Promoting our Digi-Pack

We have created a magazine advert as a platform for part of a media convergence campaign. However there are man more ways we can promote our digi-pack. Obviously our music video is another way we have promoted the digi-pack and this would be shown on the television, however this is mainly just promoting the single 'The End'. Although advertising can be quite expensive these days especially the effective ways such as a television adverts there are still a few cheaper ways and ways that could actually make us money whilst it is being promoted.
Our song 'The End' could be found within a film soundtrack for a romantic comedy film for example, so not only is this a free way to promote our artist but also a way to make money. Another way is through the radio with them playing our songs which is a classic way for promotion. 

Magazine Advert

This is our Magazine advert promoting our artists latest album 'Rectify'.
This would be shown on half a single sided page of a magazine., rather than a double. 

Planning for Digi pack and Magazine advert

Digi-pack

• Technical info- -

- Picture format 16x9

- Multiple viewing angles: 1

- Colour mode: colour

- Region Code: 2-5

- Disc Format: DVD-9

- Duration: 120 minutes

- Language and audio content: English/Dolby 5.1 surround

- Subtitels Eglish, Francais Deutsch, Nederlands, Italiano, Espanola, Portuguese (European versions of ll languages) 

• Track List
• Record Label and Logo
• Dedicated to...
• With Thanks to...
• DVD Features (music videos, concert, interviews)
• Extras

Magazine Advert 

• Make clear it is for a digi- pack 
• Out now/date 
• Record Label
• Action (how to buy) - Itunes
• Facebook/Twitter
• Quotes and star ratings from reviews

Feedback

We asked for audience feedback from a few people in our target audience range about our initial idea for our album cover. We asked 3 female teenagers to summarise their thoughts on our first idea.
The overall response was that they really liked the font of on the digi-pack cover as it was simple and girly without it being too obvious. They said the colour stood out and the colour scheme of the pastel colours would work well, however it could seem a bit boring and maybe too childish to attract their exact audience. They also said the way it looked without the picture would work well as a single cover perhaps, however it looked a little boring without the image for a digi-pack cover and they werent sure that a photograph image would work but suggested a drawn image would work better. They also really liked the idea of the bird silhouettes as it was simple, yet effective and did connote a natural approach which links in with our star persona. They suggested to keep the birds as it could almost be her signature image/logo that is recognisable within an audience.
We then suggested a new idea of a black and white colour scheme throughout which they said would appeal to them much more. They said this would look classy and with the possibility of a little colour in some of the images as this would stand out even further. They said this would appeal to a bit of an older audeince yet still aimed at the main teenage audience.
Overall this audience feedback was very useful, especially as it came from our target audience. This helped us decide on what to keep the same from our initial idea and what parts needed changing and what appealed to them. We also wanted to make sure we were still sticking to our star persona and this seemed successful.

Magazine advert

We looked closely into research for our magazine advert from many genres to see the themes throughout. Many of the adverts looked quite plain to us and had the same image as on their album cover. However we wanted to experiment more and use a variety of pictures that were still recognisable to our artist. We decided on a definite that we wanted to show the digi-pack cover in the advert to promote it and so our audience will definitely know what exactly we are advertising aswell as our artist.


Our plan was to use a profile image of our artist alongside the image of the digi-pack. The image will have the same mise-en-scene as the images within the digi-pack, therefore there is definite continuity and identification through our products. Our initial idea was to create a split screen which could be singular or double paged, with one profile image of the artist on one side and the digi-pack image and information on the other side. The split screen idea was to link in with our music video also.

Copyright

Copyright protects the physical expression of ideas. As soon as an idea is given physical form, e.g. a piece of writing, a photograph, music, a film, a web page, it is protected by copyright. There is no need for registration or to claim copyright in some way, protection is automatic at the point of creation. Both published and unpublished works are protected by copyright.

Copyright is normally owned by the creator of the work, e.g. an author, composer, artist, photographer etc. If the work is created in the course of a person's employment, then the copyright holder is usually the employer.

Copyright law grants to copyright holders certain exclusive rights in relation to their works. They have the right to: copy a work, issue copies to the public, perform show or play it, make adaptations or translations. They also have the right to prevent: 

• others communicating a work to the public by electronic transmission, e.g. broadcasting it or putting it on a website.
• others making available to the public a recording of a performance by electronic transmission, e.g. putting it on a website

 Infringing the rights of copyright holders may be a criminal offence and/or cause them to sue for damages.

For our music video, we had to try and get in contact with Ellie Golding to discuss how we would like to use her song for our A-level work. This included what we planned to do and how we would use it. Unfortunatley we did not manage to gain any contact details, but we did contact her through her facebook page.

Importance of copyright

There are many famous stories about how important copyright is and the consequences when it isnt taken into consideration. 
A classic example of a famous case was of George Harrison who was accused of plagiarism with his song 'My sweet Lord' which was very successful and lasted 27 weeks in the chart, however a song called 'He's so fine' by the group The Chiffons which was released 9 years before and wasnt so successful sounded very familiar. 
George Harrison was taken to court and the judge found that though he didn’t believe George Harrison purposefully plagiarized the song, the two songs were essentially the same, only displaying minor differences to note and chord. George Harrison was found guilty of ‘subconscious plagiarism’ and a judgment was filed against him in the amount of $587,000.00.
Therefore it is essential to think about this key factor as stealing someone's intellectual property with no permission or no notification of it is illegal. By contacting Ellie Goulding there is evidence in us telling her about how we are using her song, therefore this cannot be seen as an illegal process. 

Copyright

Copyright protects written, theatrical, musical and artistic works as well as film, book layouts, sound recordings, and broadcasts. Copyright is an automatic right, which means you don't have to apply for it.
Copyright is very important to consider when creating these media products, especially for us as we are taking a famous artists music and changing it, therefore in theory you should ask permission or inform the artist of what exactly you are doing first. Copyright works are protected across most mediums - so if they're protected in one, they're probably protected in others. It may then be copyright infringement if you create a painting from someone else's works without their permission.
We tried emailing our artist Ellie Goulding first, however we were unable to find contact details for this so we contacted her via her facebook page. We told her exactly what we intended to do and how we were using her song throughout our project. We told her what exact song we were using and what our purpose was for using her song. 

magazine insert

430, a photo by Media Studies 03 on Flickr.

We started our magazine insert on photoshop. Here we are showing the layering and the different editing techniques used in this image. We have edited the picture itself by using the brightness and contrast then editing it to black and white to show continuity and the theme to match the digi-pack. This still shows how we added our text to the insert and how we increased the boldness and colour to stand out further.

Cd Cover

This was our initial idea/ attempt at our front cover for our digi-pack. Our initial idea was to have a pastel colour theme throughout the images to show continuity and a star identification. However after taking our images we realised it wouldnt look professional and we wouldnt be able to pull off putting a photo of our artist on her with this background. We also thought the pastel colours may appeal to an even younger audience rather than our target one. Therefore we decided to get rid of the pastel colours and go for a more sophisticated and edgy approach with a black and white colour scheme with a hint of colour in the images. This is a usp for our artist and will be easily recognisable to her audience. 
On this album cover we used bird silhouettes to connote nature and her natural star persona. We have decided to keep this theme throughout, especially as our artist is wearing a bird blouse in our images. 
We are also keeping the font of this cover as it looks very girly and the writing looks handwritten which can seem down to earth and relatable to our star persona also. 

digi-pack photos

These are some of the pictures we took for our digi-pack on a shoot with the artist. We deliberately took thought in the mise-    en-scene within these pictures especially within the lighting and costume. For our costume we wanted to fit with our star persona therefore the idea of the white blouse was to connote her purity and innocence, along with the birds to connote a natural approach also. We made the artist have her hair down to connote femininity with natural and little make to show she is down to earth and creating a positive image to our audience and not promoting how the audience think they should look. We kept our setting simple with a white background as we wanted lots of close-ups and this meant the white background would be easy to edit on. We also wanted to keep the setting as bright as possible along with the lights to create this positive ‘good girl’ star persona approach. The lighting used was a large sheeted light to the side of the artist and a torch that reflected onto a gold reflector to give the images the glowing effect.

              
The top and bottom left pictures show the setting with the mid/long shot. This was to show a quirky side and to make the artist more relatable to her audience as you feel as though you are more in touch with her and with her within these images. We choose the bottom left picture as our cover because it showed this quirky side which linked to our video. There is some mystery behind the picture which also fits with our video as the artist isn’t shown in the video till the chorus. We choose this image as it stands out and would look very effective and intriguing to our audience. We also decided on a few side profile images. This was also the keep the continuity as these profiles can be intriguing and quirky as you can’t see the face straight on. Also the facial expressions look thoughtful and almost dreamlike which fits in with our music video with the cartoon clouds and in the performance when she is looking up a number of times. 

Evaluation Draft

1.       Lyrics relate to visuals-‘we have only ever touched, when there is no one else around’ the idea of touching but them not knowing as it is seen on split screen only by the audience. Fitting together ‘like a make shift puzzle’- split screen also represents this, and the green screen. There are lots of words within the lyrics that relate to them being in a bed, for example; ‘waking’  ‘lying down’ ‘still lay here’ ‘when I stayed the night’. We conventionally related the lyrics to the visuals as this, included with our performance section, was what our audience looked for in this genre; narrative.  

2.       Music relates to visuals- the song has a continuous beat and is very snappy, so this is why we used stop motion, which challenged the convention. We agreed that it made the video more visually interesting. As a guitar is used in the song, we decided to bring this feature in to the performance part of the video with our artist. This connotes how she is still focussed more on the music, even when she is being shown.

3.       Demands of record label

4.       Intertextuality

5.       Reference to notion of looking and voyeurism

6.       Genre of Characteristics

Pplease mention Goodwin and why his observations are so significant to your work

BLOGGER

Blogger.com has been an essential technology within all of the stages in this process. It has enabled us to track our progress to our initial task, from the very first ideas we all individually brought to the brief. This has allowed us to see how our product and ideas have grown.

As a group it has been a major foundation of sharing information, and posting relevant sources for us all to view. From this, ideas have sprung off each other, resulting in a finalised, professional product.

For example, we posted different techniques used in Photoshop to see which would suit our artist best, several music videos that are within the same genre as ours that we were able to view similar conventions and also different digi- packs that we all thought worked well within the genre.

Final cut

Final Cut has been the biggest part of creating the music video, as it has enabled us to edit all of our footage we took, and turn it into something professional. Final Cut allows you to alter how much, or how little of your footage you want, but we used this technology for speeding/slowing down scenes, fading in and out, jump cuts, layering, colour correcting it to make it look of a high standard, allowed us to work with green screen which was very frustrating at the best of times but improved our video a lot when it was completed. A major part of our music video was our ‘split screen’ effect, which we included for our narrative perspective. Final cut made this possible and it runs through most of the video without any hitches. Using final cut we made a continuous video, and also added a soundtrack to make the footage relate to something.

More detail needed about step by step processes of how you applied certain effects. Use correct terminology for the tools in each software.

Evaluation draft

Final Cut- We used final cut for the editing process of our video. We used many techniques within this process such as green screen, split screen, transitions and layering. With the green screen we overcame a few challenges such as the green card as the image moved so we had to try and move the image going on the card to sync this and whether the image on the card would fit and look clear and professional enough to use. We used the motion key tool and the marker to show exactly where we needed to move the image to, to get the positioning precise. We also had to create a black background behind the image, as when the green card moved a shadow of the image was shown as the lighting was perhaps too bright. However after doing a test run on this before attempting the real thing we knew this would be possible and overall it looked effective. We used split screen throughout the verses of our video. This was to fit with the narrative of our music video with the male a female sequences beside each other and keeping them as in sync as we could with each other. The obsticle we had was trying to get both sequences in time, especially when the objects were being passed through, however by simply taking out a few frames in certain parts we got near perfect to the timing we had wanted and that was possible within our footage. With the split screen we had to crop the two images so they were the same size however the positioning of the bed posts at the beginning isnt as exact as we had hoped and this was because we had to enlarge one side of the footage in order for it to look the same size and this meant the proportions had changed and the whole image would look distorted if we had moved it to line up with the other bed post exact. The layering looked effective whist the artist footage used in the chorus of our video. To layer we moved the two pieces of footage on top if each other and used to fading tool to fade the capacity of the dominant image on top. This performance footage was layered with images of the artist playing her guitar as the performance, overlayed with different camera shots, such as close ups of the guitars to connote the genre of the artist/song clearly, close up shot of the artist herself to show identification to her audience and mid-long shots to show this performance, show her body language and outfit also for this identification. We also used colour corrector throughout to highlight the lighting and to make the video more professional. Our aim was to edit the colour to almost look cartoon like and we enhanced the high key lighting when our artist was performing to follow our persona.

Blog- We used our blog to record all of our planning and research we did throughout our music video process. The blog is easily accessible to media convergence and can display media platforms such as videos, images, and web research all which was useful and needed throughout this planning period. We were able to upload YouTube videos that related or inspired some of our ideas and decisions used throughout, then we were able to analyse and explain what our final thoughts were. The blog was also useful in order to correlate our work as a group, we used this especially through the editing process when taking screen grabs of exactly our progress as a group and how we managed to achieve these editing techniques and test runs and footage to see whether these techniques would work and were achievable. Blogging is such as easy way to show your journey of planning and research as a portfolio and to look back at your initial ideas and how they have changed and progressed throughout.

Photoshop- We used photoshop through editing out photographs taken for our digi-pack and magazine advert. We used the magic want tool for our advert to erase the background and get the outline for our image. We then multiplied the image and reversed it so we had two of the same images facing the same way. We then changed the brightness and contrast of the image to create a further glowing effect then edited in the black and white effect to show continuity with the digi-pack theme. We also showed continuity by downloading our font and writing the information for the advert then cropping and editing colour to show further the connections with our digi-pack. We then edited all our images for our digi-pack through photoshop. We choose 3 images of guitars to connote the genre then 3 images of the artist to show the artist herself. There is continuity with the magnified glass prop to show voyeurism to her audience and identification. We used these as our front and back cover. With the front image we choose to blur further the image of the artist through the glass to connote a mystery and we also blurred the font of the writing to carry on this effect. With the images of the guitar, for one we highlighted the colour of pink and kept the rest of the image coloured black and white. 

Feedback

Two weeks ago we had set up a camera and created a sheet to get feedback from another classes group towards our music video. We filmed four groups to visualise there reactions and responses but also had the sheet to have a written response and more of a summary towards our music video.

We had a mixture of positive feedback with some constructive criticism and both forms of the feedback helped us immensely with finalising the results of our music video. The summary from the positive feedback was that they like the quirkiness of our idea and the originality of the idea. They also thought that the way we used stop motion throughout was clever and effective for the song choice.

The majority of our constructive criticism was based around the un finished parts of our music video and that some of the effects and use of split screen confused them, which i think will be clearer when we add our 'chorus' part of the music video and our green screen video because then it will really start to come together and look more professional.

Overall i think the feedback was positive and has helped us get to the finished music video we have now, we have corrected all of the mistakes and parts that didn't flow through our music video and hopefully answered the constructive criticism.

Possible Promotion Images

These images of our artist; Eliza Mindel, are what we plan to adapt onto and within our digi-pack.

Our artist is wearing a long sleeved white blouse with small black bird print on- this connotes innocence, alongside the love of nature, and her natural personality. This is also highlighted with her hair being down, loosely over her shoulders.

On our photo shoot we chose to use a white back drop as we are able to manipulate the images easier on to another background, such as our album cover, but it is also has a connotation of purity.

We really liked, and experimented a lot with side profile shots as through the examples we have seen, they are used well- the side profile shot is a favourite to go on the magazine advert. I think this would work well as the image on the album cover should be different (artist facing camera), so although the images would be slightly different, there would still be continuity running through.

 Image number 1 has a good contrast, and our artist is trying to look, un-interested, but the natural look bodes well for our artist’s persona. Image number 2 (top right) is extremely bright, which reflects a lot about one of the music videos on her album, giving a sense of 'surrealism'. This pose is where she is caught off guard, but the facial expression is making the audience question her different persona. Image number 3, is where she is sitting on the floor gazing above. She looks like she is in a dream like state, which has reference to her album and music. We chose to photograph her with her shoes off as she looked more natural. The red tint to the image is warming. Image number 4 is where we asked her to throw some fake leaves above her, catching them as they fell. The idea behind the leaves was the 'natural' element behind them. The edited colour adaptations are fun and attractive- giving clues to her personality and music.

Rough idea for Digi-pack

DSCF8135, a photo by Media Studies 03 on Flickr.

This is an initial idea for our did-pack. The main things we want to include throughout is a recognisable identity for our artist, this through the font of the artists name throughout the images and a clear colour scheme which we will use as pastel colours or sunset colours. All of this will connote her star persona and will attract her audience of mainly females. We also wanted to fit with connotations from our music video which was surrealistic and quirky, therefore the idea of cartoon like trees and birds would fit these conventions well. Also as our star persona is a down to earth artist and innocent we choose to use natural images to portray this. We also wanted the pack to look simple but effective which is quite similar to our music video. Our persona is all about her and her music therefore we dont want to use lots of editing and create extravagant images as this draws away from her naturalness and key themes within our persona.

Homework for Wednesday 28th November

You need to have an attempt at two of the evaluation questions by next week. I apologise for not going through this in lesson today but any start you can make with this will benefit you. The FINAL DEADLINE FOR EVALUATION IS 14TH DECEMBER so the sooner you start the better. I would like to see something significant from you next week for FOR QUESTIONS 1 AND 4 ONLY. See text in red below for extra guidance with this homework.

Word Count should be approximately 400-500 words per question (excluding question 3 which is in video form)

G324 Evaluation Tasks.

 

Below are the 4 questions you need to answer for your coursework Evaluation. The task for Question 3 should be done in your group. The other tasks are individual. When you have completed the tasks post all 4 onto the same post and tag it with YOUR NAME.

 Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Task: Select 10 stills/ images from your Music Video and the 2 ancillary tasks (you cannot annotate ancillary tasks just yet obviously). Annotate each one of them in Photoshop or Powerpoint to indicate which conventions you have used at which point. Explain which conventions you followed/challenged and how/why? Use Goodwin's 6 points as a guide here.   

 Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Task: Create a Prezi which makes clear links between your 3 products.

 Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Task: Create a director’s commentary which includes clips from the music video and ancillary tasks, as well as vox-pop presentations of audience feedback.

 Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Task: Create a video presentation which discusses the technologies you used at each stage of the project. This video needs to be different from the Director’s commentary in terms of its presentation and content ie. Presented as a ‘How to use…’/ Teaching (in character?) style of video that could then be used as a future teaching aid. For homework for wednesday, you need to write the script for this and try to collect relevant screen grab images. Choose 3 technologies that you used and explain how you used them or you can 

Feedback from roughcut

Last week we had four groups come and evaluate our rough cut. We were able to watch their reactions, and listen to their comments (as we filmed their responses) alongside a chart they had to fill out, marking against some criteria.

We received mixed responses, but overall some great comments and some positive, constructive criticism! The comments we received was that the narrative worked well with the genre of the song, and the split screen will look effective once the editing is completed and when colour corrector has finished being applied. Our constructive criticism was too fill in the black parts of the video, which was where we hadn't finished putting in our performance footage- also to add something to the green screen, which was what we had planned to do next.

Being able to view their responses was interesting to see what they thought. This is very important as the audience is who you are aiming it at, and if they don't like it- you have to re-evaluate whether it’s the correct audience/genre.

Feedback

We had 4 groups look at our rough cut video and we filmed their viewing experience to see any visceral reactions and to hear their comments whilst they were watching.
We got positive and constructive criticism from the groups which was very helpful and useful to us before our last week of editing before our deadline.
Our positive feedback was that the groups thought our idea was inventive and clever and that the stop motion was achieved well and looked effective within the video. People thought the idea was 'cute' and had a good narrative within. They said with more time and with the whole video finished, our video had the potential to look really good and memorable.
However we also had critisism which was that there were a few black screen moments where we hadnt got round to putting the footage in yet, I think this confused people as this was the part with the artist in therefore this made it unclear to see the star's persona and what our star is about. Also at this point there was nothing on our green screen and our audience wanted to know what would be on this.
Overall audience feedback is very useful to know whether you are following conventions of a music video and whether or not you need to change the video in order to do this. I think its very useful to get someone elses opinion to your own as not everyone agrees and sees things differently.

Digi-Pack Prezi

Digi-Pack on Prezi

DigiPak Ideas

When thinking about what we wanted to acomplish from our digipack, we firstly wanted to look at some different album art works which could give us some inspiration into what we want to achieve on our own digipack.  Recognising the genre and the artist we wanted to keep the digipack simple. To keep continuity throughout this we can't have alot happening on the digipack.

 Because of the genre, we want to keep it simple and to focus mainly on the atrist and make the video more lyrical based. By focusing more on the artist and the acoustics sound it makes the video and digipack connect together with a link. The simpleness of the video being both story based and focusing on the artist in the chorus playing the guitar, also relates to what is wanted to be done on the digipack.

These two album covers are rather simplistic, but draw attention to the genre. Emeli Sande album cover relates to her music video. This simple effect with the clouds will be quite easy to re-create by adding effects in photoshop to the images we take. Kayne West album 'Runaway' with a ballet dancer in view is different to the genre you would expect to see him in as it is going agains the conventions of 'rap' and 'pop', however it is allowing the audience to be inquistive toward this CD.

This was an album advertisement in a music magazine, however the same image was used for her album. I really like this advert as it highlights all the important bits without bombarding you with too much information. The image and font work well together! I love the different red shades used throughout the advert, and the side shot of the artist.

These two album covers are by Shikari. They chose to do a different digipak with over 6sides. I really like the top image as the natural setting is stunning. I feel that our digipak could relate to this one as our genre, artist and song are very natural and we are trying to strongly get this across to our audience. Our shots should be taken outside, in a desserted location, to give the feel of freedom.

Rough cut

Unfortunately we were unable to upload our rough cut to YouTube

Screen Shot of editing the green screen

This is evidence of the process we went through whilst using green screen. This is the last clip of our music video. We knew the images for the green screen would work as we used test footage before applying the real thing. On the green screen the image will be of the other character in the video in live motion arther than in stop motion and the image will move with the green card. It was hard to move the image with the green screen as the movement was quite fast and not that fluent, however overall the image worked and looked well, we didnt want it to look absolutely perfect as our whole idea of the video is surrealism and not to look realistic.

Blog of The Week!

Congratulations, you are blog of the week. Your blog has an excellent range of posts. Keep up the good work!

Tanya

Qualitative Research

After research into our target audience and discovering out that we should be aiming our artist at female teenagers/young adults, I thought Id do qualititative researach into a contrasting audience to see whether we could attract an further target audience from her niche.

I interviewed a 30 year old male to get this contrasting view and opinion:

What genre of music do you tend to listen to?
Usually rock music with a bit of R&B although i do have quite a wide variety in taste of music.
So Im guessing you dont listen to the likes of Ellie Goulding/Taylor Swift?
No thats not really my cup of tea to be honest, I dont really choose to listen to their music, however do hear them on the radio sometimes.
What would you expect to see in that type of genre's music video?
Id expect it to be quite abstract maybe, Ellie Goulding songs can be quite different and I saw a music video of hers which was quite out of the ordinary, I think this fits with her persona.
Would you expect there to be some kind of performace included in this genre's music video?
Yes, most music videos have some sort of perfromance of the artist within. It makes us as an audience connect and realate to the artist and song better I think.
You say you like rock music, how would that style of a music video differs from our artists?
Rock videos are quite intense with lots of performance involved, especially footage from a concert and festival. Also the videos are quite whacky and almost abract which could be quite similar to your artists style, however on a much more toned down level to rock I think.
What would you expect our artists digi-pack images to look like?
Id say it would have to follow a theme throughout maybe a link with her music video. Also some of the images should have the artist on she is recognised to her audience and has her unique stamp.

This research was very interesting and useful. This tells us that we are aiming our artist to the right type of audience and although the male audience may not choose to listen to this music, they can recognise the artist and dont object to listening to this genre. This means although we are mainly focusing our audience to female teens, there is still a further potential audience. This research has also told us that with there not being a massive male fan base we are sticking to our star persona

Feedback from other group

These screenshots shows the feedback of our music video from the other A2 media studies group. We swapped classrooms and we all watched each others music videos. we set up video cameras to record the reactions/feedback of the group watching our music videos. Also we were told to fill out these sheets as pictured.

the levels we received were:

T2-10: 19.66

T2-08: 21

T2-07: 25

T2-09: level 2

Font Ideas for digipak

This is a font idea for our Digipak, i like the simplicity of the font and this will really fit out artists personality and the star personna we are trying to create for Eliza Mindel. The handwritting effect will make the single seem very personal and almost like our artist has wrote it herself but it adds a quirky feel. Also this font will be very appealing for our target audience because it fits our ideal target audience members likes perfectly. This font is free to download from http://www.dafont.com/ so we will probably be using one from there for our final digipak because they have loads to choose from.

Screen Grab of green screen experiment

 This is our test to make sure our green screen
will work and to make sure we wont have to film this section again. This thankfully works however
we need to film the footage for the green screen still.

Font Ideas

I have been looking at potential ideas for the font we will use in our digi-pack/magazine advertisement. I have considered the star persona of our artist and I think that because she is potrayed as innocent and from a folk background this font will represent her well. It appears to be the handwriting of a woman. The typography will suit our target audience well. This font is from a website called dafont.com all of the fonts here are free to download and this is a good website.

Ideal Audience Type

Ideal Audience Type on Prezi

Photoshop Technique

Throughout media we have learnt various new photoshop techniques to help improve our overall finished products, and this year when creating our music video our new photoshop techniques will help immensely because of the fact we need to create a digipak cover and magazine article. One effect ive learnt from media studies that will help me in creating our digipak cover is lighting effects through the image that create a surrealistic 'slash' of lighting which makes a image stand out and with the right image and the right composition of the image can make the image very effective and different and this is the exact type of effect we are looking to create with the contrast of the natural setting of the image. We would like to add these surrealistic effects because it will link perfectly with the imaginary and surrealism we are trying to create with our actual music video and we think this will link very well.

Digi pack ideas

We are thinking that we will use natural locations such as outside because this will promote her star pesonna and the fact that our star is a natural beauty. Using quite outside locations will also follow the song and fit into how the song makes you feel because the song is quite peaceful and relaxing a lonely outside place that doesn't look to grotesque will be perfect. We are also looking to have different locations fro every shot on the digipak with different outfits to advertise her different styles.







We like this one because its unusual and unique, and this is the effect and emotion we want to give off when people look at our digipak cover. Also it uses photoshop effects to create dream like effects and a appealing image. We also like its rustic look because of the handwritting effect on the back and "Taylor Swift" on the actual C.D, the fact she is holding her musical instrument makes the audience understand that she creates alot of her own music and is a independent artist and this is what we want to create with our digipak cover.

Bad Day music video

I came across this video through cross media convergence on a tv music channel. Even though we came up with our initial idea before seeing this video there are many similarities throughout both sequences therefore we know we are along the right tracks to creating a professional and conventional music video. The opening shots are very similar to our own video. The idea of the male and female going about their daily routine within this split screen image. It may have been useful to have seen this video before filming our video to experiment with different camera angles like in this video, however we still wanted to create the abstract unrealistic approach with it all being filmed in a bed and this may not have given the image we were hoping if we had choosen different camera angles. I like the use of the drawings in this video as it fits with our idea of although the characters arent physically together at the time, they are together through these drawings in this video and are together through passing the objects through to each other in our video. This video also plays around with the editing of experimenting further with split screen being in four parts. This is something we could consider through our editing process to broaden the image and movement of our video.

Finalised Star Persona

 

 

        Our star persona for Eliza Mindel through our music video and digi pack, is that we hope to portray the idea of our artist a very innocent character that many teenage girls (our target audience) can relate to and aspire to.  This photo follows our idea of this star persona. Our artist is sitting in a poppy field with the mise-en-scene of the colours and setting being very colourful.  We are using this to portray our star having a cheerful and relateable persona. The blue skies and clouds relate to our music video therefore we are creating a theme throughout and an identity for our artist. IThe framing shows the artist as the full image in the forground to make her the main subject. The lighting within is also very high key to enhance the colourful approach and to almost look unrealistic to fit with our music video also. In this image the artists body language shows a sense of vulnerability. She is holding her knees up to connote she's a safe and protective character that is appealing to our target audience. She is staring straight to camera to engage our audience and to be able to identify with her with her expression relaxed and to show an overall down to earth 'girl next door' approach. However with our choice of costume this can go against our ideology of our star. She is wearing a black top which may go against conventions of innocence and purity, although this may be true it can also show a side which can be relateable to her audience also. As her audience is teenagers, teenagers can be rebelious and although this is the opposite to our star persona this could attract a further audeince within our target. Also with the artsist showing some flesh this can attract a male audience. We dont want to give our artist the provocative approach however believe this doesnt cross the line and will still follow our persona.

        Throughout our digi-pack we will try to show continuity throughout all the products. Like similar artsists to ours such as Ellie Goulding, she uses the theme of lights throughout her products. This is clever and we hope to create a similar approach. By doing this Ellie has created her own identity and every product she creates is easily identifiable. Also it links in with her album name of 'Lights' and songs form the album such as 'Starry Eyed'. With the title of our single being called 'The End' this can give of negative connotations yet positive ones so if we were to follow the idea of linking our products to the title we would go for the positive approach and interpretation. We will try to use the theme of colours to fit with her star persona. We will also try to use a theme of unrealism which will follow on from our music video. Although we are unable to use shots from our video we can still connote the abstract approach through our pack also. The idea of childlike images like the cartoonised clouds and sky in our music video may also be an option for our products. However we still want to attract our target audience of teenagers and by doing this we may attract a younger audience.

 

 

digi pack ideas

There are many different ideas we could use when it comes to designing a digi-pack, i have been researching and looking into many different concepts. The first one I looked at and I really like is from the album 'Here we are!' by the Citizens. I really like the idea and it is so simple yet so effective. It looks as if a Photoshop genius has created the image however it is literally a photo of matchsticks burning. If we could use intuition like this and apply it to another simplistic idea I think it could be really effective to our target audience.

This is a really cool looking album and I really like how simple the idea is.

Another idea that could be used in making an album would be to go even simpler and use simple shapes and colours. This is a very effective way graphic designing and I usually like and am intrigued by adverts/posters that use this effect. Using a couple of shapes with block colours always looks good and would be a good way to appeal to people. It is a good method of catching peoples eye, this is by using bright block colours. This album cover is a compilation album for the A/W 12 season.

These colours are really effective and produce a simple, yet appealing digi-pack.

These two digi-packs were designed by a guy I know from Paris. Check out his Facebook page for more info.

Target audience and magazine advert

Our target audience has been stated before, however we will need to be revisiting it when we come to design our magazine advert. We have to take the interests of our target audiences incorporate them into our advert. We must also use the factors that appeal our target audiences to our star persona and incorporate them into the advert. These could be all sorts of factors including graphics, typography, placement of images and theme of advert. I have been looking at a couple of magazine adverts from similar artists and analysing them. One factor i think would appeal to our target audience and match our star persona would be to include an image of our star, Eliza Mindel. This image would show her face and include her emotions/feelings. It would be good to use some of the Photoshop techniques i have mentioned in previous posts as well. The image should fade to black either on the top or the bottom, or both. Creating a main focus on the artist. Meaning audiences will be able to relate to her feelings. One advert i have seen a similar effect on is Ellie Goulding's 'Lights' advert.

The advert will also include ratings from multiple recognisable critics. Just like in the above example. This will appeal to our target audience because teenagers are easily influenced, therefore by seeing a review saying it is 4 or 5 star they will take the word of the critic.

Eliza Mindel Facebook page

We recently have created a Facebook page for 'Eliza Mindel', our star persona. This is a good idea because it means we will regularly be able to keep fans and our audiences up to date with what is going on with our star. Another way Facebook is a good idea is the fact that you can use it as a marketing technique. Lots of companies compete over how many likes a page gets or how many page views their page gets. This is one good way of targeting potential customers or in our case fans. Ways in which we can do this is by creating adverts which will appear to everyone in a specific region (our most targeted) and also we can run competitions, for example a user must like our page, share a promotional image (for all their friends to see) and at the end of a specific time period we will pick one user who shared the image and they will win a prize.  This could be concert tickets or merchandise. This is a very effective way of marketing/gaining awareness/advertising to target audience.

This image shows the Eliza Mindel Facebook page, we have included a generic concert audience image for the cover photo and also the profile picture is similar. I have left in the advertisements at the side so you can see where we could place advertisements.

Target audience with digi-pack

We hope to incorporate the interests of our target audience as much as we can into our digi-pack cover and our magazine advert. Our target audience is teenagers, predominantly women aged around 12-20. Our digi-pack will include a front cover, a CD  a back cover and an insert. All of these will follow the same theme (as will the magazine advert) and the front cover will be very similar compared to the CD. This may include the artist's face, logo/name, album name and relevant legal images. The back cover will obviously include the track names and will also include the legal images and maybe a graphic.

 It is the insert that I would like to focus on as this is always the most appealing part of a digi-pack. The insert will include some interesting facts about the artist which we think will give good reason for the target audience to relate to her (as this is what we find the most appealing about the artist, the ability for teenagers to relate with her). The insert will also include some 'behind the scenes' images which will appeal to the target audience through teenagers love for information. I find that once an audience has all the information they can get on their interests, they will always look for more. I think the behind the scenes images will be a nice compliment to the digi-pack. The insert will also include the lyrics to the song we have made a music video to. This means that if teenagers do relate to the song they will enjoy reading/learning the lyrics.

The whole digi-pack will be influenced by the target audience of our star persona  One way we will find information on what the interests of our target audience are is by interviewing a select few who fit the match and recording the results.

More image techniques

During our time at A-level media studies we have learnt many Photoshop techniques. Another one we have learnt is editing textures of things. For example earlier this academic year we put a flag on a human hand, however by editing the textures and adding multiple layers/effects we made the hand look as if the skin was the same colour as the flag.The image that becomes the texture wraps around the lighting/shadowing of the base image. This effect is very realistic and can work in an effective way by appealing to the audiences of the images used. (eg. an English flag would appeal to English people.) For example:

Editing Images

In the promotional package (digi-pack)/Magazine advert the images we use must look appealing and professional. To edit the images we use will be created in Photoshop and using the techniques we have learnt  in media studies. One technique I am particularly fond of is creating a good 'lomo' effect in Photoshop. This is achieved by getting an image, then creating a new layer with the same image on it. Then use the layer effect 'Overlay'. This will give the image some more aesthetically please colour levels. Then messing with the hue, saturation etc can further more improve the image.

Before

After

5/11/12 -Plan for the following week

As our final cut deadline is the 15th of November, we have the next 5 lessons to edit, however we have to start our digi pack too.

This should include:

•  Front Cover 
• CD 
• Insert
• Back Cover 

Our ideas are, to make them: 

• Colourful 
• Abstract? 
• Folllowing same theme as track 

Ideal Audience type

Looking at the picture this would be our ideal looking and dressing audience type wearing casual but colourful clothing that stand out because of they're unusual. The media we feel that she would consume would be mainly social networking sites and expect to be quite heavily involved with all things social trying to get to as many gigs as possible, and having their lives evolve mainly around their friends and having a good time, we also expect that they would be into reading the occasional celebrity magazine and very into music. We would expect them to attend festivals because its a way of socialising with new people and their current friends, the kinds of festivals would be V festival, Reading, Global Gathering, Bestival and Glastonbury to name a few examples of the ones they would be interested in mainly because the genre of music we are using in our music video would be the bulk of the music at most of these festivals or genre similar to that of ours. The radio channel they would mainly be into would be Radio 1 because of its slightly more out of the charts and alternative genre types than that of kiss and heart. We would expect them not to be heavily into technology but have essentials for their personality such as a phone, laptop, ipod and camera to take photos of all their favourite moments.

 

Interview with 14 year old female

Eliza Mindel is attracting a similar audience to the likes of Ellie Goulding/ Taylor Swift, do you enjoy their music?
I really enjoy this type of music because of its unique sound and interesting music videos that i like to relate to, i enjoy slower melodies and like to be able to sing along with the song so Eliza Mindel would really be attractive for me.
What conventions would you expect to see in this genre's music videos?
I would expect to see casual/smart dress senses and really inspiring style of fashion for me because i really like the type of clothing they would generally wear. Also i would expect to see a quirky story for the video with interesting editing that captures the eye.
Does our idea for our music video follow these conventions to our genre and will attract our target audience? 
Yes. The fact you are using iStopMotion in your music video really follows the unusual personality of there music videos and the split screen really helps you understand the stopmotion and understand the story within it fully.
Do you have social networks, if so is this a good way to promote an artist aimed at teenagers?
I do and i think especially twitter is a good way to promote an artist because twitter means you can directly contact the artists because they use it a lot and you interact with them and they can show there thanks to their fans and post promotions that all their fans see on their home screen.
What would you expect her promotional package to look like?
I expect it to use photoshop effects and techniques to create unusual effects around the picture of the artist, in terms of clothing i expect it to be quite dressy with their promotional pack but it not to be high end designer like clothing more the kind of dresses and things you see in high street store to further promote her image. Her make up i expect will be noticeable but only hinted at with subtlety because thats what her type of personality sounds like.