Saturday, 18 December 2010

Examples of fonts

I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love  I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love You I love you I love you I love you I love you I love You I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I LOVE YOU I love you I love I love you I Love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you
I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I  love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you 
Here are some examples of fonts that we may incorporate into our digipak and advert. We particularly liked the handwritten styled fonts which will be used for the back cover of our album. 

Images for the digipak

Below are the short-list pictures for our digipack and advert, we intend to choose two pictures for our digipak and one for our advert.





Friday, 17 December 2010

House-style

We plan to create a house-style for our digipak and advert which matches the brand created for our artist, by consistently linking the mise-en-scene of the video to the digipak and advert. The specific themes highlighted would include:
  • The locations of the video. Creating a clear relationship between the video,digipak and advert.
  • An Autumnal colour scheme to match the rural scenes of the video.
  • A handwritten font to correspond with the lyrics, which would also reinforce the idea to use 'Notebook' as the album title.
  • A background for the green screen which would also appear on the digipak and advert.

Thursday, 16 December 2010

DigiPak Ideas

Below are pictures of our first ideas for the digipak and advert. As stated before we liked the idea of incorporating patterns or illustrations into the digipak and advert. The pictures below show some ideas of patterns and illustrations we may use. The third picture is the rough draft of what we wish our digipak to look like. We would like to stick closely to this template, but may need to change some aspects of it. 

 


Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Target Audience for Digipak and Advert

As discussed previously we intend to market our products to an audience of females aged 16-25. We hope to achieve this by using many different techniques. First of all there will be images of the artist 'Ella' in both our digipak and advert. In these images 'Ella' will be wearing fashionable clothing which many of our target audience would wear. This again underlines the image of 'Ella' as a 'normal person' and not a glamorised 'pop star', making it easier for the target audience to relate to her. We also hope that the use of photoshop on our digipak and advert will attract our target audience. By editing the original images it will enhance the quality of the product giving it a more professional appearance. In addition we wish to change the colours of these images to match that our music video, linking these products together. We intend to advertise the album as being downloadable on iTunes instead of stating where it is able to be purchased. Again as we are targeting a younger female audience iTunes would be more appropriate as downloads have become an increasingly popular source of purchasing music. As it is then easier to transfer the album onto iPods and mp3 players. We will also be advertising the artist 'Ellas' websites on both the digipak and advert. The websites will be 'Ellas' official website; 'www.ella.co.uk' and also 'Ellas' myspace page; 'www.myspace/ella.com'. We hope to attract our younger audience by having a myspace page for 'Ella' as it is a popular music orientated social networking site. Many of our audience will be using myspace meaning they can hear previews of the album and also get the latest news from 'Ella'. Myspace is also useful as it can create large fan bases on the site through sharing pages with friends and other artists.

Monday, 13 December 2010

Research: Album covers

Here are some examples of Natasha Bedingfield's Album covers. The original Artist of our song.

 

















This is her first album; 'Unwritten' (2004). The album cover is very simple with just a close-up of Natasha Bedingfield. Her make-up and styling is also very simple with no bright colours. The colour scheme matches her hair and skin colour. The font is also relatively simple, again using no bright colours only black and white. The album and artists name has been placed in the middle of the cover, which immediately draws attention to it.























This is Natasha Bedingfields second album; 'N.B' (2007). Like her first album cover this again is very simple, mainly using a black and white colour scheme. The font is used as a border on the top and bottom of the album, with 'Natasha' in bold. Her name stands out immediately as it is black on a white background. The picture is of Natasha's main features, her eye, nose and mouth. Also these features are mostly in black and white as if drawn apart from her mouth and eye which are in colour.




 















This is the third album; 'Pocketful Of Sunshine' (2008). This album cover is very similar to her first album cover 'Unwritten', it uses the same font as the first album for her name. It also uses a simple close-up of Natasha as the picture. Again similar to the first album the colour scheme is simple, just using yellow and black. This also connects to the albums name; 'Pocketful Of Sunshine'. The album cover also has patterns on the lower left and right corners. Myself and Rhi like this idea and are thinking of including patterns added onto our album cover image. 
























This is Natasha Bedingfields latest album; 'Strip Me' (2010). This album cover is completely different to her other albums. The image used is a mid shot of Natasha and is the focal point of the album cover. Natasha's make-up and styling are also different on the album cover, she has a lot more make-up on in this image rather than her natural make-up on her older album covers. She is also wearing jewellery and has a more styled costume which gives her a more glamorized look on this album cover. There are also lyrics that have been added to the image with some that have been crossed out as if she has been writing on the image. Again myself and Rhi like this idea and are thinking of using it on the back of the album. Similar to the previous album there are patterns added to the image behind Natasha and also on her face, which again we like.

Sunday, 12 December 2010

Editing techniques

We have now finished filming, and have captured our footage using adobe premiere software, we have a rough idea of the types of editing techniques that we wish to incorporate into our video. We researched the use of split screen in music videos and found this example for Frances song 'Cold Water' . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKYmhq0K-Z8&feature=fvw. Which exemplifies the use of this technique in a real media product.
Other editing techniques that we may include are as follows:
  • The inclusion of Letters coresponding to the lyrics 'The combination D E F'
  • Enhancing the quality of our product by altering the colour and brightness of the footage.
  • Selecting and adding a suitable background to the green screen footage, which reflects the representation of the artist.

Saturday, 11 December 2010

How our production decisions relate to intended genre

One of the key features of the pop music genre is its appeal to a general audience. Although we have identified a clear target audience of females aged 16-25, I believe that our music video would appeal to a mass market and therefore does apply to the characteristic of general appeal. Of course there will always be those that our product does not appeal to.
The common narrative of our video I.e girl falls in love with boy, along with our ideas for the editing of the narrative e.g. quick cuts and a spilt screen certainly relates to the intended genre . Despite our plan to film all of the footage outside in rural and urban locations we felt that our video was lacking performance. As performance along with choreographed dance (which would not have been suitable for our video) are key characteristics of the pop genre. We knew that we needed to incorporate more performance.With performance there is a factor of 'repeatability' and therefore we decided to make use of the green screen in the tv studio and filmed a variety of shots, which could then be placed throughout the video.
Knowing that the close up predominates in all music videos we made sure that at all times when filming that we included close-ups. Eye contact and facial gestures are crucial to the overall performance and credibility of the artist. Furthermore as a guarantee of authenticity, I (Rhianwen) sang the song instead of miming.

Friday, 10 December 2010

Decisions and Revisions

Our initial plan as previously discussed was to film in both rural and urban locations. We first encountered problems with our decision to film outside, due to the cold weather we have experienced this Winter, for example the snow and ice which caused continuity errors with footage we had already filmed in the Autumn. It also made it difficult for us to travel to our locations. The cold weather also effected our filming and on many occasions we were unable to film for long periods of time. Also due to the time of year we were limited with our filming, because of the short daylight hours. After facing these problems we decided that it would be practical to make use of the green screen in the TV studio. We filmed Rhianwen singing 'These Words' in a variety of different shots, which we could then use anywhere throughout the video.
  Another problem we encountered came from our initial decision to use our own camera. We felt that using our own camera would be more practical, as it would be available for use at all times. Unfortunately however during our first filming session we discovered that our camera was not charging properly and therefore ran out of battery very quickly. The quality of the footage was also very poor. We then decided to use the college cameras, but this meant that we had to book the cameras (which were not always available), and return them after filming.
  As our friend Adam (who plays the boy in the video) attends a different college to ourselves it made it difficult to manage our shooting schedule as he was not always available at suitable times. Admittedly because of this we left the filming of Adams scenes until later on , which was when we also encountered problems with the weather as it was now Winter.
  During the planning of our shoot we did not anticipate that we would face as many problems as we actually encountered, leading us to believe that we would finish filming on time. Ultimately all of these set backs built up leaving us with a short amount of time to finish our filming and our entire project.

Thursday, 9 December 2010

Shooting Schedule

Below is our shooting schedule, showing the date, location, and equipment we used each time we filmed.
We have written comments as a review of the footage filmed, including factors such as the need to refilm scenes where the footage was unsuitable e.g. dull, of poor quality or as shots weren't framed correctly.

Tuesday, 7 December 2010

Locations; Chester or Wrexham?

We were planning on using Chester as the urban location for our video. Here are examples of where we were thinking of filming;


The clock would make a good location for the final scene in our video when the girl meets the boy and finally expresses her feelings towards him.

This is a footpath which runs along 'the walls' which encircles the city of Chester. This would be a suitable location for the scene where the girl 'bumps into' the boy. As the wall is nearly 2 miles long we could use a variety of locations along the wall.


This shows the characteristic features of Chester city centre.



We have instead used Wrexham as our urban location as it is only a fifteen minute walk from our homes to the centre of Wrexham. Whereas Chester is a forty five minute drive.


Below are examples of some locations in Wrexham we wish to use.