Introduction

Some of my production goals for this unit were to create an original piece of music, produce it, and create an interactive website. I was working with Kiyoshi Taylor, a fellow web/audio student, and Emma Bridgland, an excellent film student, and our wonderful vocalist Casey Marquez, who is a part of Mountain View High School’s choir program. I took the role of organizing everything and everyone and scheduling studio time, as well as working with Kiyoshi on the final edit of our song, Alien Anthem. I also recruited Casey to sing for us, as well as recording my own guitar loop, which we mixed into the chorus.I learned a ton about my own work ethic, and what I am capable of doing while using both reason and Pro tools. I also advanced my knowledge of DreamWeaver and web design, I was able to implement another site’s button motion into my own with the help from Mr. Flo. I think that I value the experience of working in collaboration with the film students, as well as learning more about producing music in both protools and reason simultaneously.

Music

Download the song here----> Alien Anthem

Click the image above to view video

Photogallery

Music Art

Poster: Our group decided to follow the theme of aliens and space, so we named our band Moonshine, and our son Alien Anthem. I wanted to do something that would contrast with the sound of our song, so I choose my favorite color scheme blue and orange. I picked multiple shades and tones of blue and orange, which gave it some visual interest. For my image I choose a mountain, and I did a image trace in Illustrator with 16 colors, the effect made it more abstract. I used a effect on the UFO’s trail, which gives it a glow effect, I learned this during our practice poster. I choose the fonts, based on the shades of my colors and the theme of aliens, so I picked one that was more geometric, a cursive one, and a san-serif regular font that had some curves to match the cursive. I really enjoyed creating this because I did something a little different from the rest of my group, but it still had some unity with theirs. I really love using Illustrator because it has its challenges, but it is just so much fun to use. I really loved discovering the different techniques from the practice design that we did and applying them to my poster and shirt designs. When I started using Illustrator I really struggled, but now I really have come to love it, and learning to use it with photoshop to create images that appear as drawings, paintings, and other things. T-Shirt: For my t-shirt design I really liked the mountain that I had created for my poster, I couldn’t incorporate it because the designs are supposed to be different but look like they belong together. To still keep the mountain, I traced the mountain with the three shades of blue and added a charcoal stroke, to make it more abstract. To make it more different I drew 3 triangles and added my three different shades of orange and made them fit on the mountain, and by using an organic stroke with some geometric patterns gave the image an ominous vibe. The font that I used for the band name was the cursive one, and I made it a more red orange to show contrast on the moon that was overlaid on the trace of the mountain. I took the planet in the middle to represent a world in another, which sits atop a cloud like shape that holds a geometric text with the tour name. This was a bit of a challenge to achieve, mostly because I wanted to use a lot of the same elements and images in the shirt design that I did for the poster, but I couldn’t because of the rubric. It actually worked in my favor though because I had a really great time re-working my design, and I really like how it came out.