Evaulation

To summarise the project as a whole I really enjoyed this one. Im really satsified and confident with my final submission. Everything went well, I didnt have any major pressure during this project. I got my idea quick and I knew exactly what I was doing/making. Pitch and crit went good. I think this was one of my stronger projects.

The minor problems I encountered were really small, it was learning how to do the effects for my promo (shine and particle) I had to watch tutorials online and try and adapt a similar style to my promo. It was time consuming but it got there in the end and im very happy with it.

I didnt create an iPad version because it was pointless as I would of had the exact same layout. Also each screen is a static photoshop image. And I have about 50 different photoshop documents and it would of took so long to resize them all to ipad size but have the same layout...so thats the reason why i didnt make an ipad version.

Reviewing my app walkthrough, after the changes I made from after crit Im very pleased with it. I think I have done a lot of detail and I have made it clear how to use. I think my visual style is consistent of using the neon glow whilst combining hand made icons and buttons together. Reviewing my promo, I think my music choice syncs nicely to the content. There is a fast pace aspect to it which goes with the flying particles and a slow pace aspect in the song what goes with the slow revealing words and slow shines. I think it visually looks nice and clear. And has matched everything I wrote in my proposal.

I managed my time really well even though it was definitely the hardest challenge of the project, a lot of my peers struggled to time manage but I spent a lot of time working on it giving nice reliefs when getting close to deadlines. I didn't feel much pressure at all in the project. I feel the time given was very tight for what we had to produce. I think i planned my app very thorough, I knew exactly what to make when making my illustrations, planning was definitely key for this project. If you didnt plan ver well then it would of been very hard task to make the walkthrough and promo.

50urz App | Final

50urz promo | Final

Critique | Feedback

Today I have shown my promo and app walkthrough to the class and the feedback I received was controversial. I was last to show my work and I got literally no comments at all on my app. All i got was 'excellent work' from my lecturer, and just people saying it looks nice, some positive comments on the visual style. I was left quite disappointed and frustrated from the lack of feedback as I got none whatsoever that could help improve it. The promo got a little bit more feedback, one of my peers said to lose the 3 dots after 'our' and that was the only feedback I got what could help. Then that was it, it was time for lunch. I am annoyed that it took me so long to make my videos and I get no more than a 30 second period of feedback which was really empty and not helpful whatsoever. I really hate going last and this year I have been showing my work as one of last people and it feels like is rushed due to lunch time coming up. From my frustration I spoke to Kate about my feelings about crit... so she said she would look at my work and give me 1 to 1 advice. Anyway the 1 to 1 advice to Kate was extremely helpful, compared to crit its just a huge, huge difference. I got a very in depth review of certain elements in the video. The things recommended to change were:

App 

- At the begining show the search of tags and location (can use the same content used for the trending and random photo)

- Speed up the upload scene

- On profile page fill in more photos so there are 3 photos and one blank with the upload icon (to show activity)

- On voted photos page fill in all the empty blanks (same reason as above)

- Change the hashtag of '#drunk'

Promo

- Add images behind the words to show context (vote, share, upload, win) to give more information what it is

- Lose the three dots after our

So im very happy of how minor the improvements are. They shouldnt take too long to do, overall I a very happy with that I produced at this stage of crit.

Proggresion | learning how to do effects

I used this tutorial to learn how to do the shine effects.

Progression | 50urz App | The layout deisgn

To begin with I made the layout which was going to be the same layout for ever page so it was important I was content with the layout and this was my progression. The thing i kept changing was the effect behind the 50urz logo at the top and the background behind the tiles.

This was my first draft. For me it looked too plain. I wanted to add a background behind the tiles of something. I thought of adding a carbon texture background as I think it would fit the style. I also wanted to add a colourful visual graphic behind the title too.

I tried a gradient from the centre and I didnt like that, so i added a carbon background which i ideally wanted.

After adding a carbon background I played around with the graphic behind the title. I thought this was too much so I changed again.

I changed it again and still didnt like it...

This was my final design. I really like what I have produced.

Chosen music | Sub Focus - Twilight

After ages and ages of listening to songs I heard this on my ipod on the way to work one evening and it gave me this really nice visualisation of my promo in my head. As I had already started building my promo I had learnt some tutorials on youtube how to do some effects such as animated text glows and moving particles. I visualised have this music of slow shine glows on text with fast moving particles on the screen to give an almost like space effect.

Promo | Music

For my 15 second promo. I want a piece of music that obviously suits with my visual style. My style is nightlife, neon, clubbing etc so I think a music that suits with like clubbing will be efficient. Nothing too over the top like fast pace drum and bass, I think I want a slow chilled dub-step tune. I will research and give my opinion whether I think they will fit the bill.

Anotsu - Man on the run

Whoschaos - intro

The two music pieces above are the sort of genre I want to chose, inspired by the 'This is our shot' sourz tv advert, I really liked the music they used in that advert, unfortunately there wasn't an official song, the producer just made it for the advert.

I looked at so many songs on youtube. It took me hours to decide on a song but to help me chose a song I actually started to build my promo before choosing music, I thought it would help to chose the effects I used in my promo then chose music what would fit the music.

Pitch | Feedback

Yesterday I pitched to the class and I think it was a successful pitch. The comments from what I can remember from Kate where:

- Very thorough
- Really good idea
- Very well though out
- Strong planning
- It would work

The improvement comments

- Not have the unique code so long. Plus where is it going to be on the bottle, the more recommended one was underneath the wrapper instead of underneath the bottlecap. one of my peers recommended having a qr code. But i was against it because of the security of it. People could just scan the code without buying the bottle in supermarkets and bars etc. So im going to have a shorter code.

- Prizes; it was recommended that the prize duration should be affected by how big the prize is. For example festival tickets would have a longer duration than say t-shirts. Because they are much more expensive so there should be a longer time period.

- Also I was told in advertising you are not allowed to use the word 'drunk' obviously as your not allowed to encourage drunkness. So I will just have to avoid the term 'drunk, pictures.

Yeah... there was other comments. But a lot of positivity about my pitch, I thought myself that I had pitched well and covered literally everything. The only thing I was missing was digital mock ups. But as a whole I think everyone got a really good understanding of my idea, the themes, target audience, mechanics and so on. Im proud and I am completely ready with what i'm doing, I have minor issues before starting to build my animation and promo which is great. I think this project could be one of my most successful projects yet so I am looking forward to making these. Well one thing I have to quickly do is find a piece of music for my promo which won't take long because I know exactly the type of music I want.

Visual style

As I have said a lot and have a strong knowledge of my proposal. Gathering some examples of similar and related to my visual style might help me get some more ideas.

I found some brushes on www.brusheezy.com which is where you can get preset brushes. I want to find some glow effect ones and found these:

 



































This is just a glimpse of the range of cool brushes that might be helpful if I want to add some glowing content in the background. I really highly doubt I will otherwise it will look too busy on the app. I want to keep it very simplistic and clean as possible. But for the promo these might help.

This is an example of what one of these brushes look like. A nice plasma glow beam.

I found just a really random image what has a glow effect on text which I will use. It wont be as intense as the glow on here, but the visual style I want is very similar. Glow text on the black background.

Font | Research & Chosen font

As my app is called '50urz' im going to have to re-create the logo. Making the 5 and 0 in the same style as the original font of the logo.

The o has a little gap in the top right which i will replicate when i make the '0'. Im going to have each letter in the logo a different colour from my fruit pallet.

For content text I want a simple font what will go with my neon/nightlife theme. So I will conduct some potentials and shortlist the ones I think will fit. Then have a bigger think to what one i want to use.

Bank Gothic

I think this would definitly fit neon theme as it looks techno and square. The problem is its not really feminine, it looks really boyish.

This font looks much more feminine. it looks slick and professional and would fit my theme well i think. The decorative curls on some elements give it that female edge. The fine weight gives it the professional and clean look

This font is a bit more formal than champagne, I don't like it as much but would still fit well.

I like this font. But it is a title font so I couldn't have it as body text as it would just look weird having caps everywhere. The style is very nice though.

This font I really like. very similar to champagne , the only noticeable difference is the dots on the 'i' is relatively higher, making it look more unique. But the decorative curl is still swaying me too chose champagne just for that extra feminine edge.

This font again I really like and would fit my theme. Its a really hard choice for me to chose out of these fonts. But still champagne is winning.

Similar to the rest. A nice clean font but champagne is the winner for my chosen font.

Chosen font

Colour pallet | My chosen colours

My colour pallet will be obvious. I intend to use the black background with white text on top on my app. And my effects I want to use will be in the colours of the sourz bottles which are:

I made this by taking the hex code from the bottles of sourz in photoshop and made here in kuler:

https://kuler.adobe.com/Sourz-color-theme-3235691/

Proposal | Keywords, Target Audience & themes

I have wrote up a big description in my sketchbook but here are key words in a bullet point list to describe my proposal.

• Target audience - 18 - 25 woman (But it is unisex too, as I think men would like to use it too)
• Professional
• Simple
• Neon
• Dark
• Clean
• Slick
• Tiled
• Easy
• Nightlife 

Technical/visual Research | Instagram Promo

I was trying to look for short promos for apps and i came across a fan made promo for instagram which is main inspiration of my app. I thought this video was good to give me ideas. It is a nice calm and peaceful visual style which suits to instragram as it is aimed at photography of all sorts. Cause instagram is so versatile so many visual themes would suit it. But the slow revealing of the brand name with the moving grain effect background looks nice and the music makes everything suited. The simplicity is the main theme of this promo.

For my promo I want to keep my simplistic proposal too. Have as less content and animation as i can. I just want a short catchy motto which summarises my app. Have the app name and nice little effect or something going on. Just something easy.

Research | Competitors & Tv advertising

As I have already researched Sourz, and I want to use their visual style I think it can be useful to research tv advertising and competitors of my brand just to learn the approach they use for their target audience, similar to mine or not. As I have to create a promo. Researching into advertising of video can help give some inspiration and techniques. I can also learn visual language of the brands and who they are targeting. As I have to make a 15 second promo it would be beneficial to see the kind of styles my competitors use as well as my existing brand.

Sourz tv commerical

This is another commercial for sourz, you can see the use of a dark theme with bright lights as their visual style. And they use a club to promote the drink again.

Archers Schnapps

schnapps is easily a competitor for Sourz. It has a little bit more alcohol percentage and is classed as a 'womens' drink. This advert from 11 years ago is trying to suggest archers is this golden quality drink portrayed by the dramatic entrance of this gold property what lands and this glamourus women comes out and invites young women to come drink it which symbolises the target audience. It is a more fun and social drink compared to the sourz style in my view. This ad is jokey and funny. With a fun theme. The sourz style is much more professional and serious. It mainly focus' on a high class looked bar with a upper class women audience to show that sourz is good quality drink and will not be cheap.

Technical research | Main inspiration | Instagram

The most popular photo editing app is undoubtably instagram. It is hugely popular, and especially for a young adult audience like I have.

Technical - Its so simplistic and clean and just really easy to navigate and use. The home page is so simple its just the name of the uploader you follow on top with their icon picture next to them then the photo, the likers underneath which turns to a number when there is not enough room to fit everyones username on it, the description of the photo with hash tags underneath it. Then a button to like and a button to comment.

Visual - Instagram uses just a simple white and black colour scheme like other editors. Everything is clean, Blue would be its main primary colour. its very squared and uses glow effects on the selected tabs which is nice. It uses a fine font too to keep the clean and professional look.

The Explore function is what you use to find users and hashtags on photos. A very easy way of searching for things.

The camera function which is the middle blue button to make it stand out from the rest so people know how to upload is made very simple to add pictures or videos. There is a button for a grid which is illustrated by the grid button, a switch camera view and flash button. Then theres a library icon, take picture icon and video icon. Very easy to understand just by using small icons which again keeps it clean.

The likes/comments tab illustrated by the heart icon in the speech bubble which represents likes/comments shows you what the users your following are liking or new users they have followed. The switch at the top enables you to toggle between following and news; the news page is your notification centre, it tells you when you get a like on a picture or if someone new has followed you.

   

The furthest to the right tab is finally your profile. You can see how many posts, followers and following you have. You can view all your photos here, you can see photos you've been tagged in and a photomap of where your photos were taken on a illustrated map of the world. 

When you have taken or selected a photo the editing of the photo is very easy, again like other photos you simply slide through the filter you want and just select it. When I make my app I will have the same simply because its the best and easiest way to navigate through. The icons simply show rotate, frame, focus and change the light of the photo. My app won't have the same features obviously or as many because i am focusing on one type of editing, Ill obviously have rotate, crop and scale but i am only having colour hue filters.

After looking at instagram in depth, this will definitely be my main source of inspiration technically. My visual style is reflecting the ethos of the brand but i can be similar in some ways to most of these apps as  most of them have the black background which is what I want.

Technical & Visual Research | Photo editing apps

1. Cam WowPro

Technical - It is a really simple and effortless app. The app opens up with a 4 tile camera effect filter on your front camera and you can slide across to see the other effects. Theres no navigation or buttons at this point but when you click on one it just gives you a really simple and basic photo editor. I wanted to try find hue effects but this app doesn't do them.

Visual - There wasn't one really. It was just plain.

2. Pic Collage

Technical - This app was a nice app technically and visually. The technical style was an easy to navigate and function app. It tells you to tap to add photo or take one from camera then you can click again on the photo to either edit photo, edit border, clip it, set as background or copy it. You can arrange layouts of photos you have added to make a collage which is the point of the app. When editing the photo their is a toolbar on the bottom which you can slide across to chose tools to edit the photo whilst seeing the live effects.

Visual - The style looks bold and fun. It has a plain white colour scheme with grey colour elements on top of it to look clean, simplistic and emphasise colour elements of content on top of it. They use a turquoise green as their main primary colour.

After you have edited you can share the photo. By giving it a caption then either posting it to other social feeds like twitter, facebook, instagram etc. It has a nice button switch look to click what social feed to share. It looks nice and clean.

3. Photo Editor-

Technical - This app has a lot of tools to edit photos you can do so much to it. One of the tools that i really liked the idea of was the stickers tool. You can add in objects, scale and rotate them to put them on the photo. This is a fun and playful interaction of the app and its something Im going to consider in my app.

Visual - The app uses a black carbon look background with white elements on top. I really prefer this to a white background with black on top. I would use black anyway to carry on the Sourz ethos. As it is night club related it is dark with bright lights so it would be black with vibrant colours on.

This is the stickers function which is funny and playful interaction.

This is called a meme tool. You can add text on top or bottom of the picture to describe or demonstrate text reflecting the image to give a funny and entertaining effect. Im not sure if I would use this in my app, all though its funny and playful I think the visual style looks a bit tatty and cheesy, maybe too childish for a 18+ App.

4. BeFunky

Technical - I found this app really good to use. It has lots of positive things about it. Firstly the navigation and functionality is strong. Pretty much every similar app has the same layout. A left to right scroll bar down the bottom  and maybe buttons at the top. There is a lot more tools to edit photos with than most apps

Visual - it has a black colour scheme like most of them with the white content on top of it, my preferred style.

 One feature that I found and is really, really helpful for my idea is the hue function.You can change the colour of the skin levels in photos to a primary colour. As my idea is editing photos with colours of the Sourz flavours. This has inspired me to have my editing to photos by using hue. For example blue summer berries flavour would give a code to have the hue effect of blue like shown in the picture above. I think its different, playful and fun. Im really keen on this idea.

Also on be-funky is this homepage of icons which represent a certain type of photo. Which is nice. So each photo can have like a tag and you can find random photos of the tag you want to look at, it is irrelevant to my idea as all the photos taken on my app will be clubbing mug shots but the use of tagging is appealing, i could even have locations instead of like type of photo.

First development stage of idea

My first stage of an idea I want to develop is an app which is a photo editing app. As my target audience is young women and can be young men as well I want to base to target the audience that go clubbing and go out drinking. So my app will be for taking pictures of friends in clubs, bars etc then you edit the photo by unlocking colour effects through a unique code what comes with a bottle of Sourz. For example on a bottle of cherry Sourz will have a code on the bottle which you type into the app then that unlocks cherry colour effects which you can edit the photo with. That picture then is sent to a social feed which can achieve a prize through a weekly prize draw. The prize will be festival tickets, t-shirts, gift vouchers, iPads etc pretty much the cliche prizes for a young adult prize draw. This picture can then be shared on Facebook or Twitter. Can be tagged, can be found by anyone else. There will be a like/favourite function to have on the picture to get its popularity up. The idea is to get a funny drunk picture. The more likes/favourites (Havant named a unique description yet) the more popular it will get and something like the top 10 every week is legible for the weekly prize.

For what effects I want to have on each unique bottle is yet to be decided I initially had the idea of the app turns the photo in a sketch and you have to colour it in and unlock colour pallets from each bottle but I think that is too complicated for my audience, I wouldn't see many bothering with the effort. So I want an easy to do effect.

I need to conduct research into camera editing apps, visual style of apps and technical approach of apps similar to mine.

This Is Our Shot | Sourz tv ad

This advert is an urban night life style ad promoting sourz in bars and clubs. Lots of neon lights on black is the colour scheme. I think it would be essential to keep the same visual style of neon and night life theme.

Chosen Brand | Sourz

From choosing Sourz I can set myself a brief which I can list my themes I want to bring. I done some brief research on Sourz such as the target audience and their website to get some more knowledge of it. As I am 19 I already know that Sourz is aimed at young adults, more specifically a women's drink. It is a 15% mixer drink and is more preferably mixed with lemonade so it is a sweet tasting cocktail. I would say the age range for this products would be 18 - 24. And more aimed at young girls going out clubbing. I have bought and drunk this drink before so have some of my mates so its definitely not a complete woman's drink so I wouldn't have to focus specifically on women when designing what I want my app to be.

Here is what the bottles look like. I really like the like floral look pattern on the bottom half of the bottle, it almost looks feminine. The visual style just reminds me of clubbing from how vibrant the colours are. 

The logo for Sourz, its very bold and fun looking which again reflects the target audience, putting this brand onto a brand map which I will be doing quite a bit later on in the blog I can tell from the bottles visual style and the logo that the product isn't very classy and relatively cheap but it does look professional and decent quality.

The website

The website for Sourz already shows you what the target audience is, young clubbers. Portrayed by this image of people dancing in a club. Also on the website there is a page where you can win festival tickets, so Sourz sponsors festivals which are for young music loving audiences. There is an image of all the bottles of sourz with a floral pattern with butterflys and women in which gives the impression of a more female audience too.

From this research I already know my audience which is already a guideline of what theme I want my app to be as the brief says it can either be useful, informative or entertaining. For a young audience choosing entertaining is ideal. I want my app to be fun as that is what a young audience would be more suited to.

Also on the Sourz website Sourz have just released a new tv advert video. Check next post.