Online Website Feedback

We posted the website to Facebook and have received some really positive feedback, which we are all happy about! Above are some of the comments people left. In the last comment someone even linked the video "Pharcyde-The Drop", which means that our references have been noted!

Audience Screening

Our screening is today! Very excited and nervous. This is the questionnaire we are going to hand round:

Audience Screening Facebook Event

We have decided to publicize our audience screening, which will be on Monday 6th December, on Facebook. This way we can control who we invite, and let everyone know all of the event details. Facebook is also a common platform used for social-networking by our target market.

The Finished Website

CLICK HERE TO GO THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE

The website is finally finished and published! I particularly enjoyed this task as I have always been quite creative with designing things, so I got really into this. I am really pleased with the finished piece.

Finished Album Cover

After much deliberation about final fonts and placement the album cover has finally been sent to the printers, and above is a copy of the final piece.

The Website

This is the photo we have decided to use as the background for all of the pages of our website:

This is because she looks sophisticated and sexy, and the red colour of her lips jumps out nicely from an otherwise neutral background. The lighting is also warm and inviting. The background is not too cluttered and would leave room for content especially up the left hand side.

The website is going well so far. We're using a programme called wix.com to create it and it is far simpler to use than dreamweaver as it enables us to work with flash in designing it.

This is the website in progress:

As you can see, everything is very easy to navigate, with all of the things you can insert such as text, page areas etc. available up the left handside, and all of the page components easily moveable around the page.

We have decided it is essential to include:

• Some basic information about Lexi
• The finished music video
• Events
• Sponsors (eg. a clothes shop? a make up line?)
• Links to Lexi's twitter and facebook etc.
• Photos
• A fan page
• A competition
• Maybe a forum?

Third Shoot

The main aim of our third shoot was to get all of the lipsyncs sorted. There were a lot of problems with the lip sync footage before as our actress was nervous, it was cold, and the lighting wasn't ideal. So after practicising in the Seward Studio with Liv, and having fun singing the song together so that she lost all of her inhibitions, we felt we were ready to go on our second shoot. We decided to have her lip syncing set against different coloured walls we stumbled across as we were shooting clips for the montages of her walking. There were five different coloured walls; white, purple, red, pink and yellow which served as vibrant and interesting backdrops for her singing. This second shoot went a lot more smoothly. We knew exactly what footage we needed to get, Liv was far more comfortable as this was the second time round, the weather was perfect, and we remembered to bring speakers.

While on location, we also took some extra photos of Liv, for use on the website, to add some variation to the more 'glossy' studio shoots we had taken in the Seward Studio.

Photos for our Album Cover

These are the photos we have decided to use for our final album cover:

This shot is simple but effective - it's an establishing shot of the artist Lexi. The photo directly addresses the audience as she is making eye contact and the whole focus is on her face. As she is a debut artist is important that her identity is anchored and as a group we decided that this was the perfect shot to do this. She's also biting her necklace which makes it slightly sexualized and appealing to males.

We decided to use this photo to go across both panels on the inside, so that on the left panel, she is looking over to the right panel at her shadow. We also might superimpose the shadow of a bird on the right panel, as this is her motif.

This photo adds variety to our shots as it is a MCU. The jumper further anchors the 'swallow' motif, and there is space to have the track listings up the left hand side.

Lexi Grace

We decided to name our popstar "Lexi Grace", after much deliberation.Her full name would be Alexandra Grace, or Alex Grace for short, with Lexi Grace as her stage name. We think it's short, easy to remember, and edgy yet relateable to. We had names like "Pixie Lott", "Lily Allen", and "Katy Perry" in mind to draw inspiration from. We also did a bit of research into the kinds of fonts we could use for her name on the album cover (pictured above).

Our 1st & 2nd Shoots

There were both postives and negatives from our first and second shoot days (Thursday and Friday of half term). 

 

 What worked:

The weather was perfect both too days (if a little cold on the second), not too sunny, but bright and dry. The settings were beautiful, and very vibrant and colourful just as we had hoped.  The costumes were effective (we ended up dressing her in a white vest top with a red rolling stones sign and a leather jacket; a floral dress and sunglasses with military boots; a navy dress with gold rope designs; and a black bandeux leotard with navy harem pants). The shots of our actress walking, especially once reversed at the editing suite, were really effective. The well planned shots for example the apple flying out of the basket, and the lipstick shots worked really well.

 

 What didn't work so well:

 

 Detailed planning of our shots was something we all decided we needed to work on more for the second shoot. We had placed too much hope on being able to just turn up at the shoot and improvise on the areas we hadn't planned in as much depth, and although we did want that element of "spontenaity" in our video, this was still something we would have to acheive through careful planning. We also let ourselves down with the directing of our actress as we didn't really set up the role for her before the shoot so she found it hard to get into, especially the lip syncing. Our actress was cold on the shoot in skimpy clothes! Also, costume changes were awkward when we were out and about. We didn't get permission to film in Trafalgar Square.

Test Photo Shoot with Liv

We had our first photo shoot with Liv yesterday, which was a success! Unfortunately (and typically, seeing as the shoot went so seamlessly), lots of our photos got deleted during the uploading process. However we still have a few shots left that we like, one of which (the first one pictured below), we may use for the actual album cover. It was interesting and exciting learning how to use all of the studio lights, which could be controlled from a laptop, and we all had good fun using the props and costumes to try and create an edgy, cool look for Liv.