Analysis of three digipaks that relate to our genre

To begin with while doing the digipak research I came to realise that non of the modern day hip hop, grime, dubstep artist similar to our artist actual use digipaks, CD packaging is definitely more common and perhaps because of the reason that most people are not use to having digipaks, whatever the reason may be unfittingly I couldn’t find any digipak examples so I analysed CD covers, the back, front, and the image on the actual CD, because there were no images that showed the inside of the album. 

 The first album I analysed was Stereo Typical by Rizzle Kicks. This band relates to our own artist in the sense that they do similar genre of music, upbeat hip hop, grime, and also have the same younger target audience of perhaps 15 – 28 year olds.  There’s a constant colour theme of 2 main colours that are being used which means it doesn’t over do it with what there is on the cover and back. The colours are light, mutual which means they can appeal to any gender, and match with what the artists are wearing on the front cover image creating an over all blend. The font used when it comes to the album’s name reflects the young side of the artists and relates to our target audience; similarly the image used on the CD reflects the groups name with the whole kicks idea. Everything over all is kept simple and to the point with as less information as possible on the back of the CD cover. 

 The second album I will analyse is Tinie Tempah – Disco-Overy. Front the front and back cover we get a futuristic feel with a lot of effects being used to create light beams etc. This could relate to the target audience who are modern and young, the same as that of our own artist. Once again there is a maximum of three colours being used throughout the whole thing, with purple and blue dominating most of the over. These colours usually have passionate connotations which could therefore reflect perhaps the content of the CD.  The back of the CD cover is similar to the one above kept simple with just the songs and production company names with a smaller shrift written at the bottom.

Finally the third album I will analyse is Example – Playing in the shadows. I chose to do this album because the artist is very similar to our one with his genre and target audience. Once again there’s only a few colours used in this case black, white, and yellow which in this particular case bring a serious mood to the album. The front cover also reflect the title of the album as half his face seems to be covered by a shadow. The image on the front of the album is pretty simple, however very affective in catching the eye and once you realise it also reflect the name of the album you begin to appreciate it even ore. This quirky side of the album will therefore appeal to the target audience who would be young adults. The font used for the writing throughout is very simple and easy to read, which is an important characteristic of a digipak because it means when someone is quickly looking through it in a shot they can do so without a problem of having too many different fonts or colours clashing as a result making it more difficult to read. Finally, the back of the album doesn’t include a lot of information apart from the name of the artist, album, song list and companies that produce it as well as the barcode. 

Practice Digipac

In today's lesson some of us were introduce do Photoshop and the way it works for the first time while others like myself who used Photoshop last year were reminded of its functions through a practice digipak. We were given a selection of images we could use and asked to create a digipak. As you can see I only got to finish off the front of the digipak, but I managed to create the main theme (of London) that goes across the whole digipak.

Practice Digipak

Ancillary Work: Class Discussion - Digipak

Today in media we had an extensive discussion about Digipaks and how they are important to the artist just like how the music videos are promoting the artist they also achieve the same purpose through other means.
We discussed how important they are to the artist and we thought that it would help to promote the artist because it catches the eye of the consumer and gets them interested or intrigues them so they are more likely to buy the album if they see the album cover everywhere and helps them familiarise with the artist.

This is a good example of a digipak that I foun don the internet when looking for a good example.

How important are the ancially products to the artist and the industry and in the relation to music videos?


> It sells music
> its vital to have promotion
>without promotion artist will be unknown
>Gives them a brand
> makes more money
> being kept in the public eye
> relationship with audeince/fans
> to reach a wider audience

In class today we discussed come questions around digipacks and why artists still use them.

Why are CD covers still used despite Cd sales dropping?
> It promotes the artist / name
> It shows a list of songs
> It gives us information about the songs and the production
> It grabs people attention in shops
> Its a indication of the artist direction
>Its the most important advertisement
> Consumers get to the the artist identity.
>Its used for mp3 files (itunes)

For example Rhiannas Album

The importance and functions of digipaks to the music industry

In class today we discussed the importance and functions of digipaks in todays music industry. Firstly we looked at why CD covers are still used and came up with the following reasons:

-CD covers grab people's attention which as a result would make them look at the album and either introduce the artist to them or promote their new single if they already knew the artist.
- CD covers also inform the audience about the album and its content ei the genre of music, as well as the artist and their style.
- CD covers portray the artist identity and indicate their direction
- Finally CD covers are nowadays used for MP3 files such as ipods.

So how important are the ancillary products such as digipaks and adverts, to the artist, industry, and the music video?

Digipacks and adverts are highly important in relation to creating and promoting an artist's image in the music industry. Music videos are usually the main inspiration when it comes to creating the actual digipaks and adverts, therefore the ancillary products would create a brand identity. Similarly, they help keep the artist in the public eye, which as a result will hopefully help selling records, meaning more money will go to the artist. Adverts in particular are great for helping the artist reach a wider audience, for example if someone who doesn't usually listen to the artist sees an advert on the train that catches their eye it could as a result make them go out and listen to them.

First lesson on Ancillary work

Today is the first lesson on the Ancillary coursework. As a group, we discussed the importance of Ancillary products in the industry and their purpose. This is what we came up with:

Why are CD covers still used despite CD  sales dropping?

Promotion of artists
Grabs attention
Gives information
Indication of artists direction
For mp3 files and Itunes
Advertises
Illustrates the artists identity and style

How important are Ancillary products to the artists and the industry, and in relation to the music video?

Promotion of artist
gives the artist a brand identity
More money to be made
Advertisement
Artist is kept in the public eye
Creates a house style for the artist
Helps them reach a wider audience

Examples Of ' Examples' albums

 They are all very simple with colour and the text font is not confusing and we can see it very clearly and the images go with the genre of the album music.

What Is A DigiPack

Digipacks have been around since 2000 is adds value it encourages us to part with our money as it gives us more information about the artist , songs , band , tours and so on. It is normally a 4/6 panel digipack. It normally connects with the genre of the aristits music and videos.

Now for the Ancillary work

Now that we have handed in our music video, it is time to begin the production of the Ancillary work. We will each produce a promotional poster and a digipak to go with our artists music video. This means that the products must be in the same house style of the music video and relate to the genre. We are going to look closely at some profesional pieces to asses their conventions.

Definition:

A digipak is a fairly recent invention that packages C.D's or DVD's. They are made of cardboard and have various panels which consists on images and information. In many ways they are similar to standard CD's but  they have more panels, which allows for more additional features whether that is images or more information.

Editing Skills

As a Music Video is different from a thriller opening, the editing techniques we used, or the way we used them were different to last year's coursework.

Layering clips


We used this occasionally, but the most striking time it is used is at the end of the video when we end with both Sifan and our motif.

Brightness and contrast

We edited the contrast to make the clips more striking to resemble a real music video. As this effect naturally makes the clips darker, we also added brightness, but not too much, to reflect the serious nature of the lyrics (Freedom, Fighters).

Black and White


All of the 'After Party' scene was edited in black and white to create a flashback effect.


Motion Blur

This was also added to the clips in the party scene for a distorted effect which connotes the blurred mind of those who may have been drinking the night before. It also works well as we created a flashback, so it gives the impression that this has happened before, as it is not in standard effect without the blur.

Ellipsis


To create the effect of ellipsis, we cut the middle of the clips and put the remaining clips together. We used this in many instances in the music video, including the party scene, and when Sifan walks through the park to the Ivet. This effect gives the impression of time going by, and also demonstrate an action without showing the whole thing, which wastes editing space and can be tedious to watch.

Slow/Fast Motion

Slow motion is my favourite effect that we used as it is effective in creating a dramatic effect. To make a clip slow motion, we highlighted the bar, selected 'Modify' and then Change Speed.

Reversing Clips

To reverse the clips you simply follow the same procedure for the Slow/Fast motion, but instead select 'reverse clip'. We only used this effect once as we already have so much footage.

My Favourite scenes in the Music Video

Halfway through the song, the beat changes tempo and cuts to an up tempo change. During this part we filmed a 'after party' scene which consists of teenagers running away from the house which there would have been a party the previous night. One of my favourite shots was a Skins style set up with all of the cast embers on the bed, laying next to the bag motif. To get this shot, Sifan had to stand above the bed, and he also panned around to make sure to include everyone in the shot. When I edited this, I cut the clip into sections and deleted small parts, so that the end effect of ellipsis is clear and the shot pans in different directions.

We end the music video with a layer of two clips. The close up of the bag motif, and a close up of Sifan. Our teacher, Rebecca thought it was good to end the music video on a close up of the artist as this is a fundemental convention in music videos. The reason we chose the shot of the bag was because it is our motif, and we felt that it is important to end with it. However, this clip fades away to leave the close up of our artist.

The final part that I really liked was the way we edited the 'drop' of the song, which is when the song suddenly speeds up. We put two clips on top of each other and cut them according to the beat, as the drums sped up.

Analysis of some of our base track backgrounds

For the genre that we chose it is very common to have one of your base tracks set against a graffiti wall. This is because it brings an edge to the video and also the graffiti itself could reflect on the artist or what the song is about.

1st image taken from our music video.

The graffiti we chose does this for example with the first image the bright colours reflect the edgy, fun style of the artist. The second base track that has the painted wall behind the artist of all the people relates to the lyrics which talk about fighters and freedom and people coming together basically. Therefore the reasons we chose to include base tracks like these were because it related with the genre of our music video and how other music videos in this genre are, and because it related to the lyrics and our artist. 

2nd image taken from our music video.

Inspirations

One artist and a music video he did which inspired us with ideas was Just Jack - Writers Block. In this video he has a man with a paper bag over his head which does stand out when you watch the video and therefore makes the audience look out for him and when he'll next show up. This video along with L.M.F.A.O's videos with the man with a cardboard box over his head, all inspired us to have a motif of a person with a bag over their head however we made ours different by having a woman not a man have the bag over her head.

A few comments in relation to some edits

Music Video Premier

On the 6th of December all A2 media students will go to the 'Screen on the Green' a small cinema near our college, where we will get to see everyone's amazing music videos! We did the same last year with our thrillers so i'm looking forward to doing it again, because it not only allows you to share your work with your fellow media students, but at the end of it you can get feedback from them. Because they too are media students they will be looking at the technical side of the music video and will therefore give you useful feedback and comments over all. Having this opportunity to see everyone's work together is great because it not only allows everyone to show their music videos, but also its fun and it means everyone will be together enjoying and taking credit for all their hard work!

Finished :D

Skills development - planning the production

Bloopers

Finisheeeed! (with the music video) :D

influence of Artist

when we decided to come up with an artist name we thought about many artists that could influence us and we looked at the music scene here in the UK and the people that came up were mostly k koke and devlin and we decided k koke fits more of our artist profile because he's got the same type of music as us.

reflecting on teamwork

As we come to the end of our editing time, I took some time out to reflect on how we've grown as a group from last year, me myself how i've improved in working with people. This year i've learnt to deal with a lot more independent work and also working with my group through some hardships like lateness and keeping up with deadlines has been tough but i've learnt a lot, even expanding outside of my group to others outside  our group and helping them help us in filming, it took a lot to organize but we all learnt a lot this year about teamwork and hardwork.

Naming our Artist

Introducing...

C. Moore

We've finally come up with a name for our artist! The name is 'C.Moore'. We realised that we still had not had a name for our artist, but really needed one, so we sat down in lesson to talk about it. The name had to be a stage name like 'Chipmunk' or 'Devlin' as this is a convention of the genre. Few grime artists use a real name. The name was inspired by the rapper 'K. Koke' as this name is a streotypical stage name. Our take on this is C. Moore, which is a play on the phrase 'See More'. If you are thinking 'Where have I heard that name before?' It is based on my name 'Charlene Moore' (though it was only a joke when I brought it up!) but the sub text of the name meaning 'See Moore' makes it more of a stage name than a personal name.

I think this name will appeal to a young generation, which is who our artist is aimed at, because it is fun and different and not too serious. It has connotations of the grime genre which will let the audience know what king of genre the artist will be without listening to the music, which is a bonus for an up and coming artist.

Roughcut Feedback

In lesson we showed out teacher Rebecca our work so far and asked her to give us feedback. We already knew that some clips would have to be edited but here are the points she made.

There were a few minor changed that had to be made, for example the 'flashing' effect on the drop of the song is out of sync. But there were only two main changes to be made: Firstly we lost the flow of editing halfway through the video where we took a more random order, rather than sticking to a steady pace. We managed to rectify this the lesson we got the feedback from Rebecca so that we could move on with editing the rest of the music video.


Secondly, we were told not to cut to a new base track in the middle of a word. However, with the pace of our song and the beat, we have not been able to change this.


The feedback from our class mates was to add a tint to the clips so that they had more of a profesional look. One of our friends also brought up that the flashing on the drop was slightly out of sync. We are going to try our best to rectify this to make the video the best it can be!

Progress so far on Music Video

A video explaining our progress so far on our Music Video.

Artist Concept

All the way through our making of our music video we were all trying to figure out what our artist would be like and who he would be, we never really got around to giving him a name. Our main image for our artist was Example because he was the one that made that song and so we were always thinking along those lines and we finally decided on a name recently. We landed on the name C. Moore as a group because we thought it is a clever play on words much like the artist K. Koke who doesn't use his real name as many rappers or performers don't and we wanted to use that to come up with the name for our artist. After we landed on the name we also got a look for him figured out, he would dress like Example and my own style I wear to college everyday and we decided he would be a 20 year old rapper who is a Hip-Hop genre person who makes the same type of music as let's say Devlin or Example himself.

Skills Development: Editing Skills

Over the period that we've been working on our Music Video I learnt a lot of skills, we learnt a lot last year but this year we developed them. When it comes to editing skills I watched my group editing for most of the time and learnt from them how to use different programs. But recently I have been editing also to help my group out to pull my weight and I have learnt a lot by doing it myself. One of the things I learnt is to put the music video onto the editing program, how to change the type of format it is and how to use handbrake to change it to a compatible format for blogger. Another thing is actually editing, for example how to cut up a video and put down markers, this really helps to stay on beat. Also how to add effects is what I recently learnt, like how to make it black and white or any other effect. So far I learnt a lot of skills to do with Music videos in this process and most importantly how to put on a base track which is essential to a music video or it won't work.

Feedback: Rough Cut

We finished our rough cut recently and we had to show it to our teacher for some feedback and in light of the feedback we made some changes. The main points of the feedback were that we had to cut the video to the beat of the song, we did that in the most part but we lost the beat in the second part, so we spent that lesson fixing that. the second point was not cutting in the middle of a word and finally we concentrated on trying to get the sequence of the running on match but Rebecca (Teacher) told us to forget about that and remember that it doesn't have to follow a sequence like the thriller so we took that on board and cut it up our own way. We found the feedback very helpful and now we're done with the whole thing and now can add effects.

Coming up with our artist's stage name

As a group we found coming up with the artist’s name quite difficult. From the research which I did on artists that fall under the genre of our one which is hip hope, grime, house, I realised and so did members of my group too that most artists never use their real name. For example, Chase and Status, Giggs, Example, Tinie Tempah etc. We took this in to consideration, and after a lot of rough names and ideas we came up with the name for our artist – C. Moore. We decided to only have the initial of his first name therefore giving it that edge like for instance with K Koke. We thought the letter C would be good for the first initials because its a letter he can shape with is fingers and can therefore became his trade mark (something that can be used when it comes to taking pictures for the digipaks). Similarly, we thought if you put together the name it sounds like ‘see more’ which could be a way of reaching out to his target audience by inviting them to see more of him and his music. Finally we decided to not put his real name in order to relate to his genre and the way it works when it comes to artist’s name, and relate to his target audience who would be younger people that too tend to have nicknames amongst one another, which means he builds a service of familiarity amongst him and his audience. 

Skills development - new editing skills

During the editing of our music video this year I personally developed a few new skills which I didn’t have when editing the opening of a thriller last year. 

Feedback from rough cut

The feedback from out rough cut amongst our fellow media students was over all a positive one, however one thing they all agreed on that they thought we should work on was to add a few more effects in, as they felt it was to plain.

When it came to our media teacher Rebecca, she too was impressed with our music video rough cut, however her two main points towards us were to keep the pace in mind throughout because at times it cut to another shot in the middle of a word. Secondly she said we have to remember to edit exactly on the beat, with the example of the boys running past the signer in the park. This is an example of a sequence we worked on and changed in light of Rebecca's comment, and in the end even ended up using ellipsis in it as well. 

There were a few other places that needed to be re-edited after the feedback, so in today’s lessons we worked on fixing these problems in our music video.  

Editing process

This is a tutorial showing step by step how to add a tone of colour on a specific clip. 

Editing process

This is a tutorial showing step by step how to make a certain clip black and white. 

Teachers Feedback

Our teachers feedback on our rough cut was not to cut in the middle of a word , get ride of little shots, show editing at beginning and the last part of our rough cut to get in time. The main feedback was to just edit in beat with the music so in today's lesson we are editing to the beat as close as we can also to make sure the lip syncing is in time and the words are correct.

Rough Cut

Websites that could promote our artist

These are examples of some music websites that relate to our music genre and would therefore appeal to our artist’s target audience. This is because they are likely to browse around sites like these that relate to the music they listen to, which means it would be a great opportunity to promote our artist to people who might only be seeing him now for the first time and can therefore get a taste of his music and style through the website.

Our Motif

A motif is an idea or logo that pops up in a music video. This helps the audience recognise what kind of style the artist is or what kind of message they are trying to put forward as they will have picked the motif carefully.

An example of a motif in a real music video is LMFAO'S video for the song. 'You want Romance?'. The video also features a person with a bag over their head, but this is a male. We have put our own twist on this, making eyes on the bag so that Ivet has some sort of identity.

Above: (Ivet creating the bag)

Ivet is starring in our music video as our motif, and will pop up at different times throughout. This is something that the audience can look for in the video and will make each time watching our video new and exciting. We have chosen to cover her face with a paper bag to illustrate how women can be objectified in music videos. Instead of a female with an identity, she has been covered up so that her body is for the male gaze,. We have purposefully stuck to Laura Mulvey's theory of female representation in music videos as it is a convention of the genre of grime. (Our artist is a dubstep/grime crossover artist).

Pictures From The Deadline Day.