Filming our performance! (finally)

We set out today with the intention of filming Connor walking through the park and singing at the camera. However, the weather was so unbelievably terrible that we were all frozen through and this not only affected Connor's performance, but also our ability to hold a camera! We tried for as long as possible, running through the song a couple of times but we found that between the cold and him trying to remember the lyrics without any visual prompts, the shoot was not going to go well. We decided to head back to my house, which was local, and maybe slightly change our idea to Connor sitting at home and not knowing what to do with himself now that the girl is gone. This meant we could get the lyrics up for him through an off-camera TV screen and also allow us all to thaw.

We got a few shots and hopefully a few photographs which we can use in our ancillary tasks, but overall the shoot was not really a success. In the end we decided to review the footage we had captured in the upcoming week, but also to schedule another shoot in for the following Friday as we knew what we had got today was adequate at best. Despite this, the sense of relief we had afterwards, knowing we had some footage, was beautiful.

Analysing Websites

Website navigation bars

The first thing I noticed when looking into the navigation bars of websites was the colour scheme. They were all quite dark with one or potentially two feature colours to make it stand out, and this is something I could bring in to my work.

The reason I wanted to look into navigation bars was to look at what pages specifically I wanted to include. They all have a homepage, a tour/events page, a media/gallery page, and a store. Most of them also have social network icons with links to external pages. I could definitely include this into my work to make my website really impressive.

The pages I have decided to use:

Website Homepage Analysis

Now that the robbery has happened, we are trying to put as much focus as we can on our websites/digipaks because it is something we can do from home. I'm starting to think about building my website but before I do so, I decided to look at some homepages so that I know what to include in my own.

 

Robbery

On Monday morning our media teachers arrived in the media department to find that all our new Apple Macs had been stolen. The thieves had broken in and stolen all of our computers, cameras and light kits (except for a couple that were on weekend release).

This is going to severely hinder our project as our deadline was supposed to be at the end of the week for our music videos, but now that the Macs with the project files with them have been stolen, we have to work from old back ups. This means that not only do we lose a week or two worth of editing, but it's going to be hard to restore the back ups when the replacement Macs get here. It is unlikely we will be able to use them after half term as they need to be connected to our server and programs such as Final Cut Express need to be installed. Even when this happens, it is unlikely that everything will run smoothly and this will make our videos and ancillary products much harder to complete.

As soon as this happened our teachers were thinking of ways not to hinder our coursework. Our deadline has now been pushed back until the 8th March for our music videos and ancillary products, which gives us more time and allows for errors. Given that we'd lost our Macs, editing was out of the picture so we were told to use our lesson time to focus on our ancillary projects, but even those are extremely hard to do on such old software. For now, we will have to do as much work as we can at home and hope that after half term things will improve.

Changing our performance idea

Although we had a well established and good idea for our performance, we decided to change it for a number of reasons. Firstly, in order to complete our idea where Connor was singing to the TV, we would have to export our edited eras to DVD and this is quite hard as we haven't finalized the edits on each era yet. Secondly, if we did do this, we would need to plan which words of the lyrics would be sung during each era: another editing risk we did not want to take. Thirdly, we knew we were running out of time and we do not want to complicate things.

Due to these reasons, we decided to change our idea to having Connor walk down a street and sing as if he is looking for her. Our new idea is quick and easy to get done, and still ties into the narrative. We've scheduled this shoot for the Friday of half term in Raynes Park as this is convenient for Connor.

Choosing our band name

Despite the fact it's so late in our project, we have only today decided on a band name!! We have chosen the name 'Suburban Typo' as we feel this could mean that our band are misfits, as 'typo' means mistake. This would mean that our band felt like they did not fit in with the typical perfect suburban lifestyle. This would fit our genre as a lot of indie rock bands present themselves as scruffy and have a particular focus on being independent, which is not at all the suburban lifestyle.