Easter Break

Tuesday 8th April

Planning & Objectives

Today I contacted Lydia Webber, a fellow student in my class who I am close friends with to do a photoshoot with me. I chose Lydia as she has a lot of Photography experience. She's taken pictures at events and taken pictures of many different bands so I thought she would be a good fit for what I'm looking for. We plan to take the photos at sunset. We plan to get many different pictures and have over four I am extremely happy with so I can use them for social media and or song covers on Spotify. I also plan to after explaining the kind of style I'm looking for as I've asked Lydia if she could also edit them for me.

Daily Project Blogs

We started of by meeting up at mid day to give us a large amount of time to walk around and find a scope for what ideas we wanted for my photos. We decided to walk around the town to find some spots to come back to but we specifically stuck to the coastal areas of the town specifically the beach. While walking round for a while we had found about three spots we were going to use for my photo shoots that we believed would look amazing for what I'm looking for. One being at the beach were I wanted to shoot some practice photos that we can get while the sun is still up as it might look quite nice as I want a mixture of photos so each one of my cover art for the EP is different as each song has different meanings. I intend to have each picture with the sun lowering as it shows a journey you have to go through when listening to the tracks. After explaining this to Lydia we found my second location which was further down the beach were there were a lot of rocks and it was the end of the mouth of the river and I fought it looked beautiful. The last location I wanted to be up stream looking out over the estray as it looks beautiful as the sun sets right over it and I really wanted it as my final picture. After finding all the spots we wanted to use for the photo shoot, when taking the first pictures at the spot we decided to take some motion picture shots. This is when the person moves in a direction and the photographer takes pictures of them moving as it looks really natural to a audience member looking at the photos. Lydia suggested I walk towards the water and naturally look around as this way she might be able to get some nice side profiles. After me walking up and down the beach a few times we were able to find some really nice photos that I had checked and really liked. After this we moved on to the second location where the sun had started going down now so created that really nice sunset vibe I was looking for. I really wanted some nice side profile pictures for the cover and this spot was perfect. Lydia shouted out that if I turn to the side my head completely covers the sun and the sunset is all around my head which after taking some pictures looked amazing and I was really happy with them. However, due to the brightness it meant that we were going to have to edit the pictures a lot to show of what the scene looked like in real life which men's changing many things about the photo however Lydia was more than happy to do it for me. We were really rushed for time with the last location as the sun had dropped rapidly and I didn't want to miss the sunset, even though you couldn't see the sun the sky was still beautiful and work amazingly with the camera and the spot we picked. We weren't able to take loads of pictures however this was were I found the picture I wanted to use for my EP Overall cover art. The picture being a side profile of me looking up at the sky and it is perfect for the image I'm trying to have people imagine.

Collaborations

Today, I'm going to be taking some photos with a friend of mine called Lydia who is a fellow student on my course that also has amazing skills and experience in Photography. She has Taken photos for bands all over the Exeter region and has worked with amazing artists like 'Girl Band' who are upcoming all the way to people Like through her eyes who have grown a huge following in the last year. She is mainly a events manager and takes the photos of bands for her events however due to the fact she enjoys photography so much and likes working with me she agreed to come and take pictures for me to grow her portfolio even more for free which meant a lot to me. She has done similar style water backgrounds and specific editing styles which work amazingly with what I'm looking for and I'm excited to work with her. We are going to be doing the photo shoot for social media and song cover photos on the tracks to make it look professional and make it my own. I've seen other people using this technique and Lydia also recommended it to me when I proposed this plan to her a week back.

Problem Solving

A key problem we faced was clothing, due to the fact that it was a very hot day I didn't wear the normal clothes I was going to for the photoshoot that showed of the country music style I was looking for. I decided to go for more of a summery style in my clothes as I also fought why don't I just be myself as I wanted to have this ep portray myself and my situation and this way I can have fun with possibly one song however two of them are going to be really meaningful to me. Another problem we had with the clothing was we all met up earlier to have a day down the beach and I got a nose bleed which bled on my shirt. Because this happened right before the photoshoot I didn't have time to go home and change it. The way I overcome this problem was I spoke to Lydia and asked if there was anyway we could get out the stain in the pictures while editing the photos and she believed we could however just to be safe I covered it up as best I could in the pictures however later on I realized it actually could be used in a cool way as loads of metaphors and possibly make anyone looking at the pictures curious so I embraced it. Another problem we faced was running out of time for the pictures. Because the sun sets extremely quickly in Exmouth it meant we had about a hour max to take pictures with a good enough sunset for pictures. This is why the ones we took by the key were really dark as we didn't get there when I wanted to so it meant that we couldn't get the exact look I was looking for however we were still able to get some really cool pictures so overall it all worked. Another problem we had is I am quite specific when it comes to what I look like in pictures. This meant we had to retake a lot of pictures because it wasn't what I was looking for and this effected the timing situation with the sunset going down to far before getting more pictures.

Research

Over today and the rest of the Easter break im focusing all of my research on equipment as when we're back to college, we're going to be in the studios and I want to have a good understanding of everything used and also if I find a good technique suggest it to Harry my producer and see what he has to say about how he could possibly implement this.

Evaluation & Conclusion

Today is going to really help me with my social media as I haven't actually done any social media work yet as I didn't have any pictures to show anyone and i'm also looking for the right things i want to show on my social media and this had made that so much easier. Today would have been better if some circumstances were easier however it turned out great and I was very happy with the outcome.

Thursday 17th April

Objectives

Today I'm having a rehearsal session with Billy Phillips the guitarist helping me out on my track and George Lingard the Drummer who's agreed to help me out. I decided to book a rehearsal room for two hours in a venue called stiff crowd as all the equipment we needed was there, so it meant that we did not have to bring anything apart from core instruments like Billy's acoustic guitar. This rehearsal session was arranged so all of our would be ready for recording the three songs that I have on the ep which is a big ask as two of the songs at these moments are only guitar demo tracks so we have to create the rest of the song. However it revolves around the guitar and drums more than the lyrics as I had spent last week creating all the lyrics for each song going into detail about my situations I create. However due to the fact the instrumental aspects of the song aren't created or finished I have made them easily changeable, which should make it easier for the other two as I am asking a lot of them to do this in only a two-hour session.

Daily Project Blogs

Due to me having train problems it meant that I was going to be fifteen to twenty minute late to the rehearsal which was a huge problem as we were already shortened for time. However it worked quite well as it meant that Billy was able to show George the guitar tracks and George could come up with some ideas for the drums to show me. This also meant that Billy was able to work on creating chorus parts and also possibly a bridge, although, I had some ideas so I rushed to the rehearsal space and as soon as I got there we started working on the song. We had Billy record the guitar track before Easter for my first song called 'Left and right', this gave me the idea to start with that song as that will be the one George will be recording first with Harry when we get back. Luckily this song is the simplest out of all three so I thought it would be a good start for the rehearsal session as it wasn't going to overload him with information. He caught on extremely quickly and I wanted to show the both of them the lyrics I had created for each song so we decided to do some run throughs so we could also figure out whether the lyrics worked and I also wanted some honest feedback but also to have George prepared with the structure as it is quite confusing as there isn't really a chorus. After playing through George began to be confident with the song and was playing in time and tight with the rest of us, so we suggested moving on to the next song, and he comfortably agreed.

The next song I knew and so did Billy that it was going to be the largest struggle out of all three songs even though we only had to create the drums due to the fact the tempo is extremely fast which means that when it comes to recording if George and Billy go out in the slightest it will be really noticeable which is a huge problem as we have a short window to record in. This is why I wanted to use the majority of the rehearsal session focusing on the song. Even though the last song isn't finished it will be the last one we record so will be extremely easy to find some more rehearsal time before then to be prepared however the first two songs were priority. This songs is a very classic country style as I'm taking aspects of Blue grass and folk music styles and mixing them with the classic country vocals. After Billy played the song to George I sang out the lyrics for him so he had a really good understanding for him when it comes to following me and Billy if he go's out of timer as it is very possible that when we play it live it does infact go out of time. We played the song through with my new lyrics for about 45 minutes and had a complete tightly finished version of the song that I was extremely happy with. As we had a bit of extra time we decided to work on song three which had the least amount of work done to it as I hadn't created lyrics for it yet.

For the last song we didn't really have a specific starting point, I wanted to create a blues rock inspired song and then use country style lyrics over this style of instrumental elements All we had at the start was Billy in a way just playing and having no structure and every bar completely different from the last which was ok for an introduction which we wanted taking inspiration from artists like John Mayer for example but I had to explain to Billy it can't be that complicated because we cant have specific verses or choruses which means I can't make the lyrics. The way we overcame this situation is we figured out which riff Billy played that we enjoyed the most and after that we asked Billy to use chords in between to fill it out a bit. After all of this we decide to try to create a catch chorus and I asked Billy what bar chords worked with the riff notes he was using and not long after we had a verse and a chorus structure. This is when I started recording and you can see in the videos that I am just making noises and not singing words, this is my way of creating a melody and making sure I know what notes are on pitch and the general key of the song as songs like this can be all over the place and the lyrics are able to bring it all together. I didn't get time to have a finished product for this song, as I also forgot to have lucy at rehearsals, as I didn't believe we would achieve this much, but we have a solid start for song three and a finished product for songs 1 and 2.

Problem solving

We had the initial problem with me being late and in truth if I wasn't late then we probably could have progressed with the third son g and got close to finishing it however it was out of my hands and there was nothing I could do as the train was my only form of transport for the rehearsal session that day. One way we overcame it was having Billy show George what we had while I wasn't there so when we were all together we actually saved time explaining it to him so he was prepared for the rehearsal session although we should have done that before this rehearsal session As Well so it works both ways. We then had a situation with the fact we didn't invite the bass play that was going to help me for my project. The reason for this being was I didn't know if I was going to have a band for Billy's gig as I new that he was going to have a large amount of people playing with me. All though he spoke to me at rehearsals and explained that he would rather just do the stuff with me as he enjoys it more than doing that so its just me now so we asked George if he was ok with doing that and he said yes. We then agreed to resolve this situation to book stiff crowd again with lucy and keep her up to date. This means I have to book another rehearsal session although we needed to before the gig anyway and also to do more work on song three.

Evaluation & conclusion

This day was extremely pro-active and I was able to accomplish loads of things in the two hours of rehearsal time with Billy and George. Before the rehearsal session I was very behind on my practical work however i'm now very much up to date. If I was going to do it again I would like to focus on the songs and not look into covers for the performance as it means that im now behind on one of my songs. Although I was able to finish two of my songs which is extremely positive.

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