Ancillary task 2. Website- Research!

Now my digipak is all complete I can focus on my website. This is the second task I am required to complete for my portfolio. The website will be promoting the new track's video that we have previously created. It will be the band's own official website. I will be using the programme Wix to help me create my site. As I have no experience with creating this kind of website I feel it would be worthwhile to research existing artist's websites to see how they are laid out and the contents of them. This will help give me a clearer idea of what kinds of things should be included on mine and how I can set mine out to make it look exciting and professional in order to attract the audience's attention. I will also only be creating the home page of the website.

Firstly I thought it would be a good idea to look at You Me At Six's official existing website. However I need to make sure I do not make mine too similar so that I do not copy the original thing. I want my website to be original.

You Me At Six's site;

 
This is the background image that has been used for the band's website. It shows finger prints of each member of the band. This is effective in catching the audience's attention as this is something that they are likely to be interested in looking at as it is something personal to each band member. This image also creates a nice black and white effect again as no colour is used here. I am not sure yet whether or not I want to use an image for my background or rather a plain background.

This image shows the home page of the band's official site. In the top left hand corner is the menu bar where you can choose what page you wish to view. Their menu bar includes pages like;
'News, live dates, gallery, music, store, sign up' etc. I will be including a menu bar on my website, even though I am not creating any other pages I will still include this to show what pages I would be including if I was required to make them. As you can see the home page includes the 'news' option. This updates all of the fans with news on the band and their music. The first two news updates involve the band's newest album release and information on the video and tour dates where this new song will be played. I think it is important to promote the new music on the home page of the website to get it easily noticed, this is therefore something I am going to do with my site. The website uses a sliding news bar so the viewers can press the arrow and it slides to the next news updates. Other news that is shown on the next sliding page of news includes news on magazines and radio stations such as 'kerrang'. These have obviously been chosen as they must be things that the fans are interested in. It is important that I am targeting my audience with things on my website that I know they already are interested in from my audience research.

Underneath the news updates is a click here to buy tab for the new album released by the band. This is something I could use with the new track video we created for our music promo in order to promote it further.

Again the band has used mainly a black and white theme for their home page which is something I am interested in doing as my digipak used this theme, I feel it would be a good idea to match them in this way.

Also at the bottom of the website it uses social networking sites such as twitter and facebook, this is again something I am going to do with my website. I feel it is a good idea to use the facebook link as when researching my audience I found that a lot of my facebook friends had 'liked' the band's facebook page. I therefore feel this is a good way to attract these fans to my website.

Now I have researched the existing website of the band I have a better idea of how I am going to create mine.

Things I would have done differently- Digipak!

After creating my final pages of my digipak there are a few things looking back that I feel I would do different with this task if I was to do it again.

My first improvement for the future if this task was done again would be to focus more on the photographs used. I feel in order to have produced more proffessional looking images my group member and I should have focused more on how we were positioning the actors in the photos and what they were doing in them. I have previously said that we had some trouble trying to get the actors to act professionally with these ancillary task photos which limited us to what kinds of photos we could take. Even though we were quite happy with how the 'not so serious' photos of the band made them look like they fit well together as a real band as it made them seem more down to earth which might have helped us target the audience better. Although I still feel it would have been more useful to get more photographs of the band looking a bit more serious and professional to make the whole digipak look more professional. Therefore in the future I would suggest that we took a lot more photos of our actors in order to ensure we have all of the types of images we need for our ancillary tasks.

Another improvement I would set myself for my digipak would be to be more experimental and creative with photoshop when creating each page of the ancillary task. Even though I like the black and white effect I have used for each part of my digipak I feel I could have experimented with more effects to see if they looked any better. I feel I could have manipulated the images more to make them look a bit more creative, however as my experience with photoshop is not great I might not have been able to make any other effects look as effective. Overall I am happy with how my digipak turned out but would set these as improvements with the future in order to make it even better second time round as I would have had better experience with creating a digipak.

Final Front Cover!

Final of Inside Page!

Final Back page!

Creating my disk!

Now I had finished my research and had a clear idea on how I could design my own, I could begin the process! Firstly I started off by selecting a plain disk template from google images that I could work from. I then selected the paint bucket tool to create the black background. This can be shown below.

Next I wanted to add in the band's name. I wanted this text to match the housestyle of the rest of the digipak so I chose the Minion Pro text.

Above you can see where I have placed the text. I thought it would be a good idea to have the name at the top to make it stand out and show its importance. I also felt the white looked good against the black background. However I thought the text looked too simple and I wanted to emphasise the important of the band's name even more to make it stand out more so I thought it would be a good line to have it underlined. This would again relate to the front cover of my digipak as I also chose to underline the band's name there too. Below you can see that I have done this.

I also did not like the text in bold so I decided to change it to 'regular' as I felt this looked better. My disk research also showed me that it would be a good idea to include the album name on the disk. This would help show the target audience clearly that this disk belongs to my CRASH digipak.

Above you can see where I have placed the album name. I did not like this text in small case letters as I felt it looked less important particularly as this text is smaller than the band's name, which is something I still wanted to keep as I have done this on the front cover of my digipak. I decided to change this to capital letters to give it emphasis. I also thought it would be a good idea underline this to match the band's name above. After I had done this I still thought that my disk looked too plain. I therefore decided to add in the copyright terms and conditions that I had created for my back page. This can be seen below.

I thought this looked effective as it filled up a lot of the empty space at the bottom of the disk. Because I felt the background looked slightly dull just plain black I thought it might be a good idea to try out different effects on the disk background using the filter- artistic pencil tool. I decided to choose the 'plastic wrap' effect as I felt this made the disk more realistic and didn't make it look so dull. Below is the final disk design.

Disk design- research

After creating all of the pages for my digipak I also thought it would be worthwhile to create a design for the disk. This would make my digipak seem more realistic, I also thought it would draw in more attention, rather than a plain dull disk with no design. I first decided to research disk designs from existing artist's CD's to give me an idea on what mine could look like.

The first disk I looked at was from You Me At Six's album 'Sinners Never Sleep'. Below is an image of the design.

As you can see this disk is quite simple and not too over-packed with writing. It simply has the band's name in large writing at the top of the disk and teh name of the album below. Below this are the copyright terms and conditions. I have already included the terms and conditions on my back page of my digipak. I like how this design just uses a black background and there is no image. I feel that this may be something I will try with my disk as it will fit nicely with the black and white theme of the rest of my digipak designs. I feel that if I was to use another image for the disk it would be too much as I have used photographs on every page of my digipak which is why I feel it would be an effective idea to just go for a more simple design.

 

 

 

Below is another disk from one of You Me At Six's album 'Hold Me Down'.

 

This second disk uses slightly more colour to fit the rest of the album. The front and back of this album are a light brown colour. They have matched the colour of the disk to the colour scheme of the rest of the album. This is why I feel it would still be a good idea to use the black background for my disk to match the colour scheme of mine. This disk uses a nice floral pattern on the left side to fill up the empty space. This again matches the style of the rest of the album. A pattern like this however would not fit in at all with the style of design of my digipak. Again it uses the band's name, the name of the album and the copyright terms and conditions.

 

 

 

Process of Inside page!

Lastly now my front cover and back page are complete I can work on my Inside page. Below is the process of me making this part of the Digipak.

 

Firstly I started off by creating a black background. I did this because on my drawn plan I have planned to use a small image at the bottom part of the page so this would leave the rest of the page colourless or with no background so I thought it would therefore be easier to have a background already there for when I added the image in.

 

 

 

 

The screenshot above shows where I have added in the image of the band.  I have made the image smaller so that there is space at the top half of the Digipak for the text to go. I will leave the original image in colour for now to see what this looks like once I add the text in.

 

The above screenshot shows where I placed the text. Again I have used 'Minion Pro' and have made the text white so that it matches the style of the front and back covers of the Digipak. I made the writing big enough so that it filled the majority of the empty space. I like this page as I feel it gives the audience the opportunity to feel like they are communicating/ connecting with the boys in the band when reading their messages. They will feel like the boys are talking to them when they say thank you to their fans. I felt this was a good wat to target my audience through my digipak.

 

Above are the messages I have created from the boys. I wanted to make each one slightly personal to make it seem more real. I included thanks to family members, fans and girlfriends etc.

 

Once I had added the text I didn't like what the picture looked like in colour and I felt it would make the Digipak more professional if the style matched the rest of the digipak which is why I then added in the affect of black and white. I also liked the use of the black and white as it matches the dark colours that the boys were wearing in the photographs. However even though I had decided how I wanted this part of my digipak to look I realised that the background of the photograph was still showing. I thought this looked un professional and wouldn't usually be something that is seen on a digipak. I then decided to use my knowledge of cutting things out of images from previously using photoshop for other productions last year to help me remove the background curtain so that the whole background of the inside of the case is black. The image below shows the picture again but without the background where I have edited it out.