Website Development

We decided to get our music video done before we went on to do the album cover and website, which left us for a week for both.
We split the tasks and Lewis did the album cover and i did the website, however Lewis finished before me and so helped making the merchandise pictures and giving general critical advice on what i'd done and what to change which was very helpful.

We decided to have 9 pages (a homepage, about us section, news page, events page, photoshoots page, videos page, sign up page, competitions page and store) which we feel fully created band identity and also allowed the audience to get to know the band and utilise the site (entering competitions etc.) as much as possible.

Ways in which it promoted our music video:
-The videos page
- A link to the youtube page
- A news flash as to when the video premier is

Ways in which it promoted our album:
- clear links to buy the album and single
- clear links to the iTunes store
-kept up the road trip 'route 66' theme

Ways in which it promoted the band:
-lots of pictures
-kept up Americanised fun theme
-clear news into events and ticket purchasing

Ways in which the audience could get involved:
-The competitions page
-the merchandise store
-the comments box on the videos page
-the 'Messages to STA' box on the home page
-the signing up to the website to gain extra bonuses
-the clear links to ticket purchasing and album/single purchasing websites

The Album Cover

When designing the album cover I took into account the attributes of our band that made us different from other indie/alternative bands. We were care-free, cheeky and fun. Wanting to reflect this in the album artwork we decided to turn the band members into cartoons, this gave off the impression of immaturity and makes the whole thing seem non-naturalistic going hand in hand with the surrealism of our music video.

To construct the album we used Photoshop CS5, Its new colour effects such as 'vibrance' and 'luminosity' allowed us to make the album appear more eye-catching and colourful.

Our Digipack rough idea

This is our rough design for our album digipack, The front and back of the album our the top two images. We wanted to feature our band throughout the ablum to create a sense of identity. The front image features all the band members sitting on a sofa looking worn out and tired (Ain't no rest for the Wicked) as well as having a link to our songs it also has strong connotatins with a party lifestyle and ties in with the whole 'lack of sleep' theme with our debut single.

The band members are half dressed in their costumes showing the fans, or veiwers, the real faces behind the masks. This maintains a strong audience and band relationship as it fufils the urge to know who it is behind the costumes. The layout of the front cover is very casual which reflects how the band behave and that they dont take themselves too seriously and its more about just having fun.

Photoshoots

We arranged a photoshoot to make sure we got images for our album cover and website and we feel it went very well!

Here are some of the shots we got:

Editing

We made a decision in the editing process that Lewis was better at putting together the narritive pieces and I was better at doing the montagey collections so this is how we would split the editing.
As well as this we decided that our choruses would be filled with performance and our verses would be montages cut in with hints of performance or Lewis just singing in the bed.

We had quite a big difficulty with colour grading, however we felt for the style of our music video it didnt need to be perfect and also showed progression in our narrative, with it getting lighter as the morning draws nearer etc.

For an ending we also decided to play on the 'aint no rest' part of the song, giving a blackout as he falls asleep, and hear an alarm sound and then looping this back to the beginning, so its like he never gets any rest and always is for some reason up and awake which we thought added some comedy.

Comedy was a big theme in our edit, as the set never changed so we needed something else to keep up the audiences attention. Therefore in each verse we encorporated shots of our characters just being stupid and silly, as this also linked to the image of the band which was fun and freespirited.

Edit Schedule

This is our edit schedule for week one which we stuck to and it helped us get our music video done alot quicker than we expected!

First, Second and Final Shoot

For these shoots we had some advice on our lighting by our media technician who we asked to come along to the shoot.

As well as this we were alot more efficient and created shot lists which enabled us to stick to our time schedule better.

We had to change our Darth Vader actor unfortunately as the last actor broke his hand, so instead we replaced im with Leo who worked really hard and we feel we made a good choice of new actor as he played the funny role well.

To give us more time for shooting we decided to black out the windows so we could shoot from earlier in the day and this was really useful so we werent so pushed for time.

We also became more aware of looking in the background of shots to make sure there were no pieces of equipment showing.

Lastly we played around alot with focus pulls and different angles for our performance shots, as the actors were not very musically talented and so this almost hid it a bit.

Getting ready for our first shoot

We went over our storyboard and prepared shot lists of when to we need actors and when we are going to film which shots. This was to make sure we are 100% prepared and efficient during our shoot.

Test shoot

Test shoot key reflections:

-need to work on lighting
-set is fairly small so try not to get lighting kit in the background of shots etc.
-keep better control of actors (they are there to help us not mess around)
-get lots of different angles and framings to keep the one set looking interesting