Magazine Advertisement For our Digipack: Research

The second ancillary task that myself and Paige have decided upon is to create a Magazine Advertisement for the release of our digipack. So, as I did before I began creating my digipack, I will begin by researching existing advertisements and their codes and conventions.

The first existing product I have chosen to research is the magazine advertisment for Ellie Gouldings Digipack 'Lights'. The whole advert appears to incorporate much of the same elements that can be seen on the actual digipack which enables an audience to relate this advert with her actual digipack. This is a good example of cross media marketing styles where the album can be displayed in shops and the advert in magazines creating a link between the two for the intended audience. This will be a feature that I should consider using in my own magazine advertisement.

Ellie Goulding: Lights The whole advert seems to successfully incorporate the name of the digipack which I find particularly clever. For example, the name of the digipack is 'Lights' and the colour gold has been used to reflect the glow of an actual light. The artist herself, the main feature of the advertisement has a golden glow about her skin and her hair is also golden with the added effect of the glitter golden lightening given the advertisement its own identity.
The artists is the main focus point of this advertisement allowing her product to become instantly recognisable and allows for her own identity to be shown. People will recognise this advertisement to be connected to her album. The artists names appears in capital letters as does the digipack name so it is the first thing you notice. Underneath in a much smaller texts are quotes from well known music magazines and newspapers with star ratings giving the album credibility and would encourage an audience to buy the product. I will have to use this feature for my own advertisement.
Also included is the artists website and other features, so not only does the advertisement promote the album, but also the artist herself possibly widening her fan base.

The second product I will be looking at is the magazine advertisement for The Drums digipack. As with the previous advertisement I have researched, this one to incorporates elements from the actual digipack allowing the two products to form a connection and a familiarity with its target audience. So, I think its a must that I use this feature when creating my own magazine advertisement. However what I particularly like about this advertisement is its simplicity. How the artist themselves aren't featured on the actual advertisement as they allow their music and their digipack to do all of the talking. The simple background of a curtain on the stage suggests the bands love of performing and sharing their music.

The Drums: The DrumsThe name of the band and the digipack again are written in bold capital letters as this is the first thing an audience will notice and it is what will capture someones attention and draw them in to actual focusing on the product being offered. Again a feature that has been used is the use of star ratings from top newspapers and magazines allowing the digipack to have a sense of credibility which could possibly help with sales of the product as it will encourage an audience to buy it. They have seemed to use quite a lot of star ratings suggesting that their album is definitely worth buying.
Another feature included is the bands website address again promoting the band allowing them to possibly widen their fan base. In the corner as well are also their music company's and producers logos which also adds a credibility to the advertisement.

Discussion on our Digipack...

Below is a brief discussion myself and my partner had about our digipack.

Final Digipack

Below is the final Draft of our Digipack. Due to a few timing issues we decided the best way possible to create our product was on the macs rather than creating a physical digipack. 

Track Listing: Back Cover

Myself and Paige spent a great deal of time making sure the back cover of our digipack was suitable, looked professional, matched the theme we were establishing and looked like an actual back cover of a digipack. The image below is us starting to form the track listing for our digipack however it is only half finished and the reason is as follows. We thought that it looked like to much of a cliche having the track listing with numbers. We also tried to experiment by having the text positioning to the left however this didn't work out, the text was to large and also there wasn't room for any other details. So we stopped this draft and came up with our 2nd and final draft.

We feel that this track listing and back cover design looks more professional and appealing as apposed to our first draft. We took inspiration from our research into digipack to come up with our creative track listing. We decided not to include the numbers and instead have theme separated by a single line which adds to our digipacks overall theme. We then underneath in smaller text, while following the same format we including all the bonus features that you would expect to see on a digipack. We then in smaller text included 2 smaller lines of text. While we have just wrote random sentences the intent is clear in that it would include a production company, dates of creation ect..

Finally along the bottom we included 3 symbols. The first a QR sign which we have created ourselves using a generator (clearer image seen on the magazine advertisement) which links to our group blog. The second is the logo for mine and Paige's production company G&P and then Universal records is the 3rd logo just to add a bit of realism and make it look professional. 

Poll Results

After leaving my poll open for 3 days, I checked the results and found that Design 3 had proven to be the most popular. In second place was Design 1 and in third was Design 2. As the poll was only open for a couple of days I didn't receive many votes but there was a clear overall winner from the votes I did receive. Paige has also created a survey and her results had shown that Design 3 was the most popular so this is the design that we will be using for our Digipack. 

Further Construction of the Digipack

The images below will show the final steps of our Digipack construction. As we have previously mentioned, we will be using the Digipack template that I had found and the program we will be constructing it in will be Fireworks. 

This first screenshot shows us officially putting our Digipack together. As you can see, from my market research and my online poll, Design 3 proved to be the most popular so this is the one we will be continuing with and using. This was also the design that I also preferred out of the 3. We started by adding in the front cover as this is the slide we had worked on first.

The second screenshot shows us adding in the background to the other panels. As I have previously mentioned this is an image of some wallpaper that we had taken on our trip to the art gallery and just changed the colouring and contrasting of the picture to come up with a colour scheme that matched our old fashioned theme.

This screenshot above shows how I edited the frames in fireworks. Paige edited a few of them and then I did a couple myself. We just used the wand tool to delete the backgrounds and then the eraser tool to get rid of any extra parts. We will add these frames to our digipack and then add the pictures inside of them. 

This screenshot shows us adding in the frames to our Digipack. However, upon adding in the frames we realised that we had adding them onto the wrong slide. So we will just drag them onto the slides that they need to be on. 

As you can see, changed the frames onto the correct slide and then added two more onto the previous space. Above you can see that we have added in the CD, the track listing and the slide including our lyric books. Instead of creating an actual lyric book, as you actually wouldn't be able to see all of it anyway, I decided to just add some lines showing you where it would be included.

 The next screen shot shows us including a message from the band. However rather than just include the message, to match the overall theme I suggested adding a frame around the text. This added to the theme and matched the old fashioned/antique effect we were going for. 

The above screen shot is our completed Digipack. The finishing touches that we added were the titles on a few of the sides. We had already decided on the text we we're going to use for the front cover and decided to include this text on a few other sides for example, 'A Little Note...' is added onto the message from the band and 'Lyrics...' is added onto the side including the lyric book. 

Text Colouring

When considering the colour of our font we originally chose the colour gold to match that of the style of frames we were going to be using. Below is an image of how it would have looked with the text filled in gold. When looking closely at this text, I decided that I didn't really like this gold and also when we add it onto our background you wouldn't be able to see the text as it would blend in to much with the background. We decided not to use this colour in the end and instead the text on the digipack will be white.

Frames

As we had mentioned in our previous discussions of our digipack we are going for an antique/old fashioned theme. Taking a trip to the art gallery we also had the inspiration of having frames put on our digipack and the images be of the production of our actual music video. This adds a much more personal touch to our digipack allowing the audience to feel connected to the artists. 

Below I will show a few of the examples of the frames and images we will be using. The sort of images that we have taken are shots from the rough cut/final music video, creating of the audio track and general shots of filming.

Construction of the CD

 To create the CD that would go inside our digipack, I cropped out the CD frame from the digipack template we found so I could get the right measurements of what my actual CD needed to be. Below is the frame I would be using. 

For the digipack, we originally we're going to keep the CD design the same as the background of the rest of the digipack. However, the CD would not stand out overall and would blend to much into the background. To solve this problem we decided that while we would keep the same background design, we would, using IPhoto change the colour of the background and came up with the design below. We also decided to include the band name and the digipack name of the CD in the same format as the front cover. 

Possible Front Cover Designs...

When creating the front cover for our digipack, myself and Paige came up with 3 possible colour schemes to choose from. We had previously taken a picture of a design we encountered at the art gallery and Design 1 is the actual wallpaper. Design 2, we have changed the colour to gold and Design 3 is a more Ivory colour. As we are unable to pick which one we liked best, I have thought it best to leave it to the audience to decided. I have added a voting poll below these pictures to see which design appeals to the audience more. 

Design 1

Design 2

Design 3

Which front cover design do you prefer?
	Design 1
	Design 2
	Design 3
pollcode.com free polls

Construction of the Digipack: Front Cover

We decided as a group to start work first on the front cover of our digipack as ultimately this is whats going to grab the attention of our target audience and draw them in to buying our product.





As we have previously mentioned, our front cover idea consists of the two artist silhouettesAs we have previously mentioned, our front cover idea consists of the two artist silhouettes

The programs we have on the macs at our school are for the moment limited, so the program we have chosen to create our digipack on is fireworks.

We started by taking a photograph of the two artists standing back to back. We realised we could have took the two pictures separately however we felt that we would get a more realistic image if they were in the same photo. The sizing of each silhouette would also be more realistic.










We then opened the picture in the program fireworks and using the wand tool, we were able to erase the background.













The next step was to crop the two images and split them so the silhouettes were seperate. Then using the paint brush, we filled in the images so they were all black. We also liked the idea of leaving Joe's shirt white, so then to compromise with the image of Louise, we created her a pearly necklace. This goes with the black and white theme of our music video and also compliments the antique/old fashioned theme we are going for.








After looking closely at the images, we realised that the white of the shirt and pearl necklace didn't quite stand out, so we made them whiter using the paintbrush tool.

















The next stage on the front cover, after the completion of the silhouettes was to create our frames. Using images we had taken from our trip to the art gallery we found the frame to use and using the eraser tool got rid of all of the image except the frame.

After editing the one frame I just duplicated the image so then I had two images appear onto the screen. All that I then needed to do was add in the silhouettes I had previously created and the main image for the digipack was complete. My next post will show the 3 possible designs we have created.

Research into Font Styles for our Digipack

When creating a digipack, it is important that we think of every element that is to be included so we have a consistent theme running throughout. Choosing a font style is particular important as it could potentially set the tone and mood for the rest of the digipack. We had to take into careful consideration the genre of music being portrayed to allow the text to suit. We have decided to experiment with different fonts for the titles on our digipack and below are a few designs of the ones that we have considered using.

Style 1

 


Here is the first style of text that we looked at. I like how this text is a 'Calligraphy' style as it suits the 'antique' theme myself and Paige have decided upon for our digipack. I particular like how all the letters are joined and how the writing flows. I really like the style of the capital F as it draws in your attention.


Style 2

 Here is the second style of text that we considered. This one is also of a 'Calligraphy' style however upon further inspection we decided that this text may be difficult to read when put on our digipack.




Style 3: the text we have chosen...

Here is the third and final text we considered for our digipack and this will be the one that will be used on our digipack. We decided on this text as we believe it incorporates elements of both style 1 and style 2 and will be easy to read and suit the style that we are going for.

Digipack Templates...

Myself and Paige have already decided that we would like our Digipack to have 6 panels. At first we were unsure of how we wanted to create this, whether it be a physical creation or to just design it on the Macs. I then went onto google and managed to find a site that had digipack templates and we decided to use one of this templates for the creation of our own digipack.

Here is the link to the website I stumbled across: http://www.duplication.ca/printspecs/digipack.htm

Below is a screen grab of the website where we found our template. 

Digipack Discussion of ideas

Rather than type all of the discussion myself and Paige had, we decided to record a video outlining our initial ideas. Below is the video of our discussion.

In case the pictures weren't clear on the video, I have uploaded them below so you are able to see our plans in more detail. We both decided to create our own plan for a digi pack and then we will incorporate the ideas to come up with one final plan.

Below is the plan I created for our digipack...

Below is the plan my partner Paige created for our digipack...

Merging our two ideas together, below is the finalised plan for our digipack...

Audience Feedback

As a way of gaining audience feedback, I had to come up with creative ways to broadcast our music video. So, using the resources around me, I uploaded the links using my social networking sites.


On the left is my twitter account where I tweeted the link to my followers and on the right is my facebook account where I wrote a status adding in the link.















Louise and Joe (the artists in the music video) also uploaded the link to their facebook accounts which helped broadcast the video even more.On the left is Joe's facebook status and on the right is Louise's.



Here so to speak is the results because within days of uploading the links into to my social networking site, our music video gained over 100 views.

Digipack Inspiration

Above is a presentation I created detailing our trip to our local Art Gallery to gather inspiration for our Digipack. 

Digipack Research

As part of our A2 Media Brief, one of the ancillary tasks requires us to create a digipack and I feel the best way to go about starting this task is too research existing digipacks. The first thing I shall do is to give a definition of what an overall digipack actually is...

Brief History

Digipacks were first created by MeadWestvaco and their product, which is called Digi-Pak is trademarked. However, this type of format became increasingly popular among manufacturers so the generic digipack came to be used to describe all soft CD packaging.

Conventions of a Digipack

- A digipack is a type of CD packaging that is made out of card stock or heavy paper/cardboard material.
- They can flip open like a book or have three parts so that one portion of the packaging opens to the left and another to the right.
- The portion that holds the CD will be made out of plastic which is simply attached to the paper background.
- It is slightly more than just an ordinary CD, for example, it can contain bonus material such as music videos, clips of the band, bonus songs ect.
- It will contain material that will attract an audience to buy the digipack rather than just downloading the album

Analysis of existing Digipacks: Mumford and Sons 'The Cave'

When the digipack is laid out in this format so I can see every side, what becomes apparent is how the digipack follows a consistent theme throughout. The idea of a building has been incorporated onto every face of the digipack. As Mumford and Sons produce 'folk' sounding music, they have included this element through their use of mise-en-scene via their dress code and overall style of the digipack. This theme also can be shown through the colour scheme and style of texts.

Another element that I have noticed is how the text underneath the track listing is in a significantly smaller font. This could be so it doesn't draw the attention away from the actual album but is still included as it is important.

What Works Well...

- The consistency of the theme. How its runs on every face of the overall digipack.

- I found it extremely creative how the front panel of the digipack is the front of a building and the back panel is the back of a building.
- As the front panel shows the front of a shop/display, I really liked how the artists appear as mannequins in the front window.
- The simplicity of the overall theme.
- The style of text chosen to use fits well with the overall theme.
- The colour scheme is quite simplistic and neutral adding to the theme.
- The old fashioned style, which is what myself and my partner will definitely consider for our own digipack.

What Doesn't Work Well...

- I can't really say I have much to criticise about this digipack. However the one thing that can be looked into is will an audience feel it is too simplistic?

Analysis of existing Digipacks: Katy Perry 'California Girl'

Like with the digipack I have analysed above, their is a consistent them that runs throughout this digipack. The overall style and 'candy theme' of the digipack has been incorporated throughout, for instance the pink clouds could symbolise 'candyfloss' and the CD's are patterned like that of sweets. This fun and playful theme is also symbolic of the artist Katy Perry and would be instantly recognisable with her fans and intended audience. The theme represents the type of music that can be heard on the album.

What Works Well...

- The consistency of them theme throughout the digipack

- How the pattern on the CD's also stick to the theme.

- How the digipacks theme suits the artist and will be instantly recognisable among the intended audience.

- The theme of the digipack will appeal to a female audience and the artists images will appeal to a male audience.

What Doesn't Work Well...

- The albums theme has an obvious contradiction as although the 'candy' theme is very childlike, the images do slightly contradict.
 The positioning and style of font used to list the track listing is quite boring and not very appealing.

- The images in the booklet as well are obviously posed and when creating my own digipack I want it to have a realistic feel to it.





Final Music Video: 'I See'

Above is our completed music video. Looking back at our rough cut compared to our final piece you can see the progression immediately. This time around a lot of planning was involved, the shots were carefully constructed and they fit beautifully with the music.

Editing our Final Music Video

We are now on to our second attempt at editing our final music video. We previously watched over or rough cut commenting on the aspects that we liked, disliked, and ones that didn't work as well as we hoped. After reviewing our old footage, too our recent footage, we came to the conclusion that we can't use any of the previous footage that we had shot. Many reasons allowed us to come to this decision;

- Louise's clothing/make-up was different

- The location had changed

- The Mise-en-scene had also changed

- The footage we had previously recorded was also amateur compared to our new footage

We felt it best that we should record all our footage again to allow our music video to be of a high standard.

The Editing Process

As we had recorded our music video footage over a period of two days, we had two lots of footage to uploaded onto the apple macs. Below is day 1's footage, which is all of the narrative aspects of our music video.

Below is day 2's footage, which is all of the lip synching/performance based aspect our of music video.

You can clearly see the improvements from our rough cut as we have recorded a sufficient amount of footage for us to pick and choose want to include into our music video and won't have to repeat many of our shots to fill the 5 minute time period.

Black vs White

From the very beginning myself and my partner have always wanted to experiment with the use of black and white footage as we believe it will set the tone and mood we we're going for in our music video. Below is in image of how we edited the footage to black and white. I right clicked on the video, selected clip options, then selected effects and you can now see the list that came up. We selected black and white. Below the image I have included a video of the same clip, first shown in the colour it was recorded, then secondly in black and white so you are able to see the difference.

Adding The Footage

One of the problems that myself and my partner encountered when editing our music video involved the inclusion of our audio track. We weren't able to add all of the audio track, if we didn't have the correct amount of footage added onto the story board or else our audio track would get cut. To solve this problem, we added an extra long title sequence onto the end of our edited footage as shown by the picture below. This actually benefited us as it allowed us to see how much of the audio track was left that we needed to add footage for.

Precision Editing

Another aspect that I encountered upon editing our music video was precision editing. This allowed me to pinpoint the exact piece of the clip that was going to be used in as shown by the images below.

Narrative

On our first day of filming, although we had our storyboard and shooting script, we we're worried that we wouldn't have a secure amount of footage. We also felt that an audience wouldn't be able to understand our narrative so quickly concocted a understandable narrative. However when watching back the footage, I felt that the narrative was too much of a cliche, was predictable and didn't match the tone of the rest of our music video. We decided that the only footage that would be included was where Joe gave Louise the bracelet. The rest of the footage would not be included in the music video as we are confident that the narrative speaks for itself. 

Audio Track

As we have mentioned, when we first recorded our music video, we didn't have the audio track and tried to work without it. In the editing process of the rough cut we we're quick to realise that having the audio track first was vital. Joe and Louise set about recording the audio track and below is the process of recording 'I See'.