Tuesday 11 January 2011

Band Biography

Band Name – Epiphany
Band Genre – Rock Metal
Record LabelTokyo Recordings

Biography

The band Epiphany a Japanese rock metal band was formed at the beginning of September 2000, and consisted of 4 members who all met at Music College. Once realizing they had talent the band began streaming music over Myspace after getting a great response the band decided to start playing gigs around Tokyo and then following this went travelling in Europe. They got signed to the record label Tokyo Recordings in July 2001 and following this released their first album Homicidal Fate which featured the number one track Ying Yang.
The band members consists of Kenzo Chan lead drummer, Ryo Won bass guitar, Kyoshi Yuka lead guitar and Sakura Yoko the vocalist all band members were raised and brought up in Tokyo.

Band Members

Kenzo Chan 25 Male from Tokyo (Drummer)
Ryo Won 23 Male from Tokyo (Bass Guitar)
Kyoshi Yuka 26 Male from Tokyo (Lead Guitar)
Sakura Yoko 22 Female from Tokyo (Vocals)

Album Name
Homicidal Fate – Released July 2001

Tour Dates
21st December – Club Havana
15th October – Golden Cup
31st July – Liquid Loft
12th September – Super Deluxe

Evaluation Of Project

Evaulation

Before I started the Digital Graphics Assignment I had quite a good knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and had used the program at home to create and edit various Images. It’s something I have always found quite enjoyable and I believe that my knowledge of the software before hand helped me on the various projects I was given while doing this unit. I had never used InDesign, though I found it not to hard to learn and the tutorials we were given helped me to complete the work fine with no errors. I would say that I was above average on knowledge of the software before starting this unit and that helped me greatly.
The exercise I have learnt the most from would be creating my Album Cover. From this I’ve learnt many more techniques which include the blending tool, resizing various images with the free transform tool and adding various effects to enhance my final piece. I spent lots of time on creating my album cover and manually had to create and edit the various images which I used on the final product.
I have learnt loads about file formats while doing this unit and learnt what output to save my final pieces, what output is the best for High Quality images and what the best format is for uploading images on to my blog. One piece of knowledge I have learnt about file formats is what file type you need to save for animated images and what quality you need to save it for uploading onto your blog, for example my animated web banner needed to be saved as a Gif to be animated and easily viewed on my blog.
From all the tasks I have done on this assignment I think that my Album Cover looks the most effective it looks professional and hits the target audience which is heavy metal rock fans with an alternative style. I believe this makes the band successful by having a eye catching front cover with a interesting gothic style theme this catches the eye and will make the buyer want to see more. I called my band Epiphany which is a meaningful word and has a lot of effect on the reader. The Asian style theme to my band was chosen as I wanted to do something slightly alternative and different to give a interesting feel to it which made creating the band more enjoyable and fun. 
Looking over all my products created in this unit I believe the one I could improve or spend more time on would be the Newspaper front cover. I think I could make the layout more effective and add more information regarding the news and latest stories. I would also include adverts on the front cover to give it a more realistic feel as after finishing the piece I realized that it didn’t include any.
Overall I believe I have learnt an awful lot while doing this assignment and the skills I have learnt could easily be used in future assignments or a job role such as a graphic designer or web designer. I will continue to use Adobe Photoshop outside of college to enhance and learn more about the program and hopefully the skills I have learnt will come to use in the future.    

Web Banner

Animated Web Banner

I created a Web Banner for my band and I used Photoshop for the initial design and then transferred it to Imageready to put in the animation and add effects. Below is the final product with some screenshots of how I did the work.









CLICK THE BELOW IMAGE TO SEE THE A HIGH QUALITY ANIMATED VERSION.


Album Cover

Front Cover

























Back Cover

























Screenshots Of Work






















The first image is my Front Album cover created and edited in Photoshop, Below it is my Back album cover created in Photoshop and the Two screenshots show the Blend tool for blending layers to show picture behind the original copy and the other shows inserting other Images such as Jpegs found on the internet and other images designed outside of the original product.

Tuesday 23 November 2010

Album Cover Research

Research

I browsed the internet for different Album Covers of different genres that would inspire my final piece below is some pictures I found while searching.
I decided to base my Genre on a metal style band and then after seeing a Japanese album cover I came to the conclusion to make a Japanese metal band. The style of the band graphics is very dark with a Gothic kind of feel to add to the scary death effect of rock/metal. I decided to use Adobe Photoshop for both my pieces as I found after researching that it would be the easiest program to use for editing my Animated web banner and Album Cover. I also decided to save my album cover as a PDF file for the best possible viewing quality and to save my web banner as a gif as it's animated and is the best file type to use for animation.
I chose my band name as "Epiphany" as I belive the meaning of the word has alot of effect and stands out by catching the eye and gets the reader to think about it's meaning.
I called the Album name Homicidal Fate as I belive it has a very strong effect on the reader and it relates to my album genre of rock/metal with a gothic evil feel to it.








Tuesday 12 October 2010

Post Secret Web Banner

What I Did - I analysed various WebBanners on the internet and how they are created I then looked at Webbanners with animations until I came up with a idea that I liked..

How I did It - I used Photoshop to design the text and layout of what I wanted I then imported the file into ImageReady and made the text as a animation. and added a few pictures from the PostSecret website and finalized with using the blur tool to blur the text and add shadows. I saved the final output of the image to GIF so the animation could be viewed over the internet with no issues.

What I Thought Of The Results - I was happy with the results and thoguht that the overall outcome of the Banner looked good and professional. For a first try at animation I think I did a good job.

Any Technical Problems I Faced - Importing from ImageReady to Photoshop was sometimes a pain because I would accidently edit somthing in Photoshop that I wanted to do in Indesign and caused me to have to re-do it. Apart from that everything was ok.

Final Piece And ScreenShots Of Work:
CLICK THE SECOND IMAGE DOWN TO SEE THE ANIMATED VERSION.





Tuesday 5 October 2010

Different Image File Types.

PNG - Portable Network Graphics are not restricted to the 256 color limitation of GIF files and work well for images with transparent backgrounds as they have more options multiple frames and simple animation.

GIF -  Graphics Interchange Format are possibly the most used on the web being used in logos and any other color images up to 256 color. For images that have text on them GIF tends to be better than JPEG as the files are usually smaller and JPEG tends to compress making the text blurry.

JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group the format is very popular due to its variable compression range. They can be used as High quality for photo printing, medium quality for web and low quality for attaching to emails. Jpegs are not so good for text as they can make it appear blurry so using them for graphs is avoided.

PDF - Portable Document Format is a file format developed by Adobe many desktop applications documents can be converted to PDF which allows for them to easily be viewed on many different machines. To view PDF files all you need is a free program from Adobe called Adobe reader.

PSD - PSD is Photoshop's native file format, It sometimes also goes under the name PDD. PSD is a widely accepted file format. And supports all available image types such as Bitmap, Grayscale, Duotone, Indexed Color, RGB, CMYK, Lab, and Multichannel. The biggest advantage of using the PSD format is that it can save images in layers (image, text, shape, etc.). This means you can edit an image one layer at a time and then go back to it at a later date you can also adjust and edit each layer independently to achieve better effects. PSD files are usually large because of the layers, but the size may be reduced by cropping the individual layers of the image. The maximum size of a PSD file is 30,000x30,000 pixels and may be saved with 16 bits per color channel. PSD image files may be opened with Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements on Windows; and Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or Apple Preview on Mac OS.