CD album cover

ideas and planing

We have been influenced by Pendulums' album 'In Silico' which features a circuit board look which is in fact sperm reaching the egg. It has inspired us to give our album cover an electrical circuit board look, which relates to the electronic sound that Drum and Bass tends to have. The colours on this cover are also ones which you represent with the genre; the electric blue, deep reds florescent colours that resemble glow sticks and remind our/ its audiences of drum & bass music.

Within our CD album cover and Digi pack will be the image of a green circuit board with our band name, logo and album name as well as record label and producers. The colours on our album will be the typical green circuit board. Changing it to one of the other colours mentioned above was too overpowering and I believe takes away a bit of the point we are making about our music having electronic influences. Whilst this colour change may be a useful technique in other areas to help distinguish us from the crowd, I think that we want to keep the conception that we fundamentally are like other drum and bass bands. Our logo, band name and album name will all be placed on the little blackish-grey boxes. Our logo and band name will stay the same design but I think that we should make the album name look like it belongs on the circuit board, in that plain mechanical easy read text. I think it works aesthetically and is a nice little quirk to the album cover. We come up with the band name from influences form films, loud noises is a quote from the 2004 film ‘Anchorman’. Loud noises also can be linked into our genre of music when the music is often loud and defining. We feel loud Noises is a clever and quirky chose for our brand name. We matched the name with bands such as the Noisettes or Pendulum. Other aspects of our band like the other songs on the album cover also come from quotes from the film ‘Anchorman’. This was just for ease of decision and is open to change. The album cover is very important in creating the first image in the audiences/ consumers mind. We have to get this part right to be more effective. We will continue to develop and change our ideas also getting outsider comment on our album cover so that we get another perspective of our product so that it’s as most eye catching and aesthetically pleasing as possible.

Shooting Diary

Day 5

We had planned to film a large amount on this day because we had all members of our team plus a volunteered extra (Dan Norris). Unfortunately our day was cut short when Louis received a call telling him that he was supposed to be in a biology exam. No matter we decided to re film missing parts and links which I had noticed when forming the film in editing. Sam reminded everyone that we should go back to his house, (after he had gone to the toilet,) we were able to use Ollie once again for the chasing scenes.

Jack decided to film more of the running scenes so that we could also add more footage to edit as well as getting footage to make it the film flow. When filming one running scene Dan (the extra) came across an amazing location behind some garages. Instantly we set up the cameras so that we could film a chase scene round the winding alley ways even filming from upon the garages to give a CCTV effect, (an effect we learned when filming our preliminary exercise in A level media.)

The weather was perfectly suited to our film and so we used all that we could of it. Again it was cold but we were prepared with gloves. More chasing scenes kept me warm. When filming we try to gain the best places to shot from, pushing the camera men, Jack and Sam, to get the best shots possible. Jack attempted to climb a wall on the other side of Poulner Bridge, (where we shot previously) but in doing so scraped his nipple piercing, the shot turned out to be awesome but according to jack not good enough considering the pain he had gone trough. Jack insisted that we were to end filming and capture the footage even though there was useable daylight.

Another part of the days filming included scenes when running down alley ways. The camera and camera men proved to be a difficult obstacle to get round when running and acting the chase scene. During the filming were we also to film bystanders in white masks, this is where Dan Norris was needed. This though also meant that it was another obstacle I encountered when running. To overcome this we split the shots into two and filmed me running without them in the background and then a second time with them poking their heads round and into shot

This ended up being one of our more successful days. Overall we filmed and captured over 20 minutes worth of footage.

Shooting Diary

Day 3-
We actually forgot a battery when filming on one of our days which we decided to film, so we opted to choose another day with better weather as well as with charge in our battery. Technically this is our 4th day with worked out to our advantage, meaning we could film our dog walking scene in good weather.
Because we unfortunately were unsuccessful again with the filming of a scene on a previous day, we re-recorded what we could one day three we can also use previous footage which we can edit into our film. This is not a loss because we have enough good footage to edit with; this was especially the fight scene which we didn’t film properly breaking the 180 degree rule.
With re filming the fight scene we realised that we needed to keep the camera fixed when originally we broke the 180 degree rule. This would also be easily done with only 30 minutes dedicated to get enough footage to edit with. This mainly included scenes with the mirror and the fighting scene. We even thought that filming flying objects could highlight what is being thrown. We filmed sections with low angles, and close ups for some more emotion to our shots. This is also used in Alfred Hitchcock’s “psycho” when he uses a mix of shots of the same object to create uncertainty and uncomfortably with most of his scenes including the famous shower scene. We hope to create the same feel for our audience as well as Hitchcock does in his.
On this day of filming we were to film sections with the dog involved. This proved harder than anticipated. Working with animals was difficult, even though Sam’s dog is well behaved and was the perfect looking, scary, big dog for our film but he did get a bit of stage fright and it proved difficult to even make him bark. We first and to make him bark by blowing in his face but also making him face the camera. This was extremely difficult. We tried several attempts also aggravating the dog by showing him some cardboard which he apparently barks at. Again we had to try different techniques and soon he got tired. We were also being watched by an audience who often put him off as well. We shall learn from this so that our other public filming parts are not watched and ruined by other people. We did eventually get some great footage of the dog including some barking. Exact shots we wanted and selected for our film in hope to make it effective for our audiences. The dog can be edited to make our audiences scared as well as uncertain and feel as if with our trippy character. In future we will use the dog again to have a running scene when he chases me to link our scenes together.

Email To The Prodigy

This is the email which we designed to send to the prodigy asking for permission to use their song 'Piranha'for copying purposes. This is an email that we wrote up to send to The Prodigy asking permission to use their track for our course because we felt that is was best suited to our project and our initial ideas.

'We are a group of media students from a small town in the U.K.
We are writing to ask if we could use the track ‘Piranha’ for our media course.
The work is entirely for academic purposes and has no commercial value to us.
We will not be re-selling or making any profit out of our production, we kindly ask
you permission to use your track for our media portfolio. Thank you. '

We are cuurently awaiting a reply so we are going ahead with this track untill further notice.

Band Photos

Band Photos
To make our website and blogs looks more realistic and individual we took some photos of all of us in a band style. We used a photography student to come out with us around the grounds of our school to try and get some good quality and realistic looking band photos, ones we could use for our internet sight. These are the results:

Above:
This picture incorporates the whole of the band, allowing the entire band to get media coverage. We altered the photo to make it black and white to give it a more sombre feel, which there by draws more attention to the faces as they have become the brightest object in the picture. This is a typical band style image focusing on the band members getting recognised. This is perfect for our sight showing the audience and sight user all band members clearly and because of our facial expressions it shows our way of life and how we want the audience to perceive our music and us.

Above:
This image was manipulated and the contrast was altered along with the brightness to give the image a washed out feel. The shot was taken from a reverse angle to break away from the mould of typical band photos, just as our music is breaking away from typical conventional styles.

Above:
This is just a casual image, a filler image almost, of two members of the band (Jack Arnold and Ben Carey) sat in the street. To edit these photos we used adobe Photoshop, a programme we are all use to using.

Above:
This image is particularly effective; it shows three members of our group (Jack Arnold, Ben Carey and Sam Harradine) behind metal bars, almost caged in. This is a representation of how our band is trying to break out of the cage that society has put this genre in. Waiting for their big break to hit the mainstream crowds.

Above:
This picture is also a symbolic image. It represents our band breaking free of the cage that it has been forced into. Going against what society believes and doing what we want regardless of others opinions. Hence the steel bars with the open door.

Above:
We chose to use the negative and black and white effect again on this photo, just to give it an edge. However we removed the effect on both the members’ shoes to bring the picture to life. The way the characters are facing away from the camera resembles the way the band is not looking for attention and is happy doing their own thing, which is very similar to other bands in this genre of music, such as The Prodigy.

Above:
This image is basically our own recreation of the iconic album cover from the beetles’ Abbey Road, which can be seen next to our version. We tried to keep our version as similar as possible to keep the recognisability, but added our own modern twist on it to keep it individual and original. Enough said.

Animatic

This is the link to our group’s animatic. This is a moving storyboard that we drew for our music video to give us an idea and outline of what we need to do when filming. I drew all of the pictures for the story board from idea’s that jack and ben would speak out, and from those words I would have to create an image to represent what they wanted to happen in the video, it was rather hit and miss for a while. This took longer than expected as we had a lot of idea’s and took time to decide upon which one would be best suited for our music video. Once the story board was completed we took photos of each individual image and then uploading them to the computer and them putting them onto premier pro. Then Louis created the animatic, but as this is our final year of media at a level we decided to make it more interesting. We altered some of the pictures so they actually appear to move in the screen. Also Louis added the band pictures we took into the animatic at certain intervals in the song, for example when the word Piranha appears a band photo will appear for a couple of frames. This made the animatic more interesting and appealing, also looks more professional than just the images moving slowly to the music. The animatic only lasts for two thirds of the song as our storyboard was not long enough to last the whole 3 and a half minutes. So we cut to a black fade and then had some tittles come up and faded the song out to finish it off.