Evaluation of ancillary texts so far.

3rd filming session.

During my third filming session I required two of my cast members, a main cast member and a supporting cast member, to kiss. I asked my talking props to kiss and then asked my main character to pick up a TV remote and point it at the camera. I decided to include this shot in order to have it fit in with the specific lyrics, "We started making out and she took off my pants But then I turned on the TV". I also decided to get more shots of one of my main cast members acting like a child. I asked Aaron to sit at a child's table and play with two toys like a small child would. I decided to include this shot as I felt I needed more shots of the actors acting like children.

Advert.

This is one of my finished ancillary texts, my album advertisement. I put a lot of effort into creating this advertisement and when looked at the finished product, I am proud of it.

I thought very carefully about what my advert would look like and what should be included within it. Firstly, I wanted my advert to stick to the typical punk conventions by including coloured such as black and red for the text. My band logo, the spider, is already black and red which further influenced my decision to keep the colour scheme the same so it wouldn't look out of place.

When looking at other posters I came to realise that most of them, if not all, contained the record label, the band logo, the name of the band and quotes from magazines reviewing the album in a short response. I decided to follow these conventions of music adverts by including all these features within mine.

Firstly, I had to open up photo shop in order to create my advert. I then used the brush tool and chose a colour so that I could filled the background with black. Black is a convention of punk which is why I decided to include it as my background colour. I then created a banner along the bottom so that I could place the spider onto it because the spider wouldn't be very vi sable if I just placed it onto the black background. I wanted the spider to appear on a white banner and I wanted to erase some of the spiders legs but keep the others in order to make it look like it was coming out of the banner onto the advert. I also wanted to follow the typical conventions of music adverts by including magazine reviews. To do this I simpley used the text tool and then wrote out a made up review from a popular magazine. The magazines I used were Metal Hammer, Kerrang, Q and NME. I decided to have these magazines produce a made up review as they are popular music magazines containing sections on punk/pop-punk and rock bands. When I'd written my reviews, I then changed the texts to red, white and black so that they followed the colour scheme of my advert and followed the typical conventions of the punk genre. When completing this, I then moved the texts to where I wanted them on my advert. I wanted to include star ratings within my advert in order to make it seem realistic. For exmaple I wanted Kerrang to award my magazine 5 stars.

iTunes.

I decided to place my album front cover onto iTunes in order to make the album appear real and to give myself an image of what the album would look like if you could psychically purchase it on iTunes. In order to do this I needed a screen shot of an iTunes page. To do this I decided to type in iTunes page onto google images. I then saved an image of a screen shot, opened it up on photoshop and then opened up my album cover onto a second photoshop page. I then selected the entire image of my front cover and dragged it across onto the iTunes page. I then made the image smaller in order to get it to fit into the blank square on the iTunes page. When I was happy with the size and positioning of the image I then needed to put the band name and name of the album below the cover so that it appeared similar to the other album covers on the screen shot.

2nd filming session.

My target for my second filming session was to complete all the shots of the band playing with their instruments. I believe during my filming session I managed to complete this target. The location was an important factor in my filming. I wanted the band to be playing the song inside a garage. I wanted this to be my main location setting as a garage is a typical location for bands to play in. An example of this is Busted. Busted's single from their debut album, 'sleeping with the light on' is partcially set within a garage. I wanted to emulate this by filming within a garage. So I used my garage as the main set. This session was intended so I could get all of my band shots done. I got number shots including long shots, close ups, medium shots, hand-held camera shots and more. I asked Dave, camera operator, to get these shots as they are commonly used within music videos. I dictated to Dave what shots I wanted for my video but then allowed some freedom by saying to my cast members and my camera operator that if they had any creative thoughts, voice them so that I could use them within my video. I filmed the band constantly 3 times whilst the song was playing in the background so that I could later cut up the sequence and include the shots I wanted. These three constant shots were all medium shots but with the band members acting differently within them. One I particularly liked was when I decided to have the band members change instruments and positions in order to add comedy to the video.

Cast change.

I have had to make adjustments to my cast for my filming. One of my cast members, Karl, is now unable to continue to be a part of my filming due to other commitments I have decided to continue without him. The main cast members will now just include Ricky, Aaron and me. However, I have now decided to change the roles around of the cast memebers. Ricky will remain as the bassist but will now also be the singer, I will be the guitarist and Aaron will now play the role of the drummer of the new three-man band, Lifelong Controversy. Dave will also be staying on nas the camera man for my video and the supporting cast members will be the same too. The supporting cast include three girls, Emily, Hannah and Kayleigh. Karl is now a member of the supporting cast after his exclusion from the main cast.

Finished album front cover.

This is my album front cover for my band Lifelong Controversy. The equipment I used in order to create this cover was a camera, headset and a computer with photoshop installed. However, due to my poor knowledge on photoshop I required help when creating my front cover which came from Aaron Hill.

Tracks and fonts.

These are the tracks I am including within my album. I initially had 13 tracks I was intending to use for my album but I have now cut it down to 11 tracks as I thought 13 might be too many for an album which was intended for a debut album.

In order to make the names of the tracks look punky in their font I decided to have a look at different fonts on http://www.dafont.com/ until I could find a font which I believe fitted within punk style.

When I found a font which I liked I then wrote the track names into www.dafont.com, print screened the image of the track names, pasted them in Microsoft publisher, cropped them to the size I felt was appropriate and then saved it.

Logo.

This is the logo which I am currently using for Lifelong Controversy. I decided to use a spider as the image as spiders are typically seen as a a symbol of fear and patience throughout history and they are commonly used as an emblem within punk culture. For example, pop punk band My Chemical Romance have a spider as their logo for their latest album 'Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys' which was released on November 22nd, 2010. MCR's spider logo was the inspiration for my logo for Lifelong Controversy.

The image below is MCR's current logo:

In order to persue my idea of having a spider as the logo, I first had to find an image of a spider. I did this by simply typing "Spider drawings" into http://www.google.com/ and looking through the pages until I found an image of a spider that I liked, which was this one: http://insepia.net/wp-content/uploads/drawing_spider.jpg. I then saved the image, rotated it anti-clockwise twice and opened it into photoshop.

When in photoshop I cropped the image of the spider to the size which I wanted and then began to play with the different effects which are avaliable on photoshop. In order to find the effects I had to use the filter too and then click on a specfic section. The particular effect that I used was the crosshatch effect which can be found by clicking on filter at the top of the photoshop screen then clicking on brush strokes and then clicking on crosshatch.

2nd album cover edit.

1st album cover edit.

This is my first draft of my album cover for Lifelong Controversy. This is very different to the idea I started off with when I first started drafting my album cover ideas onto paper. My initial idea for my album cover was to have an amp with a disconnected guitar in the background. I wanted to have the amp at the forefront of the image blurred out with the guitar in focus clearly in the background of the image. I then wanted the band name, Lifelong Controversy, at the top of the album cover with the song title 'You're Disconnected' at the bottom of the cover. However, I have decided to change this idea due to the fact that I thought it would of been to complicated to make possible.

I decided to change my idea. I still wanted to keep the idea of having a piece of musical equipment disconnected from a power source as the main image. I asked one of my friends, Aaron Hill, to bring in a headset which he owns into College in order to take pictures of the disconnected headset for my main image of my album cover. In order to keep the focus on the headset and the fact it has been disconnected, when taking the picture I decided to place the wire of the headset carefully away from the main headset itself so that it didn't block the image. I then took a couple of photographs with a digital camera once I was happy with the positioning of headset and then chose the image I believed looked best.

I then uploaded my photos onto a computer and then opened the photography I liked into photoshop. My next task was to create a font which I believe represented the punk genre and then place them onto my image within photoshop. I already had the band name's font finished so I started with that. I opened up the name in Microsoft publisher, clicked on the image and then dragged it across to the photoshop tab, dragged the name onto the photograph I had taken and finally let go of the text. I then used the arrow tool and positioned the text where I wanted it on the image. In order to change the size of the text on photoshop I had to use the free transform tool. In order to find this tool, I had to first click on Edit and free transform. This tool allows you to edit images and text on photoshop, for example, rotation and changing sizes of text.

A common feature I found on most album front covers is a 'parental advisory' sticker. Seeing this, I decided to include one on the front of my album cover. To do this I simplely copied an image of the sticker from google and pasted it onto my album cover. I then moved the image into the corner of my album cover.