Final Website

Below is a link to my finish website. I've also created a small Prezi presentation just highlighting  a few features from my website, but to get a better understanding it's best just to explore the website itself. 

Jake's Oh Wonder Website

Website Designing Vlog

Applying Research to my Website Design

My previous indie-pop website research gave me an insight on how artists of the genre layout their websites, and I'll be following some of the conventions used. 

All three artists I looked at stuck to very simple yet modern designs, something that I feel is representative of the electro/indie pop genre sound. They also only used a maximum of 3 colours throughout and they all matched with their latest album releases. This gave them a very consistent and professional look, and I've chosen to design my website following these conventions. 

I plan for my website to be primarily black and white (like the front and back cover of my digipak) and then for my third 'colour' I'll be using a similar technique to the London Grammar website. I've decided to take some band shots, potentially on Dartmoor and at a beach location, to show the duo and present their fresh, indie and quirky character. However, I plan to edit the photos so they're all roughly similar in colour, so that this will act as my third 'colour' on my website. 

It was my website research that swayed me from using my inner digipak design on the website. Despite its effectiveness at showing the duos creativity and imagination on the digipak, I felt that their were too many bright colours for it to look effective on my website - it could feel clustered and this would stray away from the simplistic design I'm after. This is therefore why I've chosen to use band shots instead, with the black and white and simplicity of the website providing the link with the digipak. 

My research also showed me how different artists use text differently depending on the image they want to represent; more edgy groups tended to have less text, whereas groups such as Oh Wonder, with their laid-back, gentle style have more text. 

I plan to be fairly minimal with my text; however, may create an 'about' page which I've seen on several websites since my initial research in which I will use a fair amount of colloquial language to address the viewers. This will be representative of the character of Oh Wonder and will provide an engaging element; however, on the whole my website will have minimal text and will keep in the simplistic and modern style of the indie pop website design. 

Final Digipack

Here's my final digipak design. 

Overall its design is very similar to my initial draft. So on my front and back cover I've created the silhouette design, and kept the whole thing black and white. It looks modern and clean and I feel this reflects the modern, electro sound of the group. On the inside several of the images have changed since my draft; however I have stuck to my initial idea for the concept. All the objects used were found around my house and some of them reflect the song titles in an obvious way (e.g. the heart represents Heart Hope) and others in a more abstract way (e.g. the marble represents Midnight Moon). Some of the objects have no link to the song list at all (e.g. the banana) however, they are all playful and childlike objects and so it enforces the image I wanted to produce, this image being the imaginative and pure nature of the duos music (I felt using small child-like objects would represent this). 

Digipak Progress (Silhouette work)

For the silhouette shots I was aware I had to make it easy to see that it was a boy and girl (to represent the Oh Wonder duo). Therefore I made the girl wear a dress and have her hair flowing, whilst I made my hair stand out and wore jeans etc. so that in the silhouette we'd be easily distinguishable. 

I also experimented with several photographs (below is a sample) because I was unaware which photos would look best as silhouettes. In one of these shots we created O W (Oh Wonder) using our hands, and I have now decided to use this for my front cover as it looks very effective as a silhouette.

Initially I was unsure how I'd be able to create the silhouette effect for my front and back cover. I wanted to create a matte black silhouette and experimented with PowerPoint to see if this would be possible to achieve on there. 

I discovered that despite giving a reasonable silhouette effect, PowerPoint didn't provide the mat black effect that I required as it still showed our faces, and I felt this would detract from my simplistic pure black silhouette concept so decided to use Photoshop as it is designed for editing photos so was more likely to have the tools necessary.

Using the 'quick selection' tool in Photoshop I could easily remove the background and I also used the tool to highlight the individual parts of the photos that I wanted to turn black. After highlighting the parts I right clicked and selected fill and change the 'contents use' to 'black' with 100% opacity and this gave the matte black silhouette effect. 

Music Video Final Cut

Digipak Draft

Here is my draft for Oh Wonder digipak. I've tried to create a digipak that I feel represents the sound of their album. 

 My analysis of the Oh Wonder music and their album design made we want to pursue two styles. I wanted to address both their clean cut, modern sound, with the creative, pure and imaginative sound they produce and design a digipak that embodied my interpretation of both of these.

The outside:

So for my front and back cover I've focused on their clean cut style. I want to create a matte black silhouette to show the duo, which will be the main focus of my front cover, alongside the album title (which will be in white text with a black box behind it). The back cover will be similar with white text for the song list and a black box behind it, with a much smaller silhouette of the two on top of the box, doing something that highlights their quirky personalities (e.g. jumping). The typography will be Sans Serif as this is a much more contemporary and fits the electro-pop sound better than Serif fonts. 

The inside:

I've taken inspiration from Oh Wonders current digipak and it's inspired me to create a very bright and vibrant inside to my digipak. My inside design signifies the imaginative nature of the duos sound. I plan for there to be a vibrant 4 colour square for each of the four inner segments, these colours being blue, pink, orange and green as they all work well together. On each colour will be a different object, and the majority of the objects will represent songs from the album. For example, the toy car will represent 'Drive', the heart will represent 'Heart Hope'. 

I'll be using childlike objects to emphasize the pure, imaginative style of the music, and so certain objects may not be relevant to the albums songs specifically, but are just quirky in nature and so fit the general image I'm trying to produce.

                         

So overall, my design will have two styles, representing how I feel the music would look if it was to be turned into imagery and typography. I'm showing the modern electro pop style through my front and back cover, and the innocent and pure sound through my inner pages.

Oh Wonder Digipak Research Vlog

Editing Update

EDITING UPDATE:

Editing has been successful so far with a first draft completed recently. Below is a video of us showing the other media group the first draft to see their thoughts on it, primarily to see if our story came through strong enough. 

Just to recap, the storyline of the music video is that there is a female who is remembering memories with her partner, these memories being both good and bad, and initially, when she sings along we want the audience to think her sadness and conflicted emotions are due to a break up, potentially encouraging the audience to dislike the male, but then at the end we reveal he's died, which brings a whole new meaning to her loneliness and makes the viewers reflect on their previous ideas.

This meeting was positive as it revealed that, despite the message coming through, for it to be more potent and easier to understand, a shot in which the male presents his partner with the ring would be useful. As a result of this we plan to film this shot and add it to the video. 

They also were unsure on the relevance of the beach, and so we've also decided to add a shot of the couple at the beach, which was filmed as a practice shot whilst location searching. By adding this shot, it will establish the beach's relevance as of significance in their relationship, hopefully adding further clarity to the videos story. 

In terms of successes and issues so far with the editing, there have been a few shots and transitions that have changed from the storyboard. Certain shots, due to technical difficulties, or just not being as effective as we'd initially pictured them, have been replaced. For example, our opening shot which was meant to show Connies feet in the sea was hard to film successfully, and so we've replaced this with a sunrise shot which was initially filmed to form part of the behind the scenes film; however, in general we have stuck to the storyboard. 

For the car shots, we decided not to speed them up as it seemed obvious they were altered (due to it highlighting the shakiness of the shots) and so we have left these as they are, but they still look effective. We have also added a two shot sequence which shows a shot outside the car and the a shot inside the car (when the car is moving much faster) to give the perception of the car moving fast. 

Behind the Scenes and Outtakes

These two videos give a taster of the filming process for Drive. We took a large amount of experimental shots not in the storyboard whilst on location (which you can see in these two videos) and some of these may feature in the final cut if some of our initial planned shots don't look as effective; for example, our opening shot filming Connie's feet in the water was challenging and may have to be replaced. However, many of the shots we took will not feature and these two videos give an insight into the set up of our filming and how the filming process occurs. 

Vlog 5

Digipak Research

The video above shows me undertaking some research on digipak's to help give me a better understanding on their conventions and generate some ideas for my groups digipak. The video isn't scripted and is my initial views on the digipak as I'm viewing it for the first time.

Filming Update

We're currently almost finished with our filming for our music video. 

Filming has proved more challenging than initially thought; well not the filming as such, but more so the time management. Finding time when everyone is available for filming, with the correct weather conditions has proved difficult. This is primarily due to all our locations being off-site and so we couldn't just leave school for an hour or so and return, we have to commit to whole afternoons. Connie, Lucy and George also all have weekend jobs which removed these as potential filming days, leaving us with Wednesday afternoons and Tuesday afternoons every two weeks; with these days being weather dependent. 

In order to tackle these set backs we kept our filming schedule adaptable. For example, we'd keep an eye on the weather up to the last minute and try to maximize our time with good weather. If George wasn't available in the preferable weather conditions (due to other commitments) we'd shoot Connies individual scenes and below you can see some examples of how we used social media to communicate and arrange this, overcoming the issue. 

We also decided that for the beach scenes we'd film at Meadfoot, not Dawlish Warren purely due to time constraints, we thought Meadfoot would be more time effective.

As predicted, it has also been challenging filming shots which involve tracking with the camera, as we lack the equipment, and so this had to be done with handheld shots, which ran the risk of an unsteady shot. 

This was apparent when filming the car scenes. Shooting within the car has been fine, but for outside shots it was challenging to film the moving car whilst keeping a steady shot. To tackle this we made the decision to make the car travel slower (around 5mph) in order for me to successfully track with the car and maintain a steady shot. The plan is to then see how this footage looks when editing, and see if the car looks like it's going unrealistically slow, and if so, look into increasing the speed of shot so it looks like the car is travelling at a faster speed. 

We also had to deal with this when filming the lip syncing shots which involved me tracking backwards whilst Connie walked towards the camera, so that it'd show her movement, whilst having her position in the frame remain constant. 
Like with the car scenes, we made Connie walk slower than she perhaps normally would to allow me to track back slower (which in turn would make the camera steadier). I also utilized the camera stand, by placing the handle on my shoulder and holding the base with one hand it steadied the camera and so as a result our lip syncing shots have been fairly smooth.

Now all we have to film is Connie walking on a country track/field and also some more car shots and we will have finished filming.

Indie-Pop Website Research