Music Video completed!

After straightening out the errors from the previous video, we can finally say that our music video is finished.
Here's the video:

Album Cover finished!

The album cover is finally completed! It's now been sent off to the printers and we're just eagerly waiting for the finished product.
Here's an image of the album cover, including the inside and the back cover.

This album was created using Adobe Photoshop CS3. 

The front and back images were first edited using an airbrushing technique to smooth out Knyt's skin complexion. This was a new technique where Bianca had found a tutorial where it showed us step by step on how to use different effects to create the desired look. 

The font that we used was Matiz which we found on dafont.com I chose this font because it was bold and it stood out in order to grab the audience's attention. 

I decided to continue on the colour theme of purple and black to create synergy between the various media texts and thus creating familiarity in order for the audience to recognise the similarities easier. 

The website is done!

We have tweaked the homepage and added a competitions page as we realised it was needed as there was no-where for us to squeeze in information about the competition.

Here are the final pages of our website with lists of their main features:

INTRODUCTION

•  Logo being "written" on screen
• Song being played in the background

HOMEPAGE

• Music video and album
• Large image of Knyt
• Ability to interact (Facebook, Twitter, Competition)

NEWS

• News feed with links to different pages
• Tour dates with link to buy tickets

PHOTOS





•  Photo gallery
• Comments box



 The screenshot above shows how the audience can click on one of the photos to view it in larger screen.

VIDEOS

• Screen to view the video
• List of the videos

BIO

•  Description of him and his life
• Picture of him that fits with the whole "Biography" and reflecting on his life theme of this page

COMPETITION

•  Contact form for the audience to enter the competition
• Album cover with "Win Official Knyt Album" banner
• Competition question

STORE

• Links to the online store
• Images of the album and the clothes available to buy

There are features that always remain at the top of the page. These are the menu, logo and advertisement banner. It is important for those features to remain at the top of the website because navigation is extremely important in order for the audience to look around the website. The logo makes sure the audience never forgets what website they are on and gives it identity and as the album would be one of Knyt's main sources of income, it is vital that there is some sort of advertisement for it throughout the website.

Overall, we are extremely happy with the final website and feel that we worked hard on it and have come out with a great, professional looking website which is exactly what we were aiming for.

Album

Today we recieved our album cover prototype and we're all really pleased with the outcome of the product.

Website Changes

We have been working on our website for a while but there is something that isn't coming together and the look of the website is nothing like we had wanted it to be.
Instead of trying to tweak and change things, we are just going to start a fresh website and make sure this one is created to look exactly how we want it to look.

The only page that will remain the same is the introduction page.

Here is the old homepage:

This homepage is too simple and the images at the bottom "Become A Member" and "New Single, Knyt Rider, Coming Soon" are screenshots from a video so the quality of the image is extremely bad. The album cover shown on the website is not the finished version and the logos for the stores to buy the album in are obviously taken from google.

These flaws have made the homepage look extremely amateur and that is DEFINITELY NOT the look we want to achieve.

We have made changes to the website and this is what it now looks like:

There is a rotating gallery that shows three images telling the audience about the new music video, the new album and the new single that is coming out soon. We have also got rid of some unnecessary pages that were increasing our workload but were not needed. There is still a lot of work to be done through-out the website but the changes have made it easier as there is now a clear theme that we can follow through-out the pages.

Screening

Our screening is in a few days and so to prepare we have set up a questionnaire in order to get our audience feedback.

Here is a copy of the questionnaire:


Questionnaire

Website

The website is almost finished!

There haven't been any hiccups and the layout of the website has come out really well. It has a sleek modern look to it which is exactly what we were going for.

We have used a consistent theme of purple, black and white as well as the same font on all the pages for the headers. This made all the pages link together and the website "flow". The menu, banner and logo always remain at the top of the website. It is extremely important that the menu stays at the top because easy navigation is key when making a successful website.

 The consistent theme of black, purple and white through-out the website which links to the style of the music video as well as the album cover. We took inspiration from Jay Sean's, JLS and Trey Songz' website as they are the type of artists that Knyt would be compared to.

There are some small things that need to be done to the homepage though as it is definitely the weakest page out of the whole website. It has all the conventions of a real website but there is something not coming together and therefore it doesn't fit with the rest of the website.

Editing Update

Uhh Ohh !

We have finished the music video but when exported and put up on YouTube, the white layers we had used to hide the background were clearly visible and any of the original "white" studio background was yellow. It looked horrible !

The school has hired a new media technician who is an expert at video editing and he has advised us to use the chroma key tool instead of adding layers. We have gone through a short bit of the video and done this and it looks much better when exported now !

We are going to work like crazy and change the whole music video. Luckily we don't have to change the structure/ layout of the music video; just the effects so hopefully we will be done by the end of today.

Editing

Our wide shots were extremely hard to film as the background of the studio could be seen and colour change between the walls and floors were very noticeable.

However we managed to edit these shots to change this.

Here is the before and after:

 BEFORE

AFTER

As you can see from the two images above, we completely removed the background and added brightness and contrast to make it white. To do this, we had to add image files of blank white from photoshop and add it to the video file. It was quite difficult to make sure the images weren't obvious but were blended in properly however after a few tries, we managed to do it.

Editing Photos

Here is another example of editing our photos and different colour effects.

Here is the original image:

Here are some edits:

black and white

just airbrushed

 blue tint

colour burn

sepia

Editing Photos

For our album cover and website, we are going to need to airbrush our photos and edit them to make them look more professional.

Here is a practice version i tried to get our desired effect

                                                                        BEFORE

AFTER

Photoshoot

At the end of our video shoot, we took advantage of the fact that we were in a studio with many different backdrops and we did our photoshoot. Here are some of the photos we took with the different colour backdrops and with Harry wearing different outfits:



It's A Wrap !

We have finished our shoot !!!!



Overall, as a group, we feel that it went really well. We're a little scared that we might have missed out a couple shots but we definately have enough footage to edit and create our music video.
We took advantage of the time we had at the end to take photos using a Sony stills camera. We used another smaller camera to film backstage footage.

Harry was really nice during the day and he brought two friends along to keep him company. It was a fun but tiring day and we are really happy with what we achieved.