Real Media

Interview part 1 - Creator of Marlwood's website

http://soundcloud.com/kathryn-sunnucks-media/miss-ingle-real-media-2

Interview part 2 - with Creator of Marlwood's website

http://soundcloud.com/kathryn-sunnucks-media/miss-ingle-real-media

After discovering that the ‘Marlwood School’ website had recently been redesigned by a member of staff, I was intrigued to find out what site they used to create the website and whether they had given instructions on how the school wanted the site to look. I took time to create a private interview with Kat Ingle, Marlwood’s Drama teacher to find out how she dealt with being producer of the site and to find out more about the disadvantages and advantages of using free website design page, ‘Wix’.

Once I had discovered ‘Wix’, a free Website Builder that allows you to create your own high quality website, I thought it was a cheap, easy way to create an average looking website that media students only used as it was ‘Free’. This was entirely brand new to me, it was challenging and confusing at first but as I became more accustomed to utilising the templates and flash links provided by the programme, things finally came together. Wix was generally a very useful tool it allowed us to create a visually interesting and interactive website. The use of galleries and widgets allows the creator to make something interesting without difficult html codes.

Similarly the homepage, ‘welcome mat’ of the website includes an animated slideshow of students of all years taking part in school activities, I have used this feature on my homepage of three main images of the band using the ‘slideshow’ technique. Like all websites Marlwood has clearly displayed their logo of the ‘Marlwood Badge’, similarly I have clearly displayed the Golden Sun on my homepage. The site has a clear, animated navigation bar centered where mine is on my homepage, making it easily accessible for parents and students to access pages easily, and quickly. The homepage includes a small rectangular white box, which has ‘Upcoming Events’, almost like a ‘persuasive teaser’ for parents and students to read and want to find out more by looking through the website. I have similarly used this persuasive technique by including three small rectangular boxes on my homepage, with information about the band’s Album, recent news, and general information to make people want to find out more.

The only criticism that I would make towards the Marlwood site is the color scheme. Immediately from first impressions of the site I felt that the ‘Pinky/red’ background color was too gendered towards a traditional female color. I think that a plain black background would be better suited as black looks more professional and sophisticated, and does not class amongst a particular gender. Using a black background would also coordinate well as the Marlwood badge, logo for the website includes black in the centre. The black would also contrast well with the white interior.

Link to Marlwood Website...

http://www.marlwood.com/#!vstc5=page-2

iMovie - beginning process Promotional video

Using this 'visual storyboard' I was able to get a clearer idea of my idea's for the opening of the 'promo video'. This storyboard was created on 'Pages', however my next step was to create these still images into a moving sequence using 'imovie'.

Screen Shots of process when creating Promotional Video...

Digi-Pak Process of Development

http://www.slideshare.net/sunnucks/process-of-digi-pak-12161537

Band Advertisement

The entertainment aspect of music helps making an advertisement more appealing to the viewer by simply making it more attractive respectively more aesthetic. By this increase in attractiveness an advertisement is able to engage more attention. From this point of view “music need not necessarily manifest any special affinity with a particular product or service in order to play an effective and useful function.” The music functions more as bridge between viewer and advertisement in this case.

I believe that a poster is a great way to advertise especially when it is fixed on to a wall which is situated in a popular public place, or a popular internet site. We all must agree that posters are important means of advertising and publicity. It does not matter what you are advertising, whether it be information about a event, a election, health programs, movies, protests, products or even a new business opening, a poster is a great thing to use and will certainly promote your campaign or band. As great as a poster is there is only one minor disadvantage and this is that you have to be explicably short and sweet. This is too keep the audience who are promoting the poster to interested, and keeping info short, the viewer is most likely to remember the information. After researching current small Indie Band, "Little Comets" I came across there band poster promoting their tour dates and gigs. I really liked this idea of a way of advertising the band and their music, so I decided to create a similar poster, and post it on GoldBloom's website on the "LIVE" page. This will add graphic imagery instead of the page being overpowered by text.

Prezi - website inspiration and design

Prezi is a recently new technology for presentational material. Prezi is basically an upgrade from Microsoft powerpoint allowing more features and animation creating an interactive, fun powerpoint to present.

Prezi presentations are builtupon four basic elements:

Content (text, images, videos, or PDF)Effects (zooming in, zooming out, going from point a to point b, varying the text size, etc.)

Visual Enhancements (frames, arrows, lines, and a marker)

Paths (the flow of the presentation)

The only criticism that I would give to Prezi, is that for Prezi beginners it is not that easy to follow and explore without having a thorough 30 minute clip of how to use it. For Prezzi beginners it is very time consuming to finally understand the process.

I have used Prezi to present my inspiration and design for designing my website for GoldBloom...

http://prezi.com/m3d9-1pg_yad/edit/#40

Audience Research

As my target audience are ages ranging from 15-20 an ideal place to gain audience feedback is students in post 16. I printed both these images of the two different home pages of my websites and asked a mixture of male and female students to write why they prefer one of the sites and what could be improved on both...

Why do you prefer this Website design?

- Good Appearance

-Warm, welcoming page

- Creative, aesthetically pleasing

-Personal insight to the band

- Good fonts

-'messy' look suits personalities of Band

-'cluttered' effect looks welcoming

-Nice centred image of band

-like the tiered effect of different images

What could be improved?

- Not very practical, more focused on look rather than info

- Does not contain much information, unclear

- Although 'messy', still quite bare looking

Why do you prefer this Website?

- Professional

-Informative

-Like the animated slideshow and updates

-Very modern

- Informative, better for people who want to find more about the band

- Easier to find information, not confusing

- Easy access to info and images

What could be improved?

- 'Uniform' layout does not suit fun personalities of the band and their music

- Too square and clear

-Need's some colour, quite boring

Audience Reseach

My targeted audience/fans range from the ages of 15-20 years. I decided upon the 'teen' stage of adolescence, as teenagers look to music as a powerful social force that also taps into an individual’s personal identity, memories and mood.

The target audience will be fun, music loving people. They will like Indie/friendly grunge music. They will be upbeat and quite artistic people. The band members themselves fit this description and are very passionate about their music. There album cover shows their randomness and artistic side, as it's quite subtle and unique.

“Music is well-known to connect deeply with adolescents and to influence identity development, perhaps more than any other entertainment medium,” said the study authors."

The genre of music that GoldBloom produce, 'Friendly Grunge' which also suits this targeted audience. GoldBloom believe that their music should be approached by people who are a fan of their music not because of their look or style, these 'people' are around the target age group that have been selected. However it can be argued that fans/teenagers look up to their favourite bands as 'role models' people who 'inspire' them, surely plays into that aspect? If you look at current music bands, for example, 'The Gorrilaz' have a repeated slogan 'Reject False Icon's', this slogan is purposely made to challenge the audience to care about the music rather than the performer. The cartoon characters are purposely made to look dirty, greasy and unshaven, quite scary looking to forward their belief of their slogan. Their music video's are also purposely set in a 'Distopian World' to go against the idea that everything is perfect which current artists try to promote in their videos. This can be argued that the band are 'experimental' through the fact that they took a dangerous risk to go against 'The norm' of music artists who represent themselves as the audiences pleasure.

This representation to 'The Gorrilaz' is very similar to GoldBloom as they have always said that they do not have a specific look, they just wear what they want to wear, which relates to their casual approach to music.

The music industry today has become all about the 'image'. I think that we all have to take a step back and remember that we are hear to listen to the quality of music, not what the artist looks like. For example, popular solo artist Adele is popular for her voice, not for the way she looks. She is different to other solo artist like Kylie, and Madonna, they were purely popular because of their look, much like Lady Gaga. Adele's videos consist of the artist just singing, not like all the other video's of artist trying to 'out do' each other through who has 'The best dance Moves'. This back's up Andrew Goodwin's theory of these days videos are being used to advertise the artist/band positive persona.

"It is only importance of their role of advertising themselves to the public."

Visual Storyboarding

After studying closely at the 'Wombat's' music video, and 'Rizzle Kicks' video, I have expanded on my storyboarding using 'imovie' to create practise the opening of my promotional video. I have taken a screen shot (shift-cmd-3) which takes a large image of the screen you are working on. I have taken many screen shots of each clip of the video, was was able to create a 'photo imaged' storyboard using pages.

Before beginning my promotional music video on imovie, I wanted to create a visual imaged storyboard. Using inspiration from my sketched storyboard and real visual footage of the band I was able to create an opening sequence. Also from using inspiration from ‘The Wombats’ video, I had mentioned that I wanted to create a similar beginning image creating a sense of place for the audience to acknowledge where the video was filmed, or where the band come from. As the band are from Bristol, I found a long landscape, skyline image of Bristol. As I wanted a ‘Vintage’ ‘yellowy’ effect to match the connotations of the Golden Sun, I used Picnik to create this effect. It also happened that as the image is a high skyline picture, the ‘yellow’ effect looks like the natural glow from the sun. As mentioned before, I really liked the technique of a moving background image with text written on top. As the image was long, I was able to create a ‘moving sideways’ effect so that it looked like the camera was slowly moving across the skyline of Bristol. Similarly to ‘The Wombats’ video I have used text to introduce the place and name of the band, this is to create a sense of a film narrative effect, “We Present”.

I experimented with different colors for the font, but found that white contrasted best with the vintage background. The next scene created jumps straight to introducing members of the band. This is where the camera would be following members of the band. The opening member would be James, lead singer, then the clip would show footage of camera ‘looking for the band’, with audience watching, feeling part of the video looking for the band as well as the camera. Scene then changes to a homely feel of one of the band members kitchen, I wanted to film in the kitchen to link with ‘Mumma do the Hump’ video, creating a relaxed approach to the video. The camera then introduces members of the band in the kitchen without speech, this again is a sense of narration, introducing the characters for the audience to acknowledge. I wanted to keep to the laid back, natural effect, this is shown through ‘props’ of the band eating ‘pizza’ in the ‘mise en scene’ of a kitchen.

As the band have a moto of not advertising their look, but wanting to just promote their music, I wanted their music to be prominent throughout the promo video. In the opening image of Bristol the music is slow and paced well with the sense of an intro, when it comes to the end of the image there is a short pause, then a big drum beat to match the fast pace movement of camera ‘finding’ the band.