My Electronic Press Kit was created as an external website. To confirm the word count, I was instructed to copy the text over to this submission, and to also provide a PDF or a set of screenshots as proof that I have made no amendments after submission. Both will be provided below.
Electronic Press Kit
Link:
Website Text
Domina Nox
Domina Nox is a freelance producer and composer, taking commission work for personal and commercial projects.
Creating programmatic music; from brooding soundscapes and grand orchestral arrangements, to sombre piano sonatas and emotional big band folk.
Biography
Poppy Crow, also known as Domina Nox, is a freelance composer and music producer from Leeds in the United Kingdom. Her music is an emotional journey, dripping with vast texture and storytelling.
Drawing elements from composers like Sarah Schachner, Gareth Coker, and Hans Zimmer, she creates emotional scores working as an in-the-box producer, studio engineer, and composer.
Poppy has been invested in soundtrack work since a young age, inspired by film and games music. She picked up the cello at primary school and later the guitar as a teenager. Though, her performance days are long behind her; the foundation of her current aspirations.
Now she strives to create music, bot for herself, and to help other bring their creative endeavours to life.
Portfolio
Child of the Hunt
A successor to “Peridot.”
Lost to the Endless Night
A sorrowful piano arrangement, and the source of the motif used in “Out of the Dark.”
We Are Order (We are the End)
A blend of distorted synths and oppressive orchestra.
Artist Feedback
“I have worked with them multiple times over the years, and every time, they have never failed to achieve what I wanted from the project. They were prompt in messaging, always willing to make changes, and honestly went above and beyond what I could have hoped.”
Chris A-H – Commissions Client
“Poppy is a very talented and professional producer and composer. She is a pleasure to work with in a studio environment, and every project she works on is carried out to an exceptional level.”
Oliver Boothright – Jazz Pianist
“Poppy is phenomenal producer with outstanding skill. She was incredibly easy to get on with and overall made my music sound that much better and would definitely recommend for future work!”
Amelie Payne-Heneghan – Vocalist and Songwriter
Commissions
Pricing for personal commissions will be set per minute of the track, with an additional length variance of 10% (up to thirty seconds) to allow a track to end in a natural manner without incurring any extra costs. (For example: a commission for a two minutes long composition will have a variance of up to an additional twelve seconds.)
Pricing will be agreed upon before commencement of the commission, along with 50% of the fee (the final 50% to be paid upon satisfactory completion). Any adjustments or alterations after the fact must be mutually agreed upon.
Transactions will be completed using PayPal. Any other methods must be agreed upon before the commission begins, and may not be changed later.
Personal Pricing:
$60 per minute.
Commercial Projects:
To be discussed via email.
Contact Details:
Email: dominanoxsound@gmail.com
https://soundcloud.com/domina-nox
https://dominanox.bandcamp.com/track/peridot
https://www.instagram.com/dominanoxsound?igsh=bjhyMXBrcTk1Nmp2
https://bsky.app/profile/dominanox.bsky.social
(Excepting the navigational link text, that is a copy of the EPK website text and links copied to Space.)
EPK Proof of No Amendment
Supporting Commentary
As a professional in the musical sphere, I have never desired to be a performer. As such, the EPK is not to sell people on my performance capabilities, but to sell them on my capacity as a composer and producer. As such, it was created as a website to hold a portfolio and commissioned work costs (along with methods of contact).
Structurally speaking, the landing “Home” page of the website is a condensed version of the rest of the site. It contains a very brief biography just below the Logo and name, along with three pieces of music I have made that I feel are stylistically emblematic of what to expect.
This landing page exists to capture a potential client or work partner’s attention, without holding any of the information they might be looking for (save for contacts and socials) behind having to navigate through the website.
Speaking of: the target audience of an EPK like this (at my current level) is small creators who want music for their own projects, but want something more personal and specific than what they might find in existing free-use music libraries, but who might not wish to pay more typically expensive fees that a much more established composer and producer might bring with them. (Musician’s Union, 2022)
Such projects might include:
- Personal Websites
- Streaming Assets
- Small Indie Film and Game Projects
- Original Character Themes
In regards to the last entry on that list, my earliest commissions were creating short (three or so minutes long) character themes for characters people have made in Tabletop Games like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, or popular large scale Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games like Final Fantasy XIV, The Elder Scrolls Online, or World of Warcraft. There is something of an audience for these commissions, as my initial delve into this scene was inspired by a digital artist friend of mine talking about how she would make money taking art commissions to draw people’s characters, or to create assets such as banners and icons for their websites.
As such, the core of the EPK–down to even the choice of web host–comes from parity with these art commissions. The thought process being that: if people are already familiar with those art commissions, being functionally similar might help close the gap on being commissioned as something that is less common in those communities.
As is stands, the music on the EPK itself are from my old portfolio as I have released little music since I started at the Conservatoire. Because of that, the music itself is still tonally and compositionally in line with what I create, but lack the greater production quality that I have been developing since joining. As I progress, the music on the portfolio will be replaced with music of a greater quality of mix and master.
The same goes for the quality of the site itself. I have been creating all of the assets myself, from the logo to the background “art.” As I make more connections, or develop secondary skills in web and art design, these can all be touched up and improved, or replaced.
The website was designed in Carrd, a simple website and creative page builder. Carrd is primarily meant to be a builder for single page websites, aimed at small businesses and individuals. As such it cost me £5.59 for the plan for the year, where alternatives like IONOS would cost £12 for the first year (£1 per month) and £120 every year after that (£10 per month). At the current level that I am operating, a more expensive service–or professionally created and run site–might help with customer retention, but is not a cots that I could realistically incur.
The same is true for the art assets used on the website:
The background was created using the digital art program Rebelle 5 which I picked up on sale for about £12 several years ago to create more abstract banner, logo, and album art for myself.
The art for the logo I have been using across the EPK and my social media platforms was created in the app Sketchbook on the Google and Apple Stores. The base app is free, but allows a one of optional payment for access to a greater selection of tools.
The art itself is simple, utilising a lot of backgrounds with layers of cerise imagery meant to be stylistically consistent with the darker tone of the music.
I chose creating the assets myself over commissioning artists as I currently cannot really afford to do so, an I do no consider myself sufficiently artistically bankrupt to use generative AI to create those assets. Beyond the many moral, legal, and environmental concerns regarding the use of generative AI, I also find that a lot of the images generated via such means tend lack the human, emotional touch the I want. As more and more programs train themselves on existing gen AI creations, the output seems to have not only stagnated, but is gradually started to produce worse products, with a current bizzare example being that AI generated images seem to be getting more and more yellow as they copy their own output in a feedback loop that I feel makes this technology unreliable for artistic asset creation in the long run.
One of the next steps to this, going forwards, would be to look into the copyright of the logo and name “Domina Nox” which has limited presence across social media. The closest musical act with a name like it is the metal band Dominus Nox (using the latin masculine where I use the feminine), but the differences between the two would likely not lead to any brand confusion as they have only a small presence (though, much larger than mine at the time of writing this.)
Group Work and Final Evaluation
The group work portion of this assignment was handled in two main parts:
- In-class group work
- Out-of-class group work
In terms of in-class group work, a lot of it felt somewhat limited due to the limited number of students who showed up to those seminars. I may have missed one or two due to some unfortunate happenings in my personal life. As a result it was limited to the discussion of writing a biography, and later the discussion of how our projects are developing.
The first of those discussions was in two groups of three, where we were tasked with summarising and reformatting the information present in example biographies the tutor provided. We started by sectioning off the information that we felt would be useful or interesting for attracting the kind off attention we believed that they were aiming for. Once done, the selected info was built upon, and restructured. Though, one member of the group did end up using Chat GPT to do that work, allowed it to be done much faster. As a result, we had basis for–and a deeper understanding of–what our own artist biographies might look like.
Separately, I worked with peers on my own and other courses who were not present in my Professional Studies seminars, looking for feedback on both the EPK itself, and for some reviews and testimonials I could use on it.
For the latter, I reached out to performers I had worked with recording and producing, and to former commissions clients, and selected three testimonials for the website (enough to show that I have worked with a variety of people, but not so much that I appear self-aggrandising and narcissistic).
As for the former, I talked to peers working on similar EPKs, looking for feedback on what I should include. At the time, I did not have the full biography in place, so that was mentioned a lot. And a friend from my production group recommended adding more images of myself to the biographical section. (At the end of the foundation year, out tutor Alex Halliday had taken and sent several pictures of the group working together, and I asked for his permission to use those as he owns the rights to them, being the photographer.)
As I progress, I feel that developing my graphical and web design skills would greatly benefit the overall presentation of the website. Making connections with web designers and artists would also achieve that, but as I have slightly more time than I have money, the former may end up being more beneficial in the long run.
And, as I have touched upon, the overall quality of the portfolio needs to be increased as there is a notable quiet muddiness to the mixes which comes with them being a less professional tier of music from an earlier time in my career.
Bibliography:
Musician’s Union. (2022, October 27). Media Commissions. Retrieved from Musician’s Union: https://musiciansunion.org.uk/working-performing/composing-and-songwriting/commissioned-work/media-commissions
