( PLANNING) Short list of fonts, colours, layout and design ideas

After agreeing on a name for our girl band we then agreed on using 3 colours ( red, black and white) for our digipaks and adverts so that the audience can see the link between the different versions and so that they might want to collect/buy them.

These are the potential fonts that may be used in my media products, as you can see they are all quite big and bold but i want the font to look quite sophisticated as this will match the image of the girlband. 

The image below shows the main layout for the design of my digipak , so i tryed placing all the fonts to see which one went best with my design and i was really happy with this font .. its called Engravers MT.

I didnt know whether to use the same font through out my digipak so i asked for my teachers opinion and she told me that i should compare it with another font that i liked and thats what the image below shows , so after making a few comparisons i decided to keep the same font.

Analysis of 3 advertisements relating to our genre (Research)

An Advertisement Online

 

The theme colours used are very different compared to their album cover. It has more soft, bright and feminine colours such as pink, white and blue. The font of the text 'SUGABABES' is similar with the font on their digipak however the colours are again different. Already, you can see a visual link between their product and their advert. Another visual link is the gestures of the girl group, I have noticed that it is similar with the gestures that they used on their digipak, but they did this differently on the advert by switching it with a different member. Also, they have included a small photo of their front cover on the bottom right corner of this advert that reminds the audience what album they are promoting regardless of the different layout that is used.

A video advert of their album 'Sweet 7'

I am fortunate to have found this video advert of their album on youtube. The whole video is very similar and it links very much with their digipak in terms of the background,theme colours, the clothes that are used and the whole setting. They have also included a voice over that introduces the girl group and their songs, and the name of the store and the store's website to where the audience could order their album.

               Similar Posters but from different countries

The original poster is the one on my right hand side. The background is full of unkown people which links to what they are promoting 'A TOUR'. It gives the audience an insight of the things that they can look forward to in this tour. Placing the solo artist at the centre with a round steel prop around her makes her the main focal point and tells the audience who 'LADY GAGA' is and also sets up the energy level because of its unusual appeal.
I have chosen a similar poster but from a different country which is seen through the text because of its different used of language. I chose this poster because it has more informations about the tour and they have included a small photo of the front cover of Lady Gaga's digipak which is conventional for these kind of adverts, again to remind people of the album. Locations, dates of the tour are included, websites of the artist are also there on the left hand side that could help the audience to browse through her current news, events and photos.

Unfortunately, I could not find any adverts that relates to their digipak. However, I found a magazine that links to the genre of our music video 'POP'. Our ideal target audience are young women who likes make up, current fashion trend, shoes and heels, accessories, bags and more. This is our ideal target audience because our music video are formed by a 'girl group', and a narrative that tells a story of an ordinary scenario in a girl's life. This magazine cover links with our ideal target audience, because it screams out the word 'femininity', the pink clothes and lipsticks, the make ups, the wavy and straight curly hair. The font colours of the texts matches with their clothes. The masthead is also bold,bright and pink which can easily attract a young woman. Layering the girl group on top of the masthead and covering the whole front page is also cleverly done, since they are a well known band. No text is covering any of the artists' face, the texts are all aligned around, on top or beneath the artists. Also, because of their whole appearances, it also screams out 'FASHION', and this advertised by the big white font on the bottom left hand side of the magazine. 

( Research) Analysis of three digipaks & advertisments

Analysis of Digipaks & Advertisments on Prezi

Analysis of 3 digipaks that relate to our genre (Research)

The genre of our Music Video is pop, therefore, I have chosen three artists/groups that relate to this.

 

RESEARCH; Anayisis of Three Digipaks

Pixie Lott; Turn It Up Louder

Pixie Lott's digipak can be seen as simple as only three different colours have been used pink, black and white. It has also been kept simple as only two different fonts have been used, the pink girly hand writing font is to establish the artists name 'Pixie Lott' , also that is how the artist is established everywhere else; I think by doing this is personalises the digipak and brings her personality through.

The close up image on the front cover is  there to engage her audiences and to make them want to buy it, the close up image also shows emotion. I think the image on the back cover is showing a different view to her for example the image on the front cover she looks young and just a little bit vunerable whereas on the back cover she looks strong, seductive almost as if she is calling you in to buy her album.

 Sugababes; Catfights and Spotlights

This can also be seen as simple as yet again only three colours have been used; white, beige and brown. To keep it all the same the same font has been used throughout this follows the 'two different font convention'. The artist group name is in capitals but so is the album title, but the album title is in bold so that the audience can tell the difference between the group name and the album name. There is only one image on this digipak which is a close up of the girl band. Girl groups usually depend on there image. The close up has been used to show emotion to engage the audiences.

Beyonce; I Am Sasha Fierce

From when you first look at this you can see that the artist is the main focus as she is right in the middle and her name and album title are in the left hand corner at the bottom of the panel.

RESEARCH - Analysis Of Three Advertisements

The genre of which our music video belongs to is Pop so below are three examples of advertisment of artists within the music genre and how they vary with the use of media codes and conventions which will help with the my advertisement

RESEARCH - Analysis Of Three Digipaks

The genre of which our music video belongs to is Pop so below are three examples of digipaks of artists within the music genre and how they vary with the use of media codes and conventions which will help with the my digipak.

ESTELLE. I particularly like the graphics used to emphasis Estelle's presence on the Digipak as she is not wearing colours used on the background, however, her outfit is used as the font colour for her name, which shows the link between the two. The effects used not only attract the attention of the audience, but it also allows the name of the album 'Shine' to connect with Estelle 'shining', which too, creates a link between what the album is called and what the album is trying to do. Successfully, the outbursts of colours - which work well though there is more than the maximum use of 3 colours - behind Estelle demonstrate the vibrant genre she sings of, pop, which from buying the digipak, the audience are aware of what type of music she produces.

The alimement of writing is in a clear position where there is a black background which allows it to be seen clearly, and does not create confusion, therefore it is pleasant to view. In addition, the font used for the writing is bold, sofisticated and attractive which the genre pop is about; it helps to illustrate the personality of Estelle as a strong, young female British artists, and allows the audience to have a connection with her. The image is in focus which indicates it is clear and has an appropriate shape to is, which shows careful consideration was taking when editing this digipak.

LILY ALLEN. The simplicity of this digipak effectively appeals to its audience as it is still atrractive though with minor editing, such as Lily Allen resting on the 'L' from her name. The large font not only allows the buyer to see her album from far, and be able to read it, it is also aligned in the centre of the digipak in black, which emphasises the boldness of the writing and the bold personality the artists has. With careful observation, you are able to see the use of different colours behind each letter which highlights each one and adds to the 'attention grabbing' of the audience. The use of Lily Allen sitting on her own writing is a creative way of displaying the connection between the artist and her name and allows individuals who are unaware of this artist to know who she is. The use of no graphics is no problem as this digipak still acts as an appealing product for its audience and with the use of a plain background, it allows the audience to pay more attetion to the position of the artist on the 'L' and what the name of her album is called. The use of a clear image allows the digipak to look clear which makes it easier for her audience to view.

ALEXANDRA BURKE. Immediately, we are appealed to the use of a close-up image of the artists of this digipak - hence how considerably clear the image is, rather than out of focus - in effect, it grabs hold the attention of the audience, and gives a sense of force, for a buyer to buy the digipak as it is so striking. The use of the artist from the shoulder to her head is in proportion with the digipak itself and with the use of writing going across her. The use of luminous colours creates an exciting and vibrant atmopshere, which describes the genre of the songs she produces, creating a link between the digipak and her music. The captured effect of her hair getting blown to the side adds to motion to the still image and right away, gets the audience in the mood to listen to her music. The positioning of the writing is good as it does not cover her face, yet is stil visable as the font colour used does not hide it or allow the audience to miss it. The use of CAPITAL illustrates the boldness and seriousness of the digipak which connects with the emotionless facial expression made by the artist. The name of the album, 'START WITHOUT YOU' relates to the digipak as Alexandra is pictured alone with a confident, straight head position. With the use of the middle third of the digipak, it allows the audience to see her first when they view the digipak and captures there attention.

RESEARCH; Anaysis of Three Advertisments

PRODUCTION - Final Music Video

PRODUCTION - Analysis Of Sequences From The Rough Cut

POOR LIGHTING.

The extract above from our rough cut shows how poor our lighting was after filiming, despite the fact we were able to adjust the lights and the settings on the camera. Unfortunately, most of the group filming were produced as such so it resulted in us having to use other clips and either editing the lighting on Final Cut - which minimised the quality - or fitting in more of our narrative. The lighting is recognisable as during our rough cut, there are tracks placed next to each other where the lighting is either food or bad, highlighting the mistake; for our final music video, we were ablwe to replicate the use of other video clips for certain parts of the song and it has still made a successful product.

GOOD STORYLINE.

I am really please with the narrative we created to help illustrate the song and its theme, successfully, we have used Final Cut pro to emerge in these clips with the performance with a wide range of editing & transitions to make the video more interesting and appealing to our target audience. I find that the narrative is clear for the audience and as well as to enjoy viewing the video, they are able to understand our intentions behind the creation of the video. To improve, I would vary the angle shots in the narrative to widen the creation of our narrative and I would add in more effects, however, on a whole, the narrative and performance tigether makes it a pleasant piece of work to watch.

Production: Analysis of at least one sequence from the rough cut

From our rough cut I have chosen two sequences that I want to analyse. The first sequence starts from 0:53-1:13 which is the first chorus. The switching from a bright to dark lighting is very apparent, this is because most of our group shots were mistakenly taken with a dark lighting due to the camera’s filter that we used which is very unfortunate because it would have been very useful in our music video. On a good note, we still have group shots with a better lighting that we could use as our base tracks and we will be replacing the dark lighting shots with these.

The second sequence that I am going to analyse is from 2:59-3:05 which is ‘the making of the making’ of our music video. As you can see there is an extra camera in front of our actual camera this is supposed to be a hint that it is a making of the making.   We mentioned from our previous blogs that we changed our ideas to this which we did in our rough cut. However, after receiving feedbacks from our teachers and classmates they said that as an audience ‘it was not clear’ that it is supposed to be ‘the making of the making’, they also added that ‘it looks like you just added these clips because you have nothing else to put’. In respond to these feedbacks, we decided that we are not including these shots on our final video as we have enough narrative and performance shots. 

Production :Analysis of atleast one sequence from rough cut

After watching our rough cut we have been able to point out the positive and negative features of our music video. The positive comments we received from our teacher & classmates were that the storyline of our music video was very clear , they were eager to find out what was going to happen in the end and the narrative went really well with the song. Another feature they were very happy was the editing, it went really well with the fast paced beat, they liked the transition between the performance and narrative, the scene they like the most was when the boy had a memory of taking a picture of him and his girlfriend and this was clearly shown through the black and white effect. They also liked the fact that the performers looked the part , the singers were wearing dresses , high heels and make up which showed that we had done some research on girl band conventions.

So overall we had a lot of positive feedback however we did have some faults. Our main problem was the lighting.

 



As you can see the lighting is different in the mid shot of the group  and this is due to our group mistakenly leaving the camera filter on which lead to our footage being very dark and unfortunately we will not be able to use these shots for our real music video. However luckily we noticed this and we had a lot of footage to replace the dark shots with because if we had not we would be suffering a lot right now. In order to improve this we will only be using the shots with the same lighting so we can keep it consistent through out.

Another problem we had was our teachers and our class mates failing to understand the making of the making of our video.



One of our initial ideas was to portray the making of the making of our music video by behind the scenes footage , i.e putting on make up , reading the lyrics and showing another camera recording us from a different angle. However this wasn't made clear to our teachers and classmates , they thought we had mistakenly inserted this scenes. So as a group we have decided not to use the making of making as we have enough shots to use and we have a strong narrative , using these extra scenes may make it confusing to our viewers.

PRODUCTION - Feedback From The Rough Cut

PRODUCTION - Our Rough Cut

Above is our rought cut; though we had very positive feedback such as a good narrative and showing of the artist's performance, we had problems with lighting and clips which were out of focus. Towards the end of the video, some clips are out of synch yet we have beared this in mind for when we produce our final video so it will contain none of these minor yet crucial mistakes.

PRODUCTION - Screen Grabs Of The Rough Cut

PRODUCTION - Preview Of Filming

PRODUCTION - Photos From Second Session

As we have mentioned on our previous posts, we as a group have decided to film our whole music video again due to some faults from our first trial of filming such as: the dark lighting and the blurred shots from our narrative.

Here are the two slideshows that consist photos from our second trial of filming of the performance and the narrative.

As you can see, we changed some of our ideas. We used our media studio in college. We thought that it would not be time consuming and this setting is more comfortable as we are already familiar with the equipments in the room.  and used a black background, matches with the black dresses but also in contrast with the red which makes the girl group stand out. This time, we made sure that we used the lighting wisely. There were about 4 lightings across the studio which is an improvement compared to our first filming.

We used two cameras with tripods to show our idea of 'The making of the making' of our music video. We also used a black leather carpet to make the black background consistent, as the original carpet's colour is blue.

For our narrative, we did not change much, instead we filmed more shots. The setting is still in Southbank. From our first filming of the narrative, our media teacher advised us to wear something bright and eye-catching especially when we are filming outdoors with a lot of people, so that the audience will be able to recognise who they are following in the music video and so we did take this advise and decided for our actor to wear white coat and a pink/grey jacket for our actress. 

RESEARCH - Second Idea For Music Video/Previous Student Work

This is a music video made by a media group from our college a few years ago. It is very simple yet smart and good.

We really liked how they used two cameras to show 'The making of the making' of their own music video and this has given and helped us to re-create or come up with our new ideas for our second trial in filming the performance of our music video. 

PRODUCTION - Faults With Filming & Solution(s)

Above, are some of the clips from our first filming sessions during half term and it shows the faults which occurred from when we filmed. Unfortunately, we had not checked the 'filter' setting of our camera, so as a result, our lighten was badly effected. In addition, we had to change our location for the performance, so the quality of the video differed too much, which we were not in favour of. To add to our problems, the footage we captured at Southbank - which we, at first, thought went really well - were out of focus as we did not realise that the camera setting was on Manual Focus, rather than Auto Focus, which we discovered would really minimise our marks, therefore, we came to the result to re-film both the performance of the artists and the narrative. In doing so, it allowed us to learn from our mistakes and to produce filming which was much better, also, as a result, we were more organised with our filming and we were opened to more camera shots and angles than before!
We have decided as a group to change the location of the artists, which made filming much easier and quicker and allowed us to adjust the lightening to have the best results, but also to change the video format. By this, we mean that we have found a students previous music video which has influenced us to base our new video on. Initially, when we had to re-film, we thought that we would not have enough time to film in the locations we filmed in before, so after watching the video below, we decided to use the college but to set up the location as if it is a studio. In addition, we have decide to emerge in shots as if the video is still in making; this allows our audience to have an idea of how it was to produce our music video. We found this very interesting as it allows us to explore greatly into our video, rather than simply producing a finished product, we hope that  this will turn our just as great!

PLANNING; using digital technology in the production of our three products

How do you plan to use digital technology in the production of your three products? - Music video, Digipak and Adveristment

while producing three different media products such as the music video, the digipak and the advertistment to go along with it. I will use various types of digital technology such as...

PLANNING; using conventions from real media within planning

PLANNING; what have you learnt about research and planning from AS?

PRODUCTION - Photos From Filming Session

These two clips consists of photos from our filming sessions during the half term. 

PLANNING - Test Shots For Lighting & Mise-en-scene

Lighting too dark. 

Before we filmed we thought that we will not need a lighting kit as for the reason that as a group we were confident that the lights we had indoors was enough. Unfortunately, we were wrong. During our filming session, it did not look as dark as these screen caps. However, when we checked our clips, we realised that the lighting was very poor and ruined most of our clips. 

Now, this is a lesson learned for our group to always bring the lighting kit whenever we film something indoors. We are re-doing these shots but with a completely different ideas. 

(Planning) My Contribution to the pitch and Section 1A

13. How do you plan to use digital technology in the production of your 3 products? Be specific about this - think about the packages and equipment you will use, as well as how you intend to use the internet (blog and vimeo!).


For my 3 products I will use a wide range of equipment and technology to show the skills that I have learnt throughout this course. Through these I will be able to attract the majority of my target audience for my products.

For our animatic storyboard I have used 'Windows Movie Maker' to combine the soundtrack that we are going to do for our music video and the photos that gives an insight to the audience of what are music video is going to look like. Final Cut pro will be used to cut, edit and combine the video clips and our soundtrack. I have used Photoshop for the mock up of my digipak, and I will be using this again with quark for the final digipak. For our pitch we have used 'Prezzi' which is a completely new way that we were introduced to in presenting our ideas. The internet is an important source for us as it gives us a lot of access to the informations we need for our products and this is now the modern way of communicating and sharing our ideas to a lot of people.

Youtube allows us to watch a lot of music videos with different genres, also films, soap operas, videos for entertainment purposes and advertisements.
Vimeo gives us an access to the previous works of previous students which helps us to observe and analyse the good and not-so-good points of their videos. In this way, it will help on the do's and dont's for our own products.
Blogger helps us update and our teachers on where we are in our coursework. It helps us to be more creative and is another method of widening our production knowledge.

14. How have you used conventions from real media text in your planning? Think about all 3 products for this question - reference real media texts and draw comparisons and ideas. 


The original music video has helped us with our ideas, involving the locations, shots, narrative and costumes. We watched the original music video several times and had a closer look on the beats, the artists and their role in the music video, the narrative, costumes and mise-en-scene. Also we have looked at how the camera shots goes with each beat of the song. After all of these observations and analysis, we have produced our own ideas for our music video.We have also looked at the editing of the original music video to help us with our base track.  The original music video focused more on the narrative rather than the artists, whereas with our music video, we intend to focus more on the artist than the narrative. We changed the narrative and made it more clear compared from the unclear narrative of the original music video. We have obtained some similar locations but we changed the rest.

For our digipak, we have used the internet to look at the original digipak of the artists so that we will have an idea of how they present themselves such as the costumes, the colours, the layout and photos of the artists. In this way, we will be able to attract our target audience as we have a guide or an example of the sort of digipak that the real artists used to reach out to their audience.

It is important that we keep our music video consistent from the beginning till the end so that we don't loose the genre and also its appeal to the audience.

15. What have you learned about research and planning a production, compared to AS?


Research and Planning in AS and A2 involves a lot of motivation, patience and determination. Without these three, then you will not be successful. I would say that in AS, there was more flexibility as it was the stage of starting, learning and knowing the different equipments, conventions of a thriller film. As it was the first year, it was quite more acceptable in terms of the amount of research and planning we have done. In other words, we were allowed to make mistakes because we were still learning the basics. Whereas now in A2, we have gone through the basic stage, therefore, there is more expectations in terms of producing the best products that we can do and using a wide variety of digital technology.

In A2, we need the accuracy, involvement, and creativity in order to produce our best work. In our blogs, we have to be creative in presenting our research and planning. The ideas of an individual is very important to the whole group as it will all be put in our final products. Contribution is a must as there is 3 products to cover. It is also important that we are organise and updated with our schedule as producing a music video is very fast pace. Showing an evidence of our research and planning is also a 'must' as it will prove the stages that we have gone through in producing our final product. It will help the observer the roots of our final ideas.

PLANNING - Permission For Filming In Southbank

On behalf of my group, I made some few phone calls to ask permission to film in Southbank as some areas are privately managed. I had the chance to talk to Film London on the phone and talked about our plans for our music video. They emailed me the contacts that I could call depending on the areas where we want to film. I also sent them an email, and talked to More London in which they sent me an application form to fill up. 

Application Form from More London