My Final Essay

Here is the link to my final essay:

Final Essay

My Final Social Page

 

Click Here to see our Band's Instagram 

My Final DigiPak

 

Here is the link to see a better quality version of the digipak - Final Digiapk

My Final Music Video

Enjoy our final music video! 😁

DigiPack Progression

In order to help Ben begin creating a DigiPak, we all sent him our original designs and discussed the important elements of the Digipak to reflect the band's image. We emphasized the importance of bright colours to reflect the band's quirky and fun aesthetic. I also gave him my sheets of annotated real life products (seen in my digipak analysis blog post) to have real life product comparisons. 

Ben's intial design:

The use of colour with this digipak was good as it was fun, however, the inside panel (bottom) was not cohesive with the outside panels (top). Additionally, we were told that the combination of naturalistic photos and stylized graphics did not often work in combination and here the difference was extremely stark. The inside panel reminds me of a 'The Strokes' product we looked at that we were told took itself too seriously compared to our band and doesn't communicate the style or vibe we wanted. 

With that feedback Ben began reworking his design:

The design had completely changed and the teacher feedback was that it was too serious and minimalist. I completely agreed with this as it seems quit rigid with the placement of the shapes and lines. Also, the gradient of colours was too soft and deadpan. While digipaks often play with empty space, this was too minimalist and compared to the personality of our band, it was just boring.

After this, I sent Ben the fake magazine cover that I had made for the Instagram and that Daisy illustrated over. Daisy and I thought this would help give a visual reference to the style we were looking for.

Taking his original design and the reference of the magazine, Ben created a new design:

I liked the use of flowers, colour and playful slightly childish graphics. We all gave feedback and came up with a list of things that needed changing:

1. the rim around the photo - black is too harsh and doesn't match the band
2. new photo - too naturalistic
3. more doodles - similar to the magazine cover, we wanted more fun graphics/ doodles

From there the design became:

The colour palette had changed into 3 dominant colours of pink, white and yellow and the circle outline matched this. I felt there was something slightly underwhelming about it and there had been no progress on the inside panels. As a result, Daisy and I worked together to create a drawn outline of 6 panels. Daisy drew this and we took inspiration from my phone case and a real life product.

outside panels

inside panels

This is one of the real life products that combines naturalistic images (which are still edited and manipulated) with stylized doodles/ drawings. I thought it would be good to refer to this in order to make ours look realistic while including the elements we wanted. Daisy thought of using the polaroid on the front panel rather than the circle.

phone case - we wanted to replicate the use of colour and shapes as it fits the overall vibe of the band, especially their music video. It is also slightly similar to the Ben's initial design (top left corner of the image) in terms of the use of colour across the corner of a panel.

front 3 panels when open - rough sketch

back 3 panels when open - rough sketch

After Daisy drew the sketch we spoke to Ben about what he thought and what elements of the pre-existing design we had kept and what we wanted to add and change. I feel that this was really useful as it meant we were able to communicate and have the same visual reference rather than imagining different products in our heads. At this point we began looking for fonts to use. Daisy found a font called 'Keep On Truckin' which I then figured out how to download and utilize. 

Testing the new font

Once we had made the sketch and I had shown Ben how to download the font, he was able to create a digipak that we were all happy with in terms of the aesthetic and how cohesive it was. 

At this point, Ben had flown back home for Christmas and I became really ill, however, we were able to communicate as a group online. The only feedback I had was possibly making the album name stand out and editing the pictures more. However, I am happy with the vibe and colour palette, I think that it is not only cohesive in itself but also with the music video and social media account we have made. 

Social Media Progression

Before posting anything, Daisy and I sat together and annotated real band feeds and what we liked and could take from them. Some key points we took were:

• casual captions
• mixture of posed and candid photos
• marketing - text + graphics on posts often used by The Wombats
• proof that the band can play instruments
• grainy editing style
• real concert shots

1st Shoot:

The first photoshoot was done as a part of the costume fitting, Daisy took photos of all of them in their costumes and then took them for a mini band shoot to see how everything worked together. However, because working with a band comes with the challenge of getting the whole group together, these shots came in really useful when we needed photos and were unable to do a shoot. 

(a handful of photos Daisy took)

2nd Shoot:

With our second shoot Daisy and I had all the band members come in clothes that were casual yet fitted the relaxed, quirky style of the band. In order to get multiple different shots we took of layers of their outfits and swapped some jackets/ clothing items with ones we were wearing. 

Reference photo for the post above ^^

Using the tent that was set up for the school's musical with sound and lighting boxes we made it look like a backstage area:

Shoots with Luke:

Because Luke has the same lesson time as us, we were able to grab shots of him alone quickly and easily in order to get a variety of posts on the Instagram.

This post was quite 'silly', it is unedited and looks like Luke did it himself - we took the inspiration for this post from the Wallows and their lead singer dressed as a pumpkin on Halloween. 

However, most lesson time was used to edit photos, create fake marketing and organise the next photos we needed. 

On occasion, daisy and I were able to create things that were written and run to a location we had in mind and shoot them. For example this fake set list where we shot the other back-stage photo but with flash and these scribbled lyrics to a song against a guitar. 

Pre-existing shots:

One post on the instagram was taken prior to the project at our schools rock concert and we used this as it was taken by Daisy.

Creating the magazine cover:

The first piece of marketing I created was a magazine cover. I searched for small up-and-coming British music magazines and scrolled through google images. I found a vibrant cover from 'So Young' and after looking up the magazine company (here) I found a "creative platform fueled by the vibrant" scenes of alternative and indie-pop music. I recreated the base of one of their covers using Canva:

I could not copy the font so I screenshotted the masthead and issue number and placed the image on mine as the background colour was the exact same. 

I cut out images of the band (using PicsArt) from various photos we already had and placed them in a range of different positions. I added a white outline to them to make it feel more graphic and 'cut and pasted' as their covers often are. 

I sent Daisy the different layouts and she chose one and added illustrations and cover lines to show the other artists inside the magazine as they have in a minimalistic way. 

our final cover inspired by 'So Young' Issue 21

Editing the 'End of the Road' Poster:

In one of our previous posts Daisy had mentioned this festival in the caption. I found the poster from their 2021 festival and edited the dates and added our bands name into the line-up to create a fake yet realistic 2022 poster. I used PicsArt to draw over the pre-existing titles and tried my best to colour match and font match the original - there was no colour dropper tool. 

The Original

Adding 'Midnights People'

Changing Dates

Shoot Day:

We used some photos that we had gotten on the day of the shoot to promote the music video on the lead up to its 'release'.

I had created this TikTok on the day of our shoot while we were setting up after lunch and it worked as a behind the scenes video for the Instagram!

I asked Daisy to screen record the opening of our music video to post alongside 2 other posts about the music video to promote its release. 

Creating Spotify wrapped:

It is around this time of year when Spotify's wrapped comes out and people often post them on their stories to share who they listen to. Daisy screenshotted her Spotify (as she listens to the genre often) and we worked on editing one each. Using a photo of the band we placed them over the original image and, once again, used PicsArt to closely match the fonts and the colours. 

Edited by Me

Edited by Daisy

Tour Poster:

Taking inspiration from The Wallows Daisy used PicsArt as we had throughout the entire process to create a similar tour poster.

I found this Thomas Headon tour poster and we copied the cities and locations from it as he is a small artist who plays small venues similar to our band. 

I edited our poster to create a second post from it using the sold out sticker from the Thomas Headon poster that I created on Snapchat using the sticker tool. I placed it next to some of our dates and encouraged the audience to get tickets while they could. 

Single Release Video:

From looking at 'The Wallows' Instagram I saw they had created a video post to announce their new single release, it had no sound and was simply a background with text on it that changed. Using a photo of clouds from Canva, I zoomed into the background the create a water-colour/ ethereal type of aesthetic as the 'song' I was going to promote is called 'euphoria'. I then used the font I had downloaded for the band and typed all the information, screenshotted it and then added it to an iMovie and made it into a short video with no sound. 

The Wallows Single Promo

Our Single Promo 'Euphoria'

We tried to keep all of our captions casual and friendly. Also, we used phrases we would actually say rather than a very artificial caption from the record label, creating a robotic voice. We wanted to make sure that the captions complimented the photos and the band holistically. 

Towards the beginning of putting our feed together, we were told that there were quite a few 'countryside' posts - as we go to school in the countryside that is often the background when shooting outside. However, moving forward we tried to space these out as much as we could.