Website Merch

For the 'Shop' page on my website, I have been busy creating Toxic City's very own merchandise! To do this, I found images from Google and Flickr, which you can see here:

From here, I inserted each picture into Photoshop, and set about editing each one to make it an official piece of Toxic City merchandise. Using my graphics tablet, I drew on every picture. Here are the finished results:

I used iconography from the album cover and also from the music video, as well as colour schemes from my website and digipak to ensure that they all were identifiable as Toxic City's band merchandise.

Filming Day 4

After all the time spent filming the other scenes, there were only a few shots left to film, and those were in school. One free after school, I managed to round up Sydney and Ruby, and film the final six shots left to complete the narrative. This was definitely the shortest time spent filming, since it only took around an hour. 

I've finally finished filming, so expect the final video shortly!

GIFs on my Website

In order to increase the interactivity of my band website, I've created some GIFs. 

This eye blinking I drew and animated myself, therefore I'm particularly proud of it. I drew some of these in my comic book, so I animated this GIF in order to unify the two products.

These pixel versions of the character from the comic book I created using the site Piskel , which is free and allows you to create your own pixel sprites!

These GIFs I created for the 'About' page in order to increase the level of mysteriousness surrounding Toxic City. They were created on GIPHY , which is free, and allows you to create GIFs from any pictures or videos you may have.

Filming Day 3

After remembering that I needed to re-film some of the house scenes, I set up all the equipment again at home, and this time brought a friend along to help, since there were a few scenes that required some very tricky positions. For example, the scene where Sydney and I are stood in front of the bathroom mirror, my friend had to stand and set up the camera in the bath. Luckily, the shots came out brilliantly this time, so it was worth re-filming!

Textual Analysis of a CD Cover and Website

The song I'm choosing for my music video is Agnes by Glass Animals, and therefore I believe it's necessary for me to study Glass Animal's album cover - How To Be a Human Being- and their website. 

I'll start by discussing the album cover.

   

(CD Cover)                                                                                                           (Vinyl Cover)

All variations of the album cover present the same 11 people, which is- according to an article I found- because of the fact that each one of these people is representative of a song on the album. Dave Bayley, the band's lead singer, wrote each song with a persona in mind, and gave them each different backstories (and moodboards!) so that the actors on the cover could actually portray each character. There is still a lot of speculation on the internet as to which actor corresponds to each song. By doing this, Bayley has created an interactive piece of media which his audience can engage with and debate online, as well as attracting a new audience who may find his music due to this audience engagement. 

The people on the cover have been edited with an orange filter, and are all wearing pastel colours- an effect which is reproduced in quite a few of their music videos. The pastel colours help to unify a theme throughout the colour scheme on the album, which causes it to look incredibly visually effective.

The borders of the album were created by cutting squares out of magazines and books and painstakingly arranging them to create this 'faded pixel' look. This directly links to the sounds in Glass Animals' music, which is often reminiscent of 8-bit songs from gaming soundtracks.

Here's what the Website looks like:

As you can see, the website has some of the same themes as the album covers. This includes the 'faded pixel' border and the orange colours. Most unusually, the band have a spinner in the centre, which when the button stating 'PUSH' is clicked, shows a random set of three images, which some being pictures or characters from their music videos or just pop culture references. This links in to Henry Jenkins' fandom culture, in which the band are attempting to connect with their audience's potential interests by displaying images or GIFs from the show. Furthermore, whenever anywhere on the screen is clicked, a pleasing 8-bit sound is played.

The first page is the 'Live' page.

Here, Glass Animals effectively and efficiently shows their tour dates in all the cities that they're going to. 

When you click on the 'Shop' page, it first asks you whether you're from the USA or the Rest of the World. I checked both, and it appears the differences are just a few shirts. However, Glass Animals' merchandise is incredibly well-designed, and these pineapple themed items link in with one of their songs, in which the lyrics 'pineapples are in my head' are repeated throughout.

The 'Music' page shows two Spotify playlists. The first playlist appears to be a collation of every song they've ever made, whereas the second one seems to be four songs that they have recommended to fans. By using Spotify to present their own music, they demonstrate how in-touch with their fans they are, since Spotify is the current most popular streaming service.

The 'Videos' tab takes you to their entire collection of Music Videos, available to watch all in one place. 

Finally, the 'Newsletter' tab takes you to a screen where you can sign up for Glass Animals' newsletter. This is hugely important to keep fans invested, by sending them emails about new song and album releases, and also to reward loyal fans with presale tickets for tours.

And finally, all their social media links are displayed on the bottom of the page, in order to appear both present and distant from the fan, in accordance with Richard Dyer's paradox of the stars.

However, perhaps the most interesting of Glass Animals' website are the extra links to fan content they've created:

This page plays an 8-bit version of the Glass Animals song- Life Itself- in the background. The entire site is reminiscent of a MySpace profile, which is intentional to create a sense of nostalgia and establish a target audience of people from 18-30. Like the main Glass Animals website, it plays another satisfying 8-bit song when you click somewhere.

This site was incredibly cryptic, the only piece of text on it the lyrics 'Dizzy on Caffeine'. Otherwise, it seems the entire purpose of the site is to scroll down through various GIFS.

The next site takes you to an 8-bit pixel game based on the character from the music video 'Season 2 Episode 3', which is incredible. Of course, this is all to increase fan interactivity with the band and to keep their audience invested. After playing the game for a while, I can confirm that it is addictive.

The final link was to a website, where if you clicked the TV, a brief period of static would appear, before a short video played. If you clicked the TV again, static would appear again, but then a different video would play. This was repeated several times. Again, the pineapples falling in the background relate to the lyrics 'pineapples are in my head'. 

Overall, I think that the CD cover and the website are incredibly unified products while still remaining very visually different. I found the small cryptic bits of content from Glass Animals on their website to be fascinating, and I feel as though this has definitely inspired my for my own website.

Filming Day 2

Today, we had a spare hour, and realised that the weather was bright enough to film outside in the forest for all the outdoor forest scenes. It was incredibly cold, so we had to take thick coats and take them off when necessary, but it wasn't windy at all and the shots came out perfectly.