate and implement my ideas. Creating the website seems like much more fun now and looks like i will be able to design exactly what i want. This is how the front page looks so far:

Digipack...

The photo shop work is proving to be a bit of a struggle so far. Though i did manage to do a bit of practice work on photoshop the other day, creating the real product for my artist is provng to be hard. Not only am i finding it hard to use the features but i am also finding it hard to come up with CD cover ideas. I am using a digipack template to understand the format of a digipack and to know exactly how many sides i will need to make. The digipack template was shown to me by bradely. He explained to me that it would help me a lot to know the kind of images to make and it would guide me on size measurements. The template is just one that we found on google but is proving very helpful to bring in some clarity on how these digipacks are to be made. This is the picture of the template that i am using:

 As you can see the template provides guidance on how big my image should be. The template also shows me how the digipack will be set out and so therefore how many pages of the digipack is going to be needed. This template definetly helped me understand what i am creating much more but i am still stuck for ideas on how to go about creating my digipack and what would look good.

 

 

One of the greatest challenges in making this digipack seems to be with the pictrues that i have. I am still not 100% satisfied with them. I feel that when taking the first set and teh second set of pictrues we only considered the website and not the digipack. When opening all the pictures that we did have of our artist i felt that there wernt any real innovative pictures taken that i could do much with on photoshop. Many of the pictuures were very much, a close up shot on his face or an instrument. The shots seemed quite basic and simple and there was no real picture that was taken from a innovative angle or a shot that looked really intersting. I realised that at the time of taking these pictures, this was the desired effect that we took a picture that represented our artist Ed Sheeran for the meek and modest personality that he ad. In order to do this we went for simple shots without considering in mind the digipack. In my opinion the digipack images ought to be slightly different as it is a photoshop program and we need to have the opportunity to edit it. I believe that we could have taken a picture from a different angle and captured more of his body by doing a medium shot or something similar to that. I think this would have given the digipack a differnt but yet simplistic look.

 

However with the pictures ii have i find it very hard to do anything innovative or smart. Many of the pictrues are jus close up shots and s this had made it diffivult for me to design a good looking digipack. I aam definetly struglling with the making of this digipack and am hoping some ideas come to my head quick, After the session today this is what i fininshed with:



 

More on Wix...

Completed & Uploaded

Bradely has finally fininshed all the last bits and pieces for the video. We had to add a few effects and accurately lip sync all our shots. A lot of the last bits were done by bradely in his free times in school. Bradely used the mac many times during his free periods to finish editing the last bits being as the closing deadline was fast approaching. Not all of our free lessons coincided and seeing as bradely was the main person to assemble the video, he ended up doing nearly all of the last bits of editing. It was clear to see that bradely put in alot of hard work into the editing and so me and darren  tried to contributed as much as we could to the editing ideas when we all had a coinciding free period. We all seem to be generally pleased with the end product. The only thing that we are not completely happy with is the quality of the video once we uploaded it on to YouTube. When uploaded, the video looks much more blury and seems to lack the quality camera view it had when were putting the video together. Our subject teacher said that when transferring our videos from imovie on to YouTube it sometimes losses quality.  Wee also foundthat when uploaded some of the lip syncing has gone off but it seems that not much can be done about that so we have left it how it is.

This is our music video, Ed sheeran - Grade 8. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNXmE5LMSbA&list=UUzCuzU6TJVKZ_Khku1FndtQ&index=7

Photos...

I have now signed up for Wix and as you can see from my last video post started to get familiar with it. I done the same with Photoshop and so i figured with time quickly closing in on us that i should begin on the ancillary tasks. In order to begin this though we figured that we need a couple of photos of our main artist. Everyone in the group needs to produce their own website and digipack with he same music artist. So we have all agreed to use the same pictures of Darren (as Ed Sheeran). We all will have individual websites and digipacks with our own design, format and text.

So today we went out as a group and took pictures of Darren alongside Lauren, the other main character in the video who acted as 'the girlfreind'. It was very hard at first to come up with picture ideas that we felt were appropriate for a website and a digipack. There was a lot of thought that had to be put in to the type of music artist that we have and what we represent through the image and so we considered this very carefully and closely. After spending a lot of time thinking of picture ideas we started actually taking pictures. We started with the idea of them being a couple as portray in our music video and so many pictures of that relationship nature was taken. This is some of them now:

We also thought of conveying our artist as an actual musician. When looking into Ed Sheeran in the early stages of our research we found out that he is a very sincere and genuine musician. What i mean by this is that Ed Sheeran is a very stripped back musician in the sense that what you see is what you get. He isn't a typical pop artist, that have songs written for them and have countless alterations on their voices when recording. He is a musician, a singer and a songwriter and so we attempted to take pictures that would sell our artist as a musician as well as a product. We ended up taking a picture of the guitar, a plain simple guitar.

Though it looks like a simple picture, this image was intended to sum up the kind of artist that we are trying to portray. A Modest, genuine and authentic musician.

These are the only pictures that we have taken however i do not feel that this will be enough photos to make both a digipack and a website while trying to keep a variety of images in both products. Nevertheless, i will attempt to begin making these two products and if any more images are needed we'll take more pictures and keep you posted.

This is some of the practice work that i have done on photoshop. My poor experiments on here seemed to be to some extent very useful as i managed to familiarise myself with many of the features i had completely forgotten about. This practice session was a form of amusement to me but on a serious level did help me regain some confidence on photoshop. This is the work that i've done:

 

 

 

Photoshop...

 

 

As part of the ancillary task, we have been told to create a digipack for our music artist. This CD promotion is to be made on photo shop something that i am not very strong at as i explained in my previous post. The other day i attempted to use the program and familiarise myself with the features once again. I do not use Photoshop in my spare time so my AS piece of coursework was the first time that i had used Photoshop and since completing that i haven't used Photoshop since. I started playing around on the program and a few things started to come back to my memory. I began familiarising myself with the use of layers and the use of different features like transforming images on scale, rotation and colour. I used a few old images i had stored in my files and some images off Google to practice with, hopefully next time I'll be doing the real thing on an image of my music artist.

Gaps filled, now on to the next...

So we have now filled in all the gaps that were remaining and have just uploaded it on to the mac. We watched the music video all the way through and it is good to see the video nearly completed. there are still a number of bits that need to be edited, moved around, lip synced and etc but most of the video is now complete. We have now began on our ancilary tasks and so we are looking at creating a website and a digipack for our music artist. This seems like it will be a big challenge for me as i am not very strong on photoshop and havenrt used the programme in while but hopefully with some practice i will be able to use the programme efficiently. We were told that we would create our website on a programme called wix. I have already created myself a wix account, this is a print screen of me signing on tot he programme:

Unexpected Gaps...

After editing all the studio scenes in place we noticed that there were some unexpected gaps were there shouldn't have been. the seconds that we thought we had covered for some reason weren't actually covered and must have been due to a mistake on our part seeing as we recorded the bits that needed to be covered but must have done so incorrectly. Time is now running by fast and our deadline is very quickly approaching so we all agreed that we needed to fill in these gaps as soon as possible. This was a challenge for us as we had to think what we were going to fill in these gaps with and we had to use a different location and different props to add a variety of locations and props to the video. Mise-en-scene was something that we had to consider but we had to do it in a rush. We had around 25 seconds to cover spread around 5 different gaps so on average each gap was around 5  ideas seconds long. Me and Darren have started thinking of shot ideas and plan to go out and record them tomorrow. This has shown us the importanc ein accuracy when we plan and prepare for our shots. i think judging from the last couple of experiences we have had we are ereally starting to notice that we need much more preperation, dedication and accuray in shooting and planning our video.