Mart's Evaluation Question Four

Question Four: How did you use media technologies in the , research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

Digipak – After planning ideas as a group as to how we wanted our Digipak to look like we settled on a picture of Jenny and Johnny together on a bench that showed their unity at that time and together as a group, seeing as their name is Jenny & Johnny we thought it would be strange to only show one member on the cover so all our ideas had to involve both of them on the cover.

Initially I created a picture to use as the front cover art that we have since used on the inside of the Digipak. This shows Jenny sat on a bed with her head in her hands looking visibly upset. Johnny is shown lying behind Jenny ‘flat out’ appearing to be sleeping after a heavy night out drinking which is referenced in the video. The picture had a variety of effects on to make it slightly unusual which is something that Jenny & Johnny are.

The text of the Jenny & Johnny on the Digipak isn’t a clip art text. After searching through various internet font websites, for example dafont.com we couldn’t decide on a suitable font as they were all either too formal for the fun characteristics of Jenny & Johnny or just inappropriate to use. We finally reached a decision and choose to create our own colourful font which I think works really well with the rest of the Digipak. The letters are all individual and were cut out of different magazines. They were then pieced together the different case of the letters, some upper and some lower show that the conventions of typing in all lower case or all upper case doesn’t have to be done.

Magazine lettering created our font

The inspiration behind the artwork on the Digipak was a dinner plate with spaghetti on toast on the plate with a dinner cloth underneath the cloth. Initially the cloth and plate weren’t going to be included and by chance I took the pictures of the spaghetti on the plate with a striped table cloth underneath it. Even though there wasn’t an intention for the plate or cloth it worked really well and Bronwyn and Beth liked the shot. Bronwyn then added the knife and fork along with a different table cloth as it the original one didn’t fill out the shot/cover.

Inside of Digipak. Very homely approach it like the video.

The editing of the Digipak was really easy as we had Photoshop to use on a Mac. Photoshop has lots of different tools that make it really easy to create professional looking material which hopefully we have achieved. For our research we looked on Amazon for the other artists Digipak’s. This allowed us to browse through many Digipak’s with ease without going to a music shop and physically looking at the Digipak’s. Additionally if we had looked in shops we wouldn’t have been able to look inside the case as they all now have security plastic casings around them.

Webpage – The webpage was created on iWeb on the Mac’s in the Mac Suite where I am now. In our group for the song Switchblade by Jenny and Johnny it was decided that I had the lead role in designing and creating the webpage. For the initial research I looked Jenny and Johnny’s official webpage, which has a plain blog layout which is slightly boring. I then looked at other artists webpage’s such as Florence and the Machine, The Fratellis, The Futureheads and Wye Oak. These other artists webpage’s shown me that the webpage didn’t have to be ram packed with different things and that simple was the best but to tweak a boring set layout and have different things that make it stand out from the rest as the webpage is one of few things that the artist can show the consumer that will differ them for the competition if their music is similar to other artists. 

Wye Oak's webpage is simple and very effective in my opinion.

From this I designed the webpage to have lots of pictures of our artist as at the end of the day they are what essentially sell the records as it is all about them. The artists or in our case the actors appear to sit on different words on the webpage to give the webpage a fun feel, to stride away from a formal looking plain layout blog like Jenny and Johnny have presently as their webpage. We had a sort of two layer approach to our webpage, the base layer had the table cloth with the name of the song partially hidden and the artists name around the main layer of the webpage. The letters of the song name and the artists name are in the same style that was used on the Digipak to keep the same conventions and look of that.

Our webpage adds a fun factor which Jenny and Johnny portray in their own products

For our webpage I used Photoshop to make the different images of the artists and the main back images. This is because I can use Photoshop quite well and if I were to make it on iWeb it wouldn’t look as good as it does now. The different tools on Photoshop made it really easy to achieve the look and feel that we wanted to create.

Overall – The online media technology has enabled us to distribute our project to a wide audience by allowing us to have an online blog that made it easy for us as a group to keep and share ideas and work on the project when we weren’t in class time. This means that we have done lots of outside work that have been crucial in making our music video. We had a Facebook group that we used to share ideas and communicate on lots of different ideas. Below are two screenshots of that wall.