Digipak Analysis of Other Artists

yyyyyyThis is one of Michael Jackson's most recent albums, just before his death, where he was performing in the O2 arena. On the left is the advert that went with the sales of the album.                               Analysing THE ADVERT: The advert in itself isn't very demanding of the audience eye, it's very simple, bottom line information; nothing extravagant, one image and a base pallet colour of red. The image stands out quite a lot more that the rest of advert because it has a hint of colour and because of Michael Jackson's pose. It is obviously very well known because of his dancing. The audience is able to see the fame of Jackson because of the way the photograph has been taken, no face is needed for recognition of who this artist is. The choice of wording is also very important, 'KING', 'THIS IS IT!', very dramatic but short affirmations that once again re-instate his fame.                                                                                             DIGIPAK Analysis: The digipak is equally as dramatic but not so much as the advert, the front cover is very similar to the advert again. Simple but effective, just the image, title of album and artist name. The back is obviously traditional in the way it has the track listings, company labels and listings, copyright restrictions, websites and bar code. I would say however that the amount of tracks is quite excessive for such a small space and the bonus tracks could have been placed elsewhere in the digipak. The inside of the digipak has been made easier by the fact there are two Cd's, so the design would have just been copied over, its good in the scheme of colour, keeps the theme, also keeps the trademark company's name also.

Below is Katy Perry’s digipak, as you will realize her album design work inspired us as a group to follow along the same sort of lines. The artistry designed for her work is very bubbly, retro and iconic girl pop art. It is very realistic, professional and fits exactly into the theme we ourselves are trying to create for our own piece of work.

I particularly enjoy the font of the writing on the front its works very well, stands out clearly and is the right shade. It also ties in with the back of the CD with the song list because they both share the same font.

The image on the front is also very iconic, its pin up features of a lying down girl which also similar to my plan as I also want my artist lying down. The rest of the image containing all manner of similar props continues to be very effective. The simplicity of the front is what I think works. Simply artists name, album title and image of artist works beautifully.

The back is also very successful with song list, bonus tracks, producer’s details, websites and barcode. Nothing essential is missing and features listed are in very good order and fit together. As a pointer, maybe a price could be added.

 

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Digipak Mock up AND in house style! {Planning}

Today we drew mock-ups of what we hope to achieve for our final digipack, I'm going for a strong four panel layout. My digipack will show strong links with the video, playing off the blue skys and animations from it, as well having it's own style that reflects the artist. When we decided on the song list and album title one of the songs we made up was called "paper dolls" which gave me the inspiration to go with a sort of paper-doll-cut-out theme that would compliment the artists style, personality and the genre well. I'm not sure if it comes across very well in my digipak plan but i know it's an effect i can create with success, i will execute it in a similar fashion to this audience moodboard work i did last year (not related to this project but I've included the picture here for reference).

For the inside panels, one of which will have the CD atop of it, i had several ideas.  Originally I thought i might use  a peach in a puddle of cream to match the album title. But i had some other thoughts, perhaps the sun from our video, obviously due to its shape, or perhaps i could combine the two ideas, thinking about when the CD is in it's place and when it's taken out. I'm leaning towards using just the sun, as i think things shouldn't be made to complicated but i shall dwell on it some more.

Finally and perhaps most importantly you have to think about the house style, this encompasses the text fonts and colour swatch that is to be used within all the related media articles. We knew we were on the hunt for two fonts, one a signature font for the texts, and one a font that would be easily legible and useful for smaller items of text such as reviews and copyright notes. Here are some of the fonts we were considering:

You might recognise Gigi as the Coco Blu font we used in the video so it was an obvious choice, however while it works as a few decorative cursive characters I think it could be pretty hard to read in bulk so we were on the hunt for a more readable alternative that had the same character to reflect the artist. I think the Giddyup font below is perfect! Its very easy on the eyes but we all agree it suits our artist and genre to the ground. I also think that Century gothic really does the job as a clean complimentary small font.

Finally the only thing left to cover is colour, it's important to always use the same shade and not a similiae one, so i've made a note of the hexadecimal value for our main shades (that can be entered into photoshop for an exact match.) Ordered from main colours to minimal colours we have:

#50c3ff light blue

#ffffff white

#fff9e0 cream

#f10202 bright red

#feb9e7 pink

#4fff4f pretty green

Vladimir Propp's Theory

Vladimir Propp was a Russian critic who created his own theory for the base of a fairytale or story. With his new found theory of narrative he studies hundreds of fairy tales looking for the similarities that would prove the existence of his theory. He had a book published in 1928, and in this he based it on 2 sections: the characters, and the time line of the story in itself. The characterization included: the villain; who will go all out to try and defeat the hero, the hero himself, the donor, the helper, the princess; usually the prize for the hero, her father, the false hero and the dispatcher; who sets the hero on their way to great successes. 

Once you decifer the character you know that they will do and what their role is in the story, this is all because all the characters have a sphere of action meaning all they do is related to them always having the same role and what they need to acheive. This includes things like defeating the villain, marrying the maiden, having a set back when the hero thinks he's winning. These features will be what always make up a fairytale.

 

 

Analysis of One Sequence

The section or sequence from the video that i will analyse is the part with various smiles. Partially because i don't think it works very well and i wouldn't have put that in personally. I do understand how it works because the lyrics have 'smiles' at that particulary point in the song so thats what the images inserted were of. Also, because we have a flash of still shots in an area of the video; where the colourful doors are shown with our artist in front of them. That corresponds to this flash of different smiles in the same way.

On the other hand i still deslike of that section and only because of that can i analyse from both sides: positives and negatives. Your probably wondering why i didn't say so and if i did why do i still deslike it, surely my comment would have been acted upon, but thats the whole complication of group work, you have to be fair with everyones opinions and if 3 liked it then majority unfortunetly does have to rule.

The reason for my deslike of this particular part because most of all i think it looks unproffessional, not the editing of it but the actual footage, its particularly rough quality. This gives the overall scene nothing to do with the rest of the video which is sharp and charming. Maybe we could have used a slight filter or effect to edit it, but time was i must admit running short so we weren't able. If there's a downfall in the video i have to admit this might be just it.

Analysis of professionally produced Digipaks

In the album art here for Oh Serenades 'The after party' they use one image to compliment the band font and album name, the disco ball. However if you look closely you can see the little bats that that give away the bands genre, moody, indie. What's interesting about it is that all the colours are similar to one-another, not one overwhelms the other which, while safe, might not be the best design. Nothing really grabs me. The Advert on the other hand is very effective,  It covers many important features, telling you were you can buy it, when you can buy it, give's you a website and the production company label. Again what i find interesting to note is that a large band pinup was chosen as the main image but the album itself is featured too. An alternative approach was taken in the advert below:

This advert uses the same image in the CD as it does in the poster, which would make it instantly recognisable if you were shopping around after seeing the poster. The text size for the artist stands out more than the album name in this case, which i think is a convention at least for the indie genre. It has a lot less text on it and lets the image keep the attention, it certainly sparks the viewers curiosity i would say, and even more so on the album cover.

Finally i wanted to look at a different genre. This Digipack and poster is for an electronic artist. Which is well represented by the lack of images (which would be more personal) giving it an edge-y electronically produced effect. The font is kept the same throughout the different media making the whole campaign more cohesive. A splash of colour is included on the CD cover, I think it's because, while the greys can still make a lot of impact in the poster/advert on the smaller scale the pop of colour within the white really makes the album pop!

Feedback from Rough Cut

Finishing our rough cut was a good process to feeling happy on how much we had completed. Here and  now i must thank Holly on amazing work she put into the editing, since she knew the most about it she was able to be the technological bunny of the group. When we had a finished rough cut, we had to present it to the class and the teacher. We received mixed feedback on which we proceeded to improve on.
Some of the feedback included:

• To swap around scenes so that the story made more sense to the viewer
• To add more blue sky and slow down the scenes at the beginning and also to introduce some cross dissolves to the rest of the opening of the video
• A scene where Coco walks past and the shot is taken from a high angle view, the teacher did not enjoy this and suggested we improve this

Just in time we did have time to complete this to good levels, a lot of effort was put in to turn around the whole video so that the story made more sense to an audience. This was something we learnt, although it made sense to us it didn't necessarily mean an outsider would understand, we did because we had to created the idea. This teaches us to be more clear and think in a way in a more simple frame of mind.
The class feedback was generally positive, their major point was also the story needing to be turned around because even they couldn't understand it.
Positive feedback from both teacher and class, this included the quick sharp editing, the particular scene of doors changing colours, the creative interaction between Coco and Mr Blue Sky.

Last Day of Filming

Our last day of filming was a victorious one, we achieved what we thought was a great deal. And indeed it was when it came to sorting through footage and editing.
We decided to meet up early by Camden passage, because we had previously seen that that day was going to have sunny weather conditions during the morning, and we were proven right. We started shooting the scene where i come up in the cafe being her friend whom calls her over and babbles on even when Coco is distracted by 'Mr Blue Sky'. The lighting was amazing when shooting outside the cafe, and we were pleased to have at least a few shots of direct sunlight. The day went well  with various, excellent shots being filmed from every angle. 'Mr Blue Sky' was then introduced in the story for the first time and being dragged into this i think he behaved and acted the part rather well. He took directions clearly and we ended up with the right shots that fitted the part.
We had some disagreements on Holly not thinking base tracks were necessary and wouldn't want to do them, but we explained how they would come in handy and were always a safe bet. So we did do a few of those, ranging in the shot types such as extreme close ups and close ups. When editing later on they did prove to be a success and were extremely useful to fill in some spaces.
Using Mr Blue Sky and the friend we were showing a point of working on the storyline and adding a sense of balance and story telling to fit the scene.
All in all the whole day of filming was exhausting and we were shattered happy girls to have completed so much filming in the day.

Filming Time Lapse and Start of Editing

I forgot to mention much earlier how i had attempted a time lapse recording session. Since i had a high window i was nominated to film in my house. I borrowed the camera over the weekend for a period of 4 days. As i was only available to film a day and a half i set to work. Eagerly thinking it was going to be easy and that the camera had a time lapse automatic setting i agreed to this. Later on, when talking to the technicians i learnt that i would manually have to change the memory cards every 2 hours and later using software speed it up to produce the desired effect of rapidly moving sky.
I proceeded to get up at half five to set the camera up in the sky, after a day and a morning of this i had used up all the memory and had to wait and see what the outcome would be.
Not a great one i can assure you, the sky was either too dark at times, or the most common problem there was NO SUN! At any point during the day! A lot of clouds and excellent leaf rustling and planes zooming past but no important factor of sun and blue sky. We obviously couldn't use the footage but luckily found alternative shots of blue sky that we inserted some sort of lapse to speed it up.

After our first day of filming the adverse weather conditions made us think better of this and we all decided to stay in the editing suite and get a crack on the editing with the footage we already had. This was a very good plan due to the fact we managed to get a lot of work done, i think a minute and a half which is pretty good for small amount of footage. We were then able to see what we still needed doing for the rest of the video and how and where we would go about doing it. 

The second day of filming was a complete failure, we got our artist all dressed up, took out necessary equipment, went off the location which was a beautiful little cafe and being lunchtime you can imagine what the place was like. There was no way we could have filmed in such a rowdy place, not only for our sake of the video but for the disruption we would probably be causing the customers at the cafe. So we left that spot, and moved down the road to an outdoor cafe: when it started raining. The rest of the group thought useless to film at the time because of the minor hitch back. Whilst i thought best to try and get any footage we could, mid close up would have allowed for a small amount of filming and rain wouldn't have been noticeable. At that point i thought all filming and opportunities of footage was crucial because of time allowance.

First day of Filming

Hurrah! Filming has become, and although it's given me hope that the video won't turn completely upside down there was a slight feeling that i didn't want to be doing this for weeks. It was however a lot of fun and successful in many points. I can speak for myself and Holly and Syldva that we really didn't know what to expect but were very happy on how things started for us.
We were in my opinion very organised with clear frames of mind on how we wanted this to work out. With the lovely, spot-on costume i arranged for Sylvda we were able to fit into a state of mind on how the acting and representation had to come across.
We remembered all the filming equipment we needed as well as speakers and music source. I couldn't have been more pleased on how Syldva fitted right into her role as artist, as i must admit those towering heels and skimpy jumpsuit weren't a help. The worst also came to us when we had to wrap up in scarfs and put on gloves, the weather could have been much better, but for a day of November we couldn't have asked for more. We found this an issue when we were trying to get shots of a blue sky that was desperately needed; no such luck.
Filming was a fun task that i put myself into, taking turns with Holly, although i did constantly snatch away the camera we managed to work between us to produce enticing shots. I wasn't necessarily being selfish but i know editing is my weak point and filming is something i enjoy, i thought i would give my all to have a positive and fair outcome with the rest of the group.
A problem we did have which we didn't account for before was the amount of people who would pass in front of the camera, making us have to shoot repeatedly because of the screen distraction. The fact was that we weren't even in a busy area but a little side road. Things could have been worse i guess, but i do look forward to the rest of the filming!





Location Shots

Since we have now a clear image of how we want our video to be, as we have completed animated storyboards (shown in another blog), we have also took it upon ourselves to go to locations and decide where we are filming. Having started our filming, we have a clearer image on where we want to set our scenes.

It has also become realistic as to the fact that we wont be filming in many other places, this is due to time factor, to illness of a team member and the niggling feeling we have about not being able to show continuity throughout if we suddenly have our artist in a different place. To many other peoples videos this factor probably wouldn't matter, but to ours we fear the story will stop making sense if continuous location shooting weren't to happen.

Below are images of locations setting which we filmed at. In reality we used two short roads and made use of its features, such as shops and cafes. As the story was very literal and about 'Coco's love', it made sense that the location wasn't one of the most important factors.

 

 

Moving on to our Digipaks {Planning}

With our music video completed it was time to move onto our auxillary texts, a digipak and magazine advert.

Alongside a detailed anaysis of other digipaks, covering what works for professional artists. We also spent time studying where it is that people often go wrong and what to avoid when making a digipak. We were given a quick challenge to try and improve an atrocious cd cover, of course the aim here was to identify where it's biggest faults were.

So the starting ground was this cover, designed with failure in mind.  As you can see the mix of fonts and glarish uncomplentary colours looks terrible, the writing overlaps the artists faces and the names are the wrong way round. It's a poor choice of photograph, that has been stretched and positioned badly, at least for Louisa. The Title of the album is barely visible, there are no logos, nor any sign to identify it's genre and a pointless texture has been applied.

From this to...
 

This! In 15minutes!

Here i've found the same photo as used above but haven't strtched it, there wasn't enough time to manipulate their skin to a better complexion much further than fiddling with the brightness so i settled on a filter, which i think helps identify a genre for them (I was going for electro-trance or some such). I fixed the text, making it contempory and bold to match the genre, and i added a modified version of the "island records" company label, matching the colours, to promote the producers along with the artists. Finally i excperimented with a little soundwave graphic coming out of Dans head to bring it all together. Obviously alot more details and thought will need to go into my own Coco Blu Digipak but this was a useful excercise.