Throughout the course of COM210, Multimedia Content Creation, we used Adobe products to produce all sorts of things such as video, audio files, logos, and photoshopped pictures.  All of which were wrapped around one topic for me, that was my music and expanding my artist online presence. My favorite two projects were probably the photoshop unit and the premier unit. (Below is my final product of Unit 1: Photoshop)

For this unit, I decided to do my first album cover. An album cover is a necessity for any musician wanting to put their media out there. The album cover has to draw in the audience, its suppose to catch their eye and make them intrigued, and also supposed to visually represent the music in some way. My inspiration to this design is the album “Beerbong and Bentleys” by Post Malone, which is a simple yellow with barbwire running through it. My artist name is LemonDrop, so I thought the yellow was appropriate.

On the other hand, my least favorite unit was the logo one. (Below is my final product of Unit 2: Illustrator)

I created this logo of a Lemon, with a triangle on top using the gradient tool of blue and yellow to try and create a raindrop look. As you can see the gradient transitions from a blue to represent the water to yellow to go into the lemon. It is a representation of “LemonDrop” a droplet, within it a lemon was what I was going for. I created this logo of a Lemon, with a triangle on top using the gradient tool of blue and yellow to try and create a raindrop look. As you can see the gradient transitions from a blue to represent the water to yellow to go into the lemon. It is a representation of “LemonDrop” a droplet, within it a lemon was what I was going for. This is why I didn’t like it as much  as the other units, it was difficult to handle and I  didn’t understand the software

As explained in the rough draft post, I decided to do my final project for unit 4 as a music video for a beat I produced. The song features Evan aka Fatty Daddy as the rapper on the beat and myself aka LemonDrop obviously as the producer. I felt it was absolutely accurate to my topic, being music and upgrading my artist profile in general. It allowed me to go through the challenges of using insufficient equipment, or atleast ones Im not accustommed to. I had a video editing class at South Puget Sound Community College, the school I transfered from, that had alot of toys for the students to work with so the quality was alot better.

The process consisted of selecting the song, gathering the footage, importing the footage, and finally editing the video together. I chose the song because Fatty Daddy had just finished his lyrics on the beat and sent them over, so perfectly timed with the start of Unit 4 project, so I thought the music video was obvious. Once I decided that song, of my wide collection of songs, I closed my eyes and waited for the visual to come to me. I saw myself waking up to the song, and going through my day continuing to jam out to the song, going to my restroom, hanging out in my room, and walking down the stairs to the beat and cooking my breakfast. So I decided that’s super simple and yet still works, so I did it, I recorded it all in as many possible angles as I could. The rough draft did not include the making of breakfast or eating of breakfast. But I figured out the technical difficulties and imported the file, then just edited the the breakfast scene on the top visual layer. Of course cutting the video up several times to jump through the process quicker, and on top of that changing the scene to the beat, throughout the original part and the newly edited final. I had issues with newly edited video, the format didn’t fit the screen properly even though it was set to the original sequence settings.

I decided to do a music video to an original song I produced “Star” featuring Fatty Daddy, who decided to rap over my beat about two weeks ago. I believe it is absolutely relevant to my topic and this unit, my topic being music and specifically my own artist identity, in today’s society almost every song has a music video to accompany it. So I thought, with this more recent song just finished, an amateur music would be absolutely perfect. Once I decided that song, of my wide collection of songs, I closed my eyes and waited for the visual to come to me. I saw myself waking up to the song, and going through my day continuing to jam out to the song, going to my restroom, hanging out in my room, and walking down the stairs to the beat and cooking my breakfast. So I decided that’s super simple and yet still works, so I did it, I recorded it all in as many possible angles as I could. I did record a 5-minute video of myself cooking and eating breakfast, but I had technical difficulties and the video couldn’t be stored in a USB or sent over email, due to the size of the file. The editing part started with importing the song and locking it, next I took the three videos I’m laying in bed and put them together to look like when I hop out of my bed I change clothes, this all happening as Fatty Daddy says ” When I hop out the womb the doctor scream a star is born.” The next scene is myself kicking the door open and falling on the floor. Simultaneously when he raps “And when I hop in the room I play some sh*t you can’t ignore…tell we can’t get off the floor” The rest of it is honestly just fill in until the stairs scene where I intentionally try and walk down the stairs to the beat. I am going to attempt to get that 5-minute video of breakfast so I can put it in between those two scenes, rather than just “fill in”

My audio story was on how I chose my artist name LemonDrop. This was inspired by my own last name of Lemons. From the adversity I faced, that eventually pushed me to embrace my last name, to selecting it to prove my father wrong. The song I selected is an original, by yours truly. Although I did do some editing in the DAW to make this Audio Story fit a bit better with my talking over it. For example, the whole beat doesn’t come into play until about 1:04, I do this because I change the mood of the story to a more uplifting context, where I talk about I choose to embrace the name and prove my father wrong about the “curse”. Everything before that, the beat is just looped and stuck on repeat, this way its simple and doesn’t take a lot of cognitive power and the music doesn’t distract the audience from the story, which is after all the point of this audio project. I started by recording myself, talk about my last name and the transition I took to embrace it. I then took one of my several beats, one I thought was catchy yet simple enough. Next, I took the audio file of my story and edited it, by cutting out the excess audio, such as all the umms fixing it by simply using the move tool and dragging the important content into the correct sequence for it to make sense and deleting the stuff that was unnecessary. The only real issue I ran in to was, Audition could not accept all audio files so I had to use websites that converted the files into .mp3 files or .wav files.

Although I mentioned in my own comment, about changing it to a more lyrical vocal audio file, and another fellow student agreed it would work well in their comment, but I was overwhelmed with other work from classes and decided it was to much extra work. But listening back to my rough draft there were obvious improvements I could make. From the numerous “umms” and the strange wording in the middle school section. But I went in and fixed each problem with the simple cut and move exercise. I also thought the beat didn’t get enough attention, so after my story, I let the beat run for a few more seconds just to grab the attention of the listener in every bit of the audio file and promote myself just a bit.

I chose to do my audio story on the story of how I chose my artist name LemonDrop. This was inspired by my own last name of Lemons. From the adversity I faced, that eventually pushed me to embrace my last name, to selecting it to prove my father wrong. The song I selected is an original, by yours truly. Although I did do some editing in the DAW to make this Audio Story fit a bit better with my talking over it. For example, the whole beat doesn’t come into play until about 1:10, I do this because I change the mood of the story to a more uplifting context, where I talk about I choose to embrace the name and prove my father wrong about the “curse”. Everything before that, the beat is just looped and stuck on repeat, this way its simple and doesn’t take a lot of cognitive power and the music doesn’t distract the audience from the story, which is after all the point of this audio project. I started by recording myself, talk about my last name and the transition I took to embrace it. I then took one of my several beats, one I thought was catchy yet simple enough. Next, I took the audio file of my story and edited it, by cutting out the excess audio, I had multiple “Umms” and awkward silences that I cut and removed, fixing it by simply using the move tool and dragging the important content into the correct sequence for it to make sense. The only real issue I ran in to was, Audition could not accept all audio files so I had to use websites that converted the files into .mp3 files or .wav files.

I decided to do a story on how I came to choose my artist name “LemonDrop” with accompanyment of a instrumental song I produced.

I did everything to instructions for tutorial 1 but for some reason the song was not captured in the export to mp3.

I created this logo of a Lemon, with a triangle on top using the gradient tool of blue and yellow to try and create a raindrop look. As you can see the gradient transitions from a blue to represent the water to yellow to go into the lemon. It is a representation of “LemonDrop” a droplet, within it a lemon was what I was going for. My artist name is LemonDrop so I think it fits pretty accurate. First I created an oval shape, almost an egg, then filled it with yellow. Next, I drew the stem and a leaf, on top of the oval and filled both of them in green. After that, I added a triangle, scaled it to the oval and centered it. In the end, I took the stem/leaf, triangle and pushed them to the back layers. I attempted to add effect to try and make the lemon look a bit more realistic but failed indefinitely. I did not use and outside sources, everything was from Illustrator. I may think about finding a source for the lemon, to get that more realistic appeal. This was actually my second attempt at the draft, so I did have a rough-rough draft. This rough-rough draft I attempted to do the same logo as you see above, but I was trying to erase the edges of the oval, in an attempt to form the drop part. Opening the file on Friday, I instantly knew that I had to start over. So this time around I includes the triangle and placed it in the back of all the layers. The problem was the eraser, I was using the tool incorrectly, I was trying to erase the lines of the oval and almost sculpt out the droplet.

In my revision, I listened to my fellow classmate’s comments. I tried my best to create the gradient to look like it was continuing down from the triangle into the oval. I completely removed the oval’s stroke, it blends in better that way, but the oval is somewhat still definable inbetween where the triangle and oval intersect. I also added the little line to show the midrib of the leaf, I believe it slightly improves it. The leaf is the only thing still connects this logo to a Lemon.