Reflective Evaluation: Question Two

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

We created two images for our artist. One to match our music video theme, as our Cd cover is mainly a singles album. We kept a constant theme of nature but added our own spin on it. For example having the back cover with a picture of lungs, but turning it upside down to make it look like a tree, which relates to Florence's first album lungs but changed it to match our theme.

Before

After

 Both main images were taken on our introduction shoot where we were outside so we had a nature theme as you can see from the leaf’s on the front cover picture and the trees and the same with the inside photo.

As you can see there is a difference as the top one we edited to change the colours and bring them out but with the photo below we kept it more natural but keeping the natural theme.

But with the website we wanted to change it slightly to have a more elegant theme but kept the natural aspect slightly with the leafs in the corner which or more art deco but keep the theme.

We chose to design our website more differently as Florence as an artist has many different themes in her songs as some of her songs are natural others are more biblical so it's very hard to place one theme on her.

As these two videos show, quite different theme's one is set outside and the other in a church.

 This is why we deigned two themes but incorporated them into both products the leaf art deco on the website and the picture frame border on the CD cover.

Both our products advertise out artist in a way where it would be recognizable to all. The younger generation would recognize her from our CD cover theme and our music video + her other video's like ours. Where are the older generation wouldn't listen to all her songs but the ones that would be aimed at an older generation e.g No Light so with both out products it targets at much larger female target. Females are our main target audience audience because she's a female artist however we feel that the way we have designed our products would appeal to some of the male audience.

CD Cover

Webiste

This is Florence's website. It promotes her image as the same picture of her is featured a couple of times. She also had a video player that when one song finishes it plays another music video, and it plays automatically when you go on the website so you have to listen to it unless you click the pause or mute button. The news and blog feed show what she is up to recently like how where she is performing or new song information. And there are also a few pictures of limited edition merchandise. 

In all her albums Florence is the main focus. This yet again promotes her image, but as I was saying early each song/album has a different theme to match the song.

We used a lot of out ideas from hers as how she is publicized works really well. The only problem we had was would it work it we had two different themes but after finishing them both we believe it has worked. We have a focus image of our artist on the cover and the website to advertise the same things as she has.

Final Website

Here is our final website design. 

How we did our website

From when we orgianlly started planning we wanted some sort of border for our website but we tried looking for so long to find one that went around the whole page, but one day when looking for our boder we came across a picture where we could take parts from and edit them for a border at the top.

This is the origianl copy from the book and from this we cut out certain sections. The arrows show what parts we wanted to take and edit. So we cropped them removed the black with the magic wand tool and turn up the saturation slightly. So from this we made the top and bottom of our page. It also works well with our title as it fits in the middle between each of the corner designs.

We took the idea from Florence's website for the design of the navigation bar with eh brackets and the '|' to separate. but we changed the colour to be lighter and bolder.

For this i took the same image and copied it and flipped it then so it has a mirror effect and used the blur tool to smooth out the line in the middle and we used the same font's for the CD for this. i got the inspiration for this from her website but changed it because i didn't want to copy it exactly because on hers it looks like she is leaning against a mirror.

On Florence's website she has a picture of herself, but the image she uses is the same as the one she uses next to the new album advert. so we wanted to to have a different image. we originally was going to use this for our inside CD cover but the way Leanne shot this we couldn't use this with out stretching her out of proportion. So this was the perfect opportunity to use this.

For this we too a screen grab out youtube for the player bar at the bottom and took a screen grab from our first shoot to put over the top.

We was going to put these pictures around the edge as we were told we could place them there but when we tried this we couldn't, they went behind the grey colour. so we had some space at the side so we made a gallery of photo's from out shoot in a studio. We picked these because we like the mix of colour and black & white pictures.

We wanted to make some of our merchandise but it didn't work as when we tried putting a photo on a t-shirt but it was very noticeable so we changed the idea to take images of her website and added a link to her actual merchandise shop.

On all websites for bands there is always a link to facebook/twitter/youtube, we so got the logos and added some text asking people to follow/watch Florence.

We had a small space to fill something with it wasn't big enough for a news/blog section or a live tiwtter feed so i thought it would be a good idea to have a competition as she is releasing a new album , it would be a good idea to give the audience a chance to win a signed copy.

Around all of these we added a border, and the colour depended on the colour of the text, we was going to use some from the picture we used for the top and bottom decoration but when we tried editing it and putting it on I-Web it didn't look right so we made out own simple version which we think works well and completes the website.

Introduction of our music video

Here is the first 27 seconds of music video. We have recently reedited this and are thinking about re shooting some shots and include some others. We also later need to add the bird on the log by using the Green screen effect. Were hoping that this flows but are still deciding on what shots to add and which ones to take out if any. This is also just the introduction and will be without music.
We think the idea of her stealing a phone she's found comes across well but might need to redo the shot of her walking away to make it look like she is being followed by the bird and that she's actually taken the phone. A thing that we definitely changing and redoing is the shot of the log. We think it needs to be longer and the log needs to be lower down so we can fit the video of the bird on top.

How we made our CD Front Cover image

On our first shoot we took a stills camera so we could take some pictures for our CD and website and this was the image we picked for our CD cover. But we edited as we didn't think it was very Florence like. So after some messing around with the saturation levels and hue levels on photoshop we came across this combination to make our original photo look like this.

We decided to keep it like this because of the lovely red colour of the leafs and the slight tint of purple in tint in her skin. But what really made our minds up was when we found the lungs for our back with the matching colour of the lungs. 

 At this point we wanted to find a border which we later found which you can see in a previous post.

Final CD/ Digi pack

This is our inside of our CD. We decided not to use the black and white photos as we think it looked too different from the front cover and thought this photo flowed and matched the outside one. For the actual CD we wanted to incorporate the bird in our CD. So I went to the college Library and found Some books on birds and bird-watching. HERE are the pictures we used of the birds from the books:

On this page we used the small black bird to the left of this writing the wings spread out. I then cropped it out and got rid of the white background and pasted it several times on the CD. I then had to rotate them to face them inwards and the wings almost touching each others. I thought this worked really well as in a CD player when spun it would have a nice effect.  After doing the outside birds me and Conor both thought something was missing so i looked for a smaller different shaped bird and did the same. But this time i put the birds facing outwards so it didn't look exactly the same as the others. i also chose to only do four so it didn't look over done. Then Conor put Bird Song around the CD in a curve and in-between the birds. We were going to originally have the writing on the circle on the inside of the Cd but thought it would be less noticeable there and where we have put it now it stands out and is easier to read.

Here is our Final front cover and back cover of our CD:

We finally finished the outside and put the artist/Band on the spine as well as the song we are doing.

Website update

This is a website so far, we used the idea from her website to have a border in the top corners surrounding the text and used the theme of the font the CD cover. Then we used a normal font for the rest of the text. We made our own youtube video link as-well and added actual tour dates to the website. For the borders we photocopied a picture from a art deco book and cut a section we liked and then edited  to bring out the colors slightly.

We just need to add some more information like new merchandise or a new feed and add the facebook and twitter links.

Our Website

After much speculation we have decided to go with Florence and the machines current theme:

Like Florence and the machine we want a big photo our actor on the side, so our 2nd photographs of our female actor would work on this home page. 

We also liked the idea of the borders so we did our own research and found an art deco book with a piece of art in; called Binding of the Odyssey of Homer by Jean Eschmann. We chose this piece because we liked the colors it used ( Black and gold), which we could incorporate into our design and we wanted to take small pieces from the art to have as a corner of a border. This also links in with our nature aspect as many of the smaller pieces are leaves. 

Here is the art work we used:

CD Final front and back cover

After much editing we have finished our CD front and back cover. Here it is:

We have since added a barcode that we got from an existing CD and also put the names of some other Florence + the machine songs as well as the Bird song. We also did the spine of the CD and just plainly put the bands name and the song that we are doing. We did this because this is also what Florence + the machine does on her CD covers. 

Here is an example of one of Florence + the machines past CD:

We chose to do the same layout as Florence +the Machine with the Lungs and the numbers and lines off of them. However to make ours a bit different we turned our lungs upside down and also this makes it look like a tree and this shows our nature aspect we wanted. The picture of the Lungs was from a Biology book and instead of just an outline of the Lungs we got one of the blood flow within the lungs to also give it our own touch. We also put our Lungs in colour to match the other side with the red and pink leaves. 

We also wanted to add a white Bird on the spine of the CD to make it different and also incorporate the Bird somehow into the CD covers.

Fonts

After looking at a few examples of Florence's Albums and singles, we noticed the trend of two different fonts, with the Band name the same ( constant on all albums and singles) and a different album/single name. So we decided to do the same with our CD Cover and have the title and single name part of our picture frame idea.

As you can see all the album/single names have a different font and we wanted to do this but use a different font again which we got from Da Font. But we also chose our own band don't as well.

After much trial and error we have finally decided on our final fonts allowing us to finish our CD cover.

Border for CD

This is what the original border looked like so we cropped around the edges and cut out the centre image.

After look over some of Florence's singles cover and we wanted to use the idea of having a line border but after some thought we wanted to use a picture frame idea. So we took a picture of a photo frame and edited it in photoshop to make it look black but have the detail. we added a negative filter and the changed it to black and white. I think it goes really well with the main photo. This is also allowed us to work our text into the border and make it white so it's very visible

The use of the picture frame allowed us to frame our actress more centre and show off more that she is the focus and allowed us to keep this photo because for a point we were thinking of using a photo from our second shoot but then that photo would of been out of context with the rest of the album so this was our solution to adding a border and keeping the theme consistent 

Our CD cover so far...

After taking the more glamorous photos in black and white we decided to stick with our already existing photo on the front cover and decided that the photos that we recently took will be on the website down the side of the tools bar and also used as the inside picture of the CD Digi pack. Here is the p[icture we have selceted from the many I took yesterday:

We decided that the light on the side of the photo didn't necessarily need to be there so I cropped it using photoshop:

Cd Cover update

We decided to add a border round our centre image on the front cover as on most of her singles albums there is some sort of border so we tried a photo frame border and we are both in agreement that we like it.

Here is how we did it.

2ND PHOTO shoot

We took some more pictures but slightly different than the ones we first took. We decided to take a glamor side to it and wanted to incorporate Florence and the Machines new album based on Art deco.
After taking about 50 photos here are a few good ones that were considering: