Magazine

We have been looking at different music magazines that fit with the genre we are doing for our music video. As ours is alternative/indie we thought Kerrang! would be a good music magazine to look through, especially for adverts of other bands releasing their CD, for inspiration on our own advertisement.

I chose to look at The Blackout's advertisement as, although not strictly within our genre, they boarder the lines of the alternative style. Looking at this magazine advertisement, you can see that it has followed the basic conventions that an advertisement should. The release date has been included, as has the bands name, the album title and reviews of the album being sold.

When making my own advertisement for our album, i will stick to the conventions of a music video; in the information provided, however i will be aiming to create an advertisement that draws attention to its, as oppose to just flicking past it.

Editing

We have been editing all of our footage for our music video and have managed to edited around two minutes of our four minute song. As you can see from these images we have been using Final Cut Express when editing our footage, we are using this software as it offers much more than the previous software used, iMovie.

Here we are editing the colour of a certain clip to ensure it fits in with the rest of our footage. Altering the colour of certain clips is a precise job as if changed too drastically then the clip will look to fake, which we do not want.

Here is the third draft of our music video, before we have started to rewind the footage.

Twitter

We have now created a Twitter page for our band Talk Big Thoughts, in doing this we have widened our publicity and also enabled our selves to an easy access of audience feedback. In doing this we will be able to tweet our final video, or drafts of our music video and ask people to comment on said draft and give any positive or negative feedback in regards. As well as us having access to our audience and their opinion of certain aspects of our band, they are also able to keep updated with the latest things we have been up to.

Regarding Digipak

I have recently edited and finalised my Digipak design and from my first draft to the final draft, several things have been altered. I have altered the colouring of certain images to ensure that the words written on top of the image can be seen with a bit more ease. I have also added a spine as this was missed from my original design and is crucial to the general template of a Digipak. With my final Digipak I have decided not to have any writing on the front cover, this will, i hope, create a sense of curiosity for the buyer and improve its overall sales rates.

This inspiration came from the CD packaging of alt-J's album An Awesome Wave;

They too have decided not to put any text on to their album cover, which again i find enticing and draws me personally to buy this particular album.

Digipak Final

Since making my presentation i have tweaked a few things about my final digipak design, such include adding a spine and using new dimensions for its production size.
Here is the final digipak design;

Final DigiPak by MeganSouthern

By looking at the dimensions of my final designs, it is obvious that they do not all match equally, and i have done this purposely. In creating these specific dimensions i am able to create a very individual and unique type of digipak. With these dimensions i am able to fold the packaging in a specific way allowing the next page to be seen as well as the current page (like this);

Digipak Presentation

I have created a small presentation within prezi, out linning all the qualities of my chosen digipak. The presentation also consists of a printed off version of the digipak as well as how the digipak would look folded. On looking at my design you may be wondering why i have not created a spine for my digipak, this is because of the type of digipak i am creating. Due to the 6 panels and fact that if it goes into production it will be made out of cardboard, or a similar material, and therefore there will be no need for a spine. In doing this i also enable myself to have more space for the front and back panels of the digipak.


 

Digital Technology

Digital technology consists of two major sections, the software and the hardware. The software consists of products such as the editing software and the sound programmes whereas the hardware is more to do with the products we use to film and create our music video.

Specifically within our video, we have used a variety of both software and hardware in the procution and making of our music video. Such hard ware includes our HD Panasonic cameras, on which all of our music video has been filmed on and also a flip camera, which we have used when filming behind the scenes of production and has proven very useful in documenting our progress whilst out on location. We have also used spot lights whilst filming, to create a more professional feel to specific parts of our video, such as the opening frame when the girl first steps off the breezeblock in the warehouse. We have used a couple different types of tripods, such as a gorilla tripod, to create extremly low cantered angle shots as well as a normal tripod for our basic yet effective still shots. We also had the oppourtunity to use a fish eye lense, but this proved inaffective with the style of music video we were to produce.

Moving on to the types of software we have used, most recently we have been using Final Cut Express for editing our music video, which is a much more advanced editing programme when compared to what we used last year,iMovie. Within Final Cut Express we are able to tamper with the speed of clips at a much more professional rate, allowing us to speed up slow transformations or slow down quick movements. We have already used the speed within our opening 45 seconds, when slowing slow water splashing up from a pond, this looks so much more effective when slowed down, in comparison to the clip being played a normal speed.We do have the option of using Garage BAnd to edit our song choice, however we decided on not dsoing so, purely due to the fact that we like the song at its full length and also, it would have been incredible difficult to cut a section out of this song without it being noticed. For editing photos and images that we are using the production of our digipaks, most poeple are using either paint or photoshop, I on the other hand used iPhoto to edit the image and then to create the layout that i wanted, i used microsoft word, mainly due to the fact that i am very familiar with this software and i would save time on production with using a familiar software as oppose to learning how another programme works.

Digipaks complete

I have completed my two digipaks and have chosen the preferred one out of the two that i will be using as my final piece. Both have their own pros and cons however i have weighed the two out and have decided that the second of the two shown in the document below is my preferred out of the two. There are several reasons as to why i have come to this decision, one is that this digipak has an overall more sophisticated and professional feel to it, it all also has our symbol, our album title, our bands name and our track list.

Digipak Complete by Megan Southern

Questionnaire Results

I have now carried out the questionnaire and here are my findings from doing said questionnaire.
I asked people from both my media class and my form class to fill out the questionnaire. A varied response was taken to the opening 30 seconds of the video, with the majority finding the genre to be that of an alternative/indie styling however one participant thought it was in the thriller genre. This was due to the fast pace and feel of disorientation given off in our video. A link between the lyrics and images shown was found to be quite clear, with my target audience making the link between the song title and the use of a breeze block, as well as the use of an obsessive love as a theme was detected by one member of my target audience. They made a link between the use of the lyric "I love you so" and the protagonists emotions within the video. All said that there was a clear relationship between the beat of the music and the editing, which most related to the fast paced editing technique we used. Unfortunately no one found a link to voyeurism within our music video, which is something that we can therefore include later on down the production line.

Digipak Photos

I have chosen the 12 photos that i will be using for my two sample digipak mock ups. I have edited the photos below on iPhoto, and created a small collage of each of the two digipak samples.


Digipak Idea One

                                                             
Digipak Idea Two

I have chosen to edit the photos on iPhoto because it allows me to play with the colours, the composition, the focus and the orientation of the image. However to put all the photos together in the form of a digipak i will most probably be using microsoft word, as i can use text boxes and images to compose the exact digipak i want.

Audience Questionnaire

I have made the questionnaire that i will be asking a a group of willing friends and acquaintances to fill out in regards to our  music video opening. I have asked questions about the content of the video, how it relates to the genre of the video and the lyrics of the song. Here is the questionnaire that i will be asking a sample of people;

Questionnaire by Megan Southern

Digipak Mock Ups

I have created a short vlog detailing my ideas for my digipak. I have created two mock up versions of my digipak, by hand, that allow you to see what i hope my overall/final digipak will look like once completed. I have therefore, instead of posting images, have created a vlog in order to describe the two digipak mock ups:

 

Audience update

As we are to conduct an investigation into our audience it is crucial that we look at the different theorists that have also done research into this field of media. Such theorists include Andrew Goodwin and Stuart Hall. As i have previously done a presentation on Goodwin and his theories i thought now would be a good time to mention Hall.

 Hall created the idea of the three different readings and interpretations of certain perspectives, These three are:
The Dominant Reading - What the producers want you to see
The Oppositional Reading - The opposite of what the producers want you to see (rejected)
The negotiated Reading - Mid-way between, partly either one