THE CREATION OF THE CROFT WEBSITE

AS part of our digipack, we need to create a digipack and magazine advert or website. Being an avid web designer during my spare time, I thought it would make sense if I made a website for our band. So now I'm at home using Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create a website. In this post I'm going to explain what I've done and why in brief detail.

Firstly I created a template on photoshop as you can see:

As you can see it has blue lines, ignore these, these are just lines to slice up the template into images to import into HTML code.

I chose to use dark colours as we're a rock band (which conforms with typical conventions) and so I made a dark grey background with a black diagonal pattern, and a plain black content background. I also made a small banner, showing the band members with "The Croft" next to it. I made the pictures black and white to relate to our music video and also it gives it a retro feel. I then added the navigation below, (home, the band etc..).


From there I imported the sliced images into dreamweaver which is a program that helps you write code for websites. There isn't much point showing a screenshot of this program, as the code just looks like "jibberish".

I thought it would be a great idea to include our video on the main page of our website, primarily promoting it, and making it stand out to viewers, instead of linking to the video, so it attracts more attention. So I coded this up in HTML and CSS, and here's how it looks in my browser:

The content such as news etc and general information will be underneath the text at the bottom, however this is yet to be added.

Quite pleased with what I've done so far. So I'm going to take a break, however I will keep this updated.

Photo shoot

Uploaded these pictures to blogger so I can use them at home when I create the website for our band.

Most recent update - 12/11

We felt our video didn't have a proper ending, which was also felt by our audience, so me (Jack), Andy and Will quickly today went and filmed an appropriate ending of us three (the band) walking down a ramp as if we were exiting a building. There is also a rock star attitude of Andy giving a rude gesture, and me and Will laughing.

We then uploaded this footage to the mac and Andy took charge in editing. He inserted the ending and added a fade effect.

As we speak we're pretty much refining our video, and touching up on anything that needs touching up.

MASSIVE UPDATE PART 2 - 11/11

This post will be about what we achieved today on the 11th November.

Firstly at 9am we borrowed equipment and set up our band on the stage in the hall. We borrowed a drum kit and a bass guitar from the music suite and spent the entirety of first period filming performance from various angles and catching different bits of playing. This was to be the live performance part of our film, although we no longer intend to convey the impression of performing to an actual audience. The video is pretty much strictly rehearsals and band shenanigans. The few hours after this was spent putting the footage from the two cameras we used up onto the MAC and deciding which of it could actually be used to a practical degree. After chopping down our footage we put together our clips and edited our piece. Much of the editing we've been doing has involved making sure that a majority of the camera cuts are on the beat, syncing lyrics and instrumental shots to the music and making sure that we didn't re-use footage inappropriately. We also added transitions to subtly link/join clips however we didn't use them too much, as we feel it will make the video repetitive. The most recent decision we made was to put the entire video in black and white to give it a more authentic feel. Research has proven that a lot of band montages, tour videos and backstage logs are filmed in black and white according to the band's artistic preferences.

MASSIVE UPDATE PART 1

Where do we start. The blogging we haven't done has left a huge whole in our blog, and what we're doing now/have done is very different to what our blog suggests.

Band

We've converted the band to a 3 piece band consisting of Andy as the lead singer and guitarist, Will as the drummer and Jack as the bassist. This is because we had troubles securing externals to be in our band. This made things easier as we are all reliable and were able to succesfully film with no "hiccups".

Narrative

Our music video is now based on a "behind-the-scenes-band-on-tour" theme inviting viewers backstage seeing what the band members get up to and see them pre-performance and also rehearse. The video introduces the band members one by one, and also shows clips of us altogether. It works up to the live rehearsal. Before you see the band behind the stage, briefly practising and generally mucking about as you'd expect a rock band to do. Then you follow them up to the stage where you see them perform a rehearsal of the song.

Okay, So...

We had the hall booked, but we weren't allowed in because apparently the lights were being fixed and as such we werent' allowed in for the entire day, as well as omnday and tuesday.  As such, we've had to COMPLETELY re-do our piece and cut out most live performance footage.  Instead we are now aiming for the "band on tour" look, with the video playing over the music

Nikki's illness

In light of Nikkie being Ill we may have to hire another female to perform the narrative part of our piece.