Back Cover Image Completed

As my music genre is folk rock I decided that I wanted to use wood etchings in my digipak. After a few days work I have finally completed the final draft of the image:

Our Current State In Production

Now we have got our narrative and part of our performance out of the way we are going to make the decision on what we should ideally be doing next as we have completed our schedule. As we are currently not satisfied with our performance shots and we'd like to get some shots in of a higher quality from different angles. We would also like to get some drum shots as we encountered some problems with getting drums in our music video. An obstacle that we still have yet to overcome.

 In terms of our filming we have been very prepared so far, we checked the weather report and planned our day in order to get our stuff. We are planning to film the last of our footage by January and we will need to prep until then to get all the equipment we need.

Breaking Folk Rock Conventions

We have decided to break conventions of Folk Rock, not only in just including a narrative but in attempting to make the music video more light hearted and comical. This is because so far I have been unimpressed with how many folk rock videos lack personality.

We wanted to go against this and take influences in our video from other subgenres of rock. We have done this in our narrative but we are also going to attempt to capture this in our narrative.

In addition to this we are breaking conventions of Folk Rock in having a carribean singer. As folk rock is entirely white dominated amongst it's artists (something very true of rock in general) we have chosen to have a black singer perform in our music video. This was at first not intentional, as he was in fact just the person who mimed the best (he was originally intended to be our bassist) and then we chose to have him as both bassist and singer.

We have decided to use this fact to break the conventions of Folk Rock within our music video.

Narrative Filming Complete

Sunday we successfully completed the filming of our narrative. We filmed James as our living statue stalking a girl through a park.
In addition to this we also filmed a few additional shots as we were unable to decide on whether to end with our tongue in cheek ending or instead take a second twist ending with him in fact stalking multiple women.
We have taken several photographs of our process of painting James:

While 5 hours of filming did prove to be very tiring however everything went well without any problems.

Tom Waits - Hold On (Music Video Analysis)

This is the second Tom Wait's video I plan to analyse as I feel this is a more typical example of Folk Rock music videos.

All aspects of the video have an old time filter on it, this could possibly . The video is almost entirely performance based with only a few brief narrative shots. This is reflecting his age but also the age of the style of music he is playing with Folk music having an extensive history.

The video is very performance heavy with him performing in different locations with different guitars. He stands very still while playing staying in one spot only moving his arms. This could be seen as reflecting his age which Tom Waits embraces.  He is represented in his usual manner of being dressed in a suit with a hat.

What little narrative there is involves a women in a car driving across America with no clear goal.

Tom Waits - Hell Broke Luce (Music Video Anaylsis)

Tom Wait is a musician who often borders on Folk Rock however he is perhaps better known as an experimental rock musician. I have chosen to analyse his video "Hell Broke Luce" for its narrative.
This video has a huge amount of symbolism.

This song is an anti war song, which talks about the real life suicide of anamerican soldier called Jeff Lucey. As such this video has a lot of anti war symbolism, it is also interesting that despite this video being clearly about the real world, the video itself is very surreal and otherworldly.

The core narrative of the video is Tom Waits pulling a house through the desert. This also makes up the performance aspect of the video as Tom is almost always seen with the rope which he is using to tow the house behind him. He travels through the video, towing the house underwater with the submarines fighting and through the desert and even through no mans land. This could be seen as Tom Waits travelling through the history of war, and how regardless of the wars changing, the story of the soldier is always the same. The story of soldiers carrying thoughts of their home (symbolised by Tom Waits pulling his home behind him) trying to make there way through the war.

Tom Waits is also represented in different ways throughout the video.

Similar to folk rock videos, the focus is very often on Tom Waits. However Waits is also telling the story of the video.  While there is no set narrative there is a lot of surreal imagery and this is an example of one of them. He is in a chefs hat with a saucepan as Jeff Lucey was a chef. Which is why Tom Waits is in this attire. Waits in this moment IS Jeff Lucey, and the song is sung from the perspective of Lucey.

Another odd way Tom Waits is represented is wearing a gas mask. This time the reference is to the London Blitz in which people would carry gas masks due to the possibility of gas bombings at any moment.

This is perhaps the boldest image within the video. The symbol on the mans hat is clearly referencing both nazi germany and america. The comparison being made here is that Tom Waits is saying there are similarities between nazi germany and america. He does this by putting the eagle of nazi germany and combining it with the eagle of america and places it on the shield of the american flag.  This is of course a very bold statement to make and it places Tom Waits as being firmly anti-war regardless of the cause.  Soon after the hat ignites. Fire is often shown as a negative image connoting pain, suffering and intense heat. Similar to that of what is felt by the soldiers in iraq which the song is dedicated too.

The general "nailed to the desk" planning a war. he is not shown as a real person instead almost like a cartoon. This dehumanises the generals and instead puts sympathy on the soldiers.

More firm anti-war imagery with a person in a skeleton costume also in an army hat. This is symbolising the death of soldiers albeit not in a grotesque way. The movement of the soldier is also quite disturbing. The way he writhes around is unusual and abstract. This adds to the almost otherworldly tone of the music video.






Tom Waits' video for "Hell Broke Luce" is a very dark surreal anti-war video making a large use of symbolism to convey its meaning. It reflects Tom Waits as an artist who is known for his metaphors and poetic style of song writing.

Explanation of Our Narrative

The narrative of our video begins with our woman walking through the park and passing a living statue. The statues eyes turn (the only bit of movement from which you see throughout the video). We then see her walking through the park and each time she turns she sees the living statue in a different frozen position not far behind her.

Initially she only gets slightly worried and uneasy. She cautiously continues her journey and the statue is found in many unusual spots watching her (behind bushes, walls etc.). While waiting for a bus she spots him frozen by the bus, and she panics and runs away.

As her journey continues and she begins to notice him more and more and she eventually panics more and more. She begins to run frantically away until she trips up. She stumbles to her feet to find him frozen behind her, she screams but then realises that the living statue was in fact only attempting to return her purse (he is frozen with his arm extended holding it).

Blog Update

We have had a few problems deciding when to start filming. This is due to the cast not being ready to film tomorrow and we thought it unfair. In addition to this we were not ready in terms of props and costume either.

So instead we have arranged to get props and costumes ready as well as do a final location scout for our narrative. In the mean time the cast are now currently learning the song to get ready for the video

During tomorrow in the time we are unable to film we're going to painting the costumes if needs be and then we will be ready to film Friday after 6th Form. Then this sunday we shall be filming all our narrative.

BLOG UPDATE: Confirmed Cast / Developing Narrative

Now that we have decided that we're going with the comedic stalking narrative we are trying to develop. We have also organised the cast and they have all confirmed that they will be joining us to film our music video.

The narrative of the video will contain the singer as a living statue in London "stalking" a woman. We do not see him move throughout the video instead we only see him in different locations and positions, we thought this could add comedy to the video. The woman grows increasingly paranoid however it ends up that he was only attempting to give her the purse that she had dropped. To add a comedic twist to the end of the video.

Our performance section of our video will be fairly straightforward performing, in keeping with folk rock music videos.

We are also staying true to the genre in keeping the singer as the focus of the video the whole time even in the narrative. Of course folk rock is limited in terms of its narrative so we have taken what I had seen from Bob Dylan's videos and applied it to our comedic set up.

Here is the video log recording our progress:

Recruiting cast members

We have determined that we only need three band members for our video:
A singer/rhythm guitarist, a bassist and a drummer.
We have sent each actor an email asking them to perform in our video:

This is our default email for the people that we have asked to play bass for our video. We have asked two members, encase one is not able to make it or bails out on us.

Below is an email intended for our guitarist/singer:

At present we are not sure who to ask to be a drummer however we shall be recruiting a drummer within the next two days.

Planning our Narrative / Difficulties with Researching

Thusday 6th


In keeping with our plan we're now planning our narrative and attempting to decide what sort of narrative best fits our video.

The cause for debate among our group is that we are currently not sure whether to include our initial comedic stalking narrative. This is because from our research so far we have not found any folk rock music videos that include a narrative.

Alberta Cross, Jeff Buckley and Bob Dylan are all heavily performances based. The closest we have come to a narrative was in the music video for "The Islander" by Nightwish, however this was a celtic rock song and it was not a true example of a folk rock song or a folk rock artist (Nightwish are a symphonic metal group and the song was not typical of them).

Because of this we have decided to look at other styles of rock and the sort of narratives they include in their music videos. We are going to take a look at pop rock and hard rock for inspiration. Particularly pop rock as their videos tend to lean more towards the humour that we would like to achieve in our video.

We have chosen to take keep our idea of a narrative involving comedic stalking
The narrative will be the following:

Draft Digipak

I have used PicMonkey in conjunction with Open Office to create a draft digipak. I have taken inspiration from the Tom Waits digipak that I analysed in an earlier blog post in terms of colour scheme (a dusty tan colour).

As my genre is perceived to be Folk Rock I have chosen an un-doctored image of a folk rock artist, in this case Jeff Buckley to create an idea of what I want my final digipak to look like.

I have used this image of Buckley:

I chose this image is it has not been photoshopped. Also it has a plain white background which makes it far easier to play around with to make the image my own. I rotated the image and zoomed so his face would take up the entirety of the image. I removed colour from the image, making it a pale sepia tone. I then brushed colour back into the left half of his face to create this effect:

I also put in the name of my artist, Lift Off, implying him to be the lead singer of the band. As there are a large amount of rock bands that only use their front man/lead singer in promotion material, for example Evanescence's Amy Lee, HIM's Ville Valo and Bon Jovi's Jon Bon Jovi. I have chosen to do this because our artist is not a folk artist, they are folk rock artists. As such conventions of rock are still fair to use as it is a hybrid genre.

For our back cover I have looked at traditonal wood etchings, as they have a celtic/folk vibe. I used this wood etching of an owl, as themes of wildlife and animals are common in folk music:

To keep synergy using dustier yellows in colour I chose to do a similar colour to my front cover and I put the track names in, in the same font as the title font, once again, for synergy. 

For our inside panel I have chosen to put in another image of Buckley, as inside panels of Digipaks usually contain an image of the artist again but in a different pose.

For this image I chose to keep synergy by editing it in the same fashion that I edited the digipaks front cover. I once again added sepia tone and then brought  the colour back into the artist but not the background. In this case however I recoloured his whole face.

However when it came to placing in the digipak the shape of the image meant it didn't fit in the frame. So I cropped it down. This cropped version fit much better into the draft:

This is my draft digipak to give me an idea of what my final one should look like. It is so far only missing the inside right where the disc should go. I am so far very pleased with it. It fits the genre of Folk Rock well with its use of sepia and dusty colours

Plan for Filming

As we now know the deadline for filming our music video we have come up with a strict plan that we shall stick to.
We have worked out what times on what days we are available to film and have a loose plan for each day.
We have recorded a video diary entry discussing in brief our plan and what we hope to achieve from it:

VIDEO DIARY

                       

IMAGES OF OUR PLAN

This is our plan for our first four days typed up:

Day 1 - Thursday 6th
Individual Analysis - write ideas of narrative
location

Day 2 -Friday 7th
Lunch - regroup
create a solid narrative
individual analysis  video progress ideas for storyboard

Day 3 - Saturday 9th
Storyboard 1
Individual research and analysis

Day 4 - Sunday 9th
Storyboard 2
Final storyboard

We have only typed up the first four days as these are the immediate things we need to get done in addition to finding the cast. We do not want to focus too much on what lies ahead until a few days prior to it. As we approach the third day we shall be start looking more at the next four days of planning and so on and so forth. Our first four are predominantly about organising and doing the final plan for the video, working on the storyboard and final narrative for the video. Then the later days will be focussed on filming the video.

We have paid careful attention to the time schedule of others, as some of us within the group have other commitments. The first thing we did was find slots when two or more of us were free to get on with production, then we began to choose what days would be used for what.

Day 5 - Monday 10th
We are all free to film our video.

Day 6 - Tuesday 11th
We are free during our media lesson to film

Day 7 - Wednesday 12th
Only Daniel and I will be able to film as Alisha and Renee are on an art trip.

Day 8 - Thursday 13th
Renee is free during 1 and 2.

Tom Waits - Orphans (Digipak Analysis)

Tom Waits Digipak Analysis

Rock Digipaks Research

Finding Folk Rock digipaks to analyse has been relatively difficult because a lot of folk musicians use regular CD cases as opposed to digipaks, because of this I have had to find digipaks of other subgenres of rock as well. However I will still be able to find useful information from them, such as how to keep synergy in the digipak.

Bob Dylan's digipak is very centered around showing him. This is similar to how his music videos keep him in the spotlight at all times. All of the images show him dead center of the image. There is little emphasis on colour, instead using the photographs as the images rather than created images.

Also the images are all quite different, with little synergy outside of Bob Dylan being the only thing constant within the digipak. He is shown on all four images however the back cover shows a different representation of him in the shadows, adding mystery but also the more practical aspect of giving the white text a black background to stand out on. There also appears to be red CDs behind each image.

Tom Waits Digipak takes the opposite approach of not showing the artist on the inside cover instead just keeping him on the front cover. The digipak keeps a dusty, sepia-toned colour scheme on everything in the digipak. This is similar to the Bob Dylan digipak however it also has similarity to the Nine Inch Nails digipak in that there is little in terms of imagery within the digipak, which is unlike the digipak. It is also worth noting that Tom Waits sits more in the middle between Bob Dylan and Nine Inch Nails in terms of his own musical style too. I am going to do a more indepeth analysis of Tom Wait's digipak in my next post.

Although not Folk Rock, Nine Inch Nails digipak is still useful as it has a clear example of synergy between the sides. NIN's digipak does not show the artist themselves. Instead they show a constant colour scheme using blacks, greys and whites. The white text is able to stand out more against the black background of the CD. It is a very simple minimalistic approach that gives the digipak a sleek and tidy look. 

Planning narrative - 2 Column Storyboard (And Peer-Assessment)

We are experimenting with a 2-Column storyboard to plan our music video. We haven't used one of these before so we were a little unsure of how to go about it at first.

We soon developed our idea and what sort of shots we wanted to use and then we traded storyboards with another group in order to get feedback from our work the feedback we got was as follows:
0:31 - 1:09 needs a little more detail as to what shot types are being used within this section
how long are these shots going to run for? 
In addition to this we were also asked what our narrative actually was and it was suggested that we put a brief outline at the top of the storyboard so that the camera-man or actors in question would know what is going on.

The two column storyboard was useful however I am unsure if I prefer to drawn storyboards, I am contemplating using both on the music video to see which one proves more useful for us.

Planning Narrative - Idea

Today we have begun to plan our narrative.
We have chosen to continue with our idea of a stalker. This idea was intially inspired by the music video for "I'm Afraid of Americans" by David Bowie and Trent Reznor.




However we don't want the video to be too serious as it would end up looking silly on camera whereas this video is played straight throughout. Instead we are going for a deliberately satirical video. We have the idea of the band members stalking someone but in a comedic way. The question of "how do we make stalking funny" is our next step.

In addition to this we are currently planning what points our narrative will peak at. As our song does not have a large amount of variation in its tempo we're using this to our advantage we as we get more control of when the climax and mini-climax's of the videos are.

Vagabond - Lyric Analysis

Oh girl, I don't know all the reasons why 

I found the answer looking in your eye 

I go out walking all day long 

Take away this lonely man, soon he will be gone 

'Cause I'll tell you everything about living free 

Yes, I can see you girl, can you see me? 

 You don't need to know what I do all day 

It's as much as I know watch it waste away 

'Cause I'll tell you everything about living free 

Yes, I can see you girl, can you see me? 

 Go and see the sorcerer and look into the ball 

You may find the answer written on the wall 

The left one was a dancer 

Can you see the answer, oh? 

 Put her on a mansion on top of a hill 

Please don't make her do the things against her will 

I found something special, I don't know why 

Looking into her pretty little eye 

'Cause I'll tell you everything about being free

     References to the narrator 

     References to stalking

When analysing the lyrics I found the song to be have implications of stalking throughout the songs run. The narrator mentions himself as a lonely man however he also seems to speak of being free and the implication that freedom is not all its made out to be. This could be taken in a straight forward dark way of him wanting to imprison this woman however I think if the song is supposed to be about a stalker I would imagine that the narrator of the song is far more complex than this. He appears to have lost meaning in his life and has found meaning from his observations of this woman.

There references to stalking are prominent with the line "I can see you girl, can you see me?" this is what has prompted me to pitch the idea of a stalker in our music video. This could make the video surprisingly sinister as there would be a huge contrast in the sound of the music and the lyrics/video of the song.

Final Logo Design

This is the logo design I have chose to go for for my music video. As the bands name is "Lift Off" I chose a bird as a reference to this. As birds "lift off" to fly.

At the moment I am pleased with the overall design of the logo and of the font. However I am contemplaying a different colour scheme than what is shown here. As I feel that red font with a dark grey bird may appear too dark-a imagery for the track we're using. 

I am contemplating making the bird brown or a golden brown colour. Similar to that of an eagle. As it connotes the west, as seen in hard rock and folk music, but also because that is an animal which is common in more rural environments which our song connotes.

When coming up with this design I took a look at my original designs and found that the bands name was often too small in comparison to the bird and it was hard to get the right balance due to the positioning of the wings. I have fixed that here with larger text in comparison to the bird, who's wings are up further in the air.

My next step will be to do a final draft of this logo to clean it up and make it appear more professional.

Folk Rock Music Video Research

Folk Rock music videos are usually show more of the artist in their videos in both performance and what narrative there is. However there is usually a lot of emphasis on performance as opposed to narrative based on my research. When researching Folk Rock I looked closely at the artists Bob Dylan and Jeff Buckley. This was because they were artists I was already quite familiar with and both of them (being solo artists) tend to focus on the artist rather than the narrative.
 For example in this music video despite the song being featured in the film "Wonder Boys" with numerous guest appearances in the videos (albeit from stock footage)the video always focusses on Bob Dylan as he sings, in both performance sections and narrative sections. Jeff Buckley on the other hand makes videos that are entirely performance. As Jeff Buckley was often fond of the music itself just telling the story. There are some videos of Buckley that involve some non performance shots however they are largely made up of random shots with 90% of the focus being on Buckley.
 
 This is a common staple of his videos:




From this so far I have largely taken away that our video should have near constant focus on the performer. Which perhaps means that our lead singer should also be the lead role in the narrative too.

"My Response to Folk Rock" part 1: My reaction to the genre

I had anticipated that when we asked our focus group what sort of music they would deem our song to be, that they would say "folk music". And it's easy to see why, while I think it's very hard to classify this song into a genre it seems at the moment that folk is the most fair as it is most certainly not indie music and it's hard to classify it as soft rock.

I am no stranger to folk music as a whole and I think I can offer a certain degree of advice for the mise-en-scene of our performance section of the video which I will discuss in a separate blog. In this blog I just want to talk about my response to folk music as a genre.

I am not one of those people who finds Folk Music to be boring. In fact I think there is a wide range of talent with in Folk music and specifically Folk Rock. Folk Rock is usually acoustic based for the most part or more acoustic sounding than other sub-genres of rock and there is usually a great deal of emphasis placed on the lyrics as opposed to the sound of the music. Perhaps the most noticeable example of Folk Rock is Bob Dylan who was famed for having great song writing skills but a less than stellar musical sound.

I find it generally easy to draw comparisons between the writing styles of different folk musicians and as such I think I will be able to find good ideas for music videos because of this.

I'm quite pleased that the focus group as judged our song to be folk rock as I found that trying to find ideas and inspiration using alternative rock and hard rock simply didn't match up with the song. And much of our initial ideas that never made it past the "brief idea" stage didn't fit the video.

I think some of our newer ideas so far can work well within Folk Rock however and now that we know what genre we're definitely going for, we can find newer ideas that will work with our track much better.

Music Video Analysis

Nightwish - The Islander Commentary

I have decided to analyse this song as it is celtic/folk rock which we have found our song to be. So I have taken a look at this video and analysed it in order to gain creative inspiration for our own video.

I have analysed some of the shots in my powerpoint and I'm going to analyse the mise-en-scene of the video next:

The video is very dark and gloomy with grey clouds throughout. Throughout the video the colours are so washed out that the video is almost black and white except for the performance shots of the band which are set in the same location as the rest of the video. As they sit in a ring of fire it brings light and colour surrounding them as the play.

All the band members are dressed in black, this brings out their naturally quite pale complexion (as they are of nordic origin).  Also the singer and guitarist of the song is using a guitar which has had leaves carved into it in a celtic design.

There also seems to be steam punk influence in the video as they have replaced the ships talked about in the video with airships and flying sailing ships. The islander wears a captains uniform as he travels with his airship as well. This gives it an unusual, steam punk, yet historical appearance on screen.

Questionnaire Data Analysis

This was the data from our questionnaire:

From our questionnaire we have been able to learn that exactly 50% of the people who we questioned were aged 11 to 17. We also found that 61% of the people we asked like rock music and of that 61% 10 were male.


This has made us choose to aim our band and their music video towards males around that age. This has also been supported by our focus group in which most of our male members stated that they prefer rock music.

Our next step will be to to analyse some folk rockish types of songs an analyse their music videos in order to find some inspiration of what we can include in our videos.

Out of 18 participants, 11 were fans of rock music (thats just 61%)

Of these 11, two were female (18%) and nine were male (82%)

Of the males, four (44.5%) were between the ages of 11-17, four (44.5%) were ages 18-24, and 1 was aged 35- 44 (11%)

Of the females, one was aged 11- 17, and the other 35- 40 (50% for each age range)

Overall, 5 were aged 11- 17 (46%), four were aged 18- 25 (36%) and two were aged 35-44 (18%)

The ratings of the bands went as follows: Iron Maiden- Two people (18%). Both were male. One was within the 11-17 age bracket, and the other in the 18- 25 age bracket.

Guns 'n' Roses- Four people (36%). Three were male (75%) and the other was female (25%). Two were within the 11-17 age bracket (50%) one within the 18- 25 age bracket (25%) and the female was with the 35- 44 age bracket (25%)

Marilyn Manson- Two people (18%). Both were male. One was within the 18-25 age bracket, and the other within the 35- 44

Aerosmith- Three people (18%). Two males (66%) and one female (34%) . The female was in the 11-17 age bracket, and the males were within the 18- 25 age bracket, giving the same percentages as before.

Focus Group

We were somewhat late in making our focus group due to communication errors within the group (which are now resolved).

We had a group of six people aged between 17 and 18 years old. We did initially want a wider range of ages however they were unavailable at the time. If we were to do this again I would include a wider range of ages together to see if the song was more appealing to an older or younger age. I found the focus group to be a challenge as only three people regularly spoke during the focus group. Everyone else in the group only spoke occasionally and as such the feedback was limited in use to us. However what feedback we did get from the more helpful members has greatly changed the way we planned to produce our video.

The general vote was that the song was of a folk style as one of our group members first suggested.We asked them about their opinions of the track itself, and for ideas of a narrative. The general response to the song was mixed and we didn't get a great deal of for our narrative. However we were able to finally identify our songs musical genre.

When we asked the group what makes a good music video, Andrew, 18, said that he occasionally will watch music videos provided that there is a strong front man to pull focus in the video. When we asked what makes a music video memorable he said:
"something that people can relate to, maybe some experience or story of sorts that some people may have gone through that they can think - "Oh, wait, I've been through a similar situation like that" - so it kind of has a meaning that is just as deep as the song itself"

I found this especially helpful as we now know that regardless of whether a group member or an actor plays the part of the singer in our music video is going to need to particularly stand out and pull focus in the video. Andrew's example was referring to David Draiman who is known for his very powerful stage presence.

Samira, 17, stated that a good music video:
"Doesn't necessarily have to fit the music but it has to engage" but also that "it can't be too far off from what the song is about, it has to paint a picture, you can't do it yourself"

I found this interesting as it is contradictory to what a lot of people would say. Many people would say that the video does have to fit the music as opposed to not fitting it. I would like to toy around with this idea to see if there was any particular way this could be done.

However I would prefer an engaging video that can paint a picture while still matching with the song, even if it was in an ironic or sarcastic way. We have also been given the advice to make our performance sections very strong in keeping with rock music as a hole.

From our feedback I've learned that we need to make a good performance that is interesting and unique to prevent it from seeming like "just another" music video. In terms of narrative Andrew said that he liked a "solid conclusion" as opposed to a vague ending. This has been a cause for debate within our group as a member of our group particularly likes things being left to the imagination and wonders if there is any way to meet it in the middle.

I think that the people that contributed to our focus group did give us a lot to work from as they were very music literate and knew what in their made could make something unique or engaging. However I was disappointed that we didn't get the same amount of feedback from more of our participants.

iWeb Practise (Practise Webpage and Band Page Mock-up)

Today we tested iWeb to get used to the program. This has been useful to me as I will now be able to use these basic skills with ease during the production of my bands website. So far I've only covered the basics of creating the pages and putting in text, images and videos however I've found them very easy to do and I will be implementing more features of the iWeb for my final band site.

I found that iWeb was easy to use but still appearing professional when using it. This will be ideal for working on my final website for my band.



I have also made a mock-up band page with iWeb to use as a basis for my final draft.

My Band Frankenstein

I have created this band frankenstein to work out how we are going to represent our band in the music video. I have chosen to have the band represented as people who do not take themselves too seriously as people, able to poke fun at themselves but serious as musicians. 

Examples of bands like this are Green Day, Steel Panther and Blink 182 who despite often making lighthearted or comedic music put a great deal of work into making their music mean something to them and in the case of Steel Panther using a large amount of musical skill. This is why I have given my Frankenstein a suit to wear, to represent them as serious musicians but holding a clown flag as they are not serious as people.

As our song is played similarly to 1980's rock music I've chosen to give my Frankenstein long 80's hair similar to the members of Motley Crue. 

The Frankenstein wears cowboy boots as their music has a western undertone to it which I will carry through their webpage as well.  A theme of westerns is a lack of law and authority which I have also conveyed with the bands megaphone, they have little respect to authority and are unafraid of it.

I will have to look back at this Frankenstein when it comes to representing our band. As this will be useful to us in the future.

Researching our Target Audience

We have created two similar but different surveys to gather extra information on our target audience. We are hoping to get a good idea of how to market our band towards that certain target audience and get ideas of what to put in our music video.
These are the links to the questionnaires:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TZX336C

In addition to this we have organised a focus group for Tuesday afternoon where we can pitch out ideas fully. As mentioned in one of my previous blogs we are using a focus group made of a mix of age ranges between both staff and students. This will give us a wider range of information to use as a source for our video and our band as a whole.

We are hoping to gain information:
How to represent the band
How to market the band
What to include in our music video

Richard Dyer's Star Theory - Marilyn Manson

Richard Dyer's Star Theory - Marilyn Manson

The reason we looked at Richard Dyer's star theory was because we needed to know how stars images are constructed as many bands have their image decided by a mixture of themselves and an actual team.  We needed to understand what stars are and are not constructed. I used Marilyn Manson as an example because he is largely atypical of what we expect to see in music artists.

When we work on our band we need to develop some kind of image for them and Richard Dyer's star theory will help us decide upon it.

Blog Update: 10/11/12: Band name and logo designs chosen

We have chosen the band name "Lift Off". Now that the name has been chosen we are working on different concept designs for the band logo. All of which make use of an eagle in some way shape or form. I've worked on two logo's in particular the first of which has the eagles wings wrapped around the name, the second has the eagle carrying a banner with the bands name.
We have chosen this in keeping with the bands western desert like iconography similar to bands such as Guns N' Roses and Motorhead.

(UPDATE WITH IMAGES FLIPPED ROUND)