DW: Lyric Booklet research

J.Cole Nation

With our digipak we'll be having a lyric booklet as this is a common convention within digipaks. So we researched existing examples to gain some influences and knowledge on the layout and what to incorporate.

It was simple what we found in that they consisted of all the lyric in the tracks that would be in the digipak, and for each track the lyrics would be displayed on one page.

Paramore

Also there's commonly images in the background which the lyrics are layered over the top, and these images would have some significance to the artist or tracks.

Ultimately the lyric booklet would link in effectively with the whole package and flow well

DW: Artist Digipak Research

Don't Leave

So that our digipak would work effectively we researched into existing digipaks from our artist 'Faithless', this way we could see common conventions used throughout their digipaks and incorporate some of these in our digpak.

Font:

Firstly what we found was that they used a common font which is recognisable to the artist, therefore we could also use this font and achieve intertextuality this way. So we'll have to research the font and download it to use in our digipak.

Bombs

Layout:

Also it is common for Faithless to have their name above the name of the album or single, and they'd do this in a much bolder text than the album/single's title which makes it stand out a lot more, we plan on using this similar layout for our front cover, and the text would usually be centred in the page which we'll also take influence to do.








Imaging:

The Greatest Hits

As for the images that are usually on these digpaks it's common for a Faithless album to be dull in colour, and have the artist displayed on the front in which demonstrating star treatment being used which is something we'll try to achieve. Also the image on the front is commonly abstract and interesting which we'll also try do so that we'll appeal to our audience more.

Magazine Ad/Digipak Research

This is a post that will help us with our digi pack we are creating for our music video. We will be creating album artwork and a magazine add for the song 'Insomnia' by Faithless. To begin we are going to look into previous album covers that were used by Faithless and seeing if we can pick out any conventions or any techniques we could use.

Back cover

Faithless - Greatest hits 2005

In this cover the singer looks un happy, this may be because all of his songs have negative connotations or it could either be following on from some of his music videos. The ones i have looked at such as 'Mass Destruction' and 'Muhammed Ali' the videos are very abstract, and this is where the no shirt idea is taken from. Because in Mass Destruction, Maxi Jazz is sitting down in a blazer with no shirt on.

Front cover

Also having the male by him self on the front cover looking down is a gender representation signifying a dominance from this performer.

However on the flip side he is standing imtimately with a woman which may signify equality between sexuality. This is one of the things i picked up on when analysing his videos, in Mass Destruction a counter-type is used as the females play the drums and guitar which would usually be performed by male characters.

This Ad is a very simplistic design, though it still follows the main magazine ad conventions. The artist, the title of the album, and the date theses are probably the main ones that would be found on any magazine ad and digipack as you can see from the examples below. The mag ad is on a plain background with a single image in the center, there is a variation in the font size however the font stays the same. The red shirt worn be the person in the image makes the ad stand out, in magazine ads there is usually one aspect that will draw someones attention.

Faithless' We Come 1 magazine ad follows all three conventions which i mentioned above and is again a very simplistic magazine ad design, this will be a factor of the post modernist movement as if this was compared with the magazine ad below there is a clear change in image and colour of the magazine ad. The add contains a picture of two of the artists from faithless which is usually a regular thing when it comes to magazine ads having a picture of the artist or band.

This is a digipack cover Faithless produced for their final ever album called The Dance, which i have blogged on Faithless The Dance Collectable Box Set. This is a very bright cover and has a very large contrast of colours to make the image stand out. This cover is very effects heavy and has minimalist text, this is one of Faithless' magazine ad conventions as most of the mag ads and album covers don't include an extensive amount of text and a significant amount less when compared to other artists in  the Dance/House genre.

For our magazine ad we are taking into account both our primary and secondary audience. For this we may be placing ads in more than one magazine. Different magazines represent a different target audience.

This is my initial knowledge of magazines and their target audiences...

Jay Z on the Rolling Stone cover

• Q magazine - Target audience 25-40
• MixMag - Target audience 18-32
• NME - Target audience 15-24
• Rolling Stone - Target audiences 16-24, 25-40
• Mojo - Target audience 25-40
• Fact - Target audience 18-32
• FHM - Target audience 15-34

Dance specific...

• djmag - Target audience 18-32
• Core - Target audience 25-40
• Maxumi - Target audience 18-32
• OHM - Target audience 18-32

• 

  MixMag Cover

Magazine Ad conventions

From re-searching various magazine ads i have drawn a list of my own magazine ad conventions, these are below...

• The release date
• Album/song title
• Image of album cover/image of artist
• Artist name
• Brief information on the artist/album
• Record label logo

Magazine Ad research and conventions vodcast

This is my vodcast on magazine ad research and the main conventions i have found.

Shoot 5: Shoot: 13th December (narrative, bedroom, tunnel, nightmare)

On the 13th of December we knew that we had to get a rough cut handed in the following week. Therefore, we shot on the friday morning for 3 hours, this was valuable time we needed and we were able to shoot enough footage that we could make a full rough cut out of. 

On this shoot we shot in a number of different locations these consisted of...

• Bedroom
• Garden bench
• Garden wall
• Underpass

These locations worked in our favour as we still had day light as we shot in the morning. Our main character would be doing different things in each scene. These were mostly narrative sequences where our character would be walking or tossing and turning in his bed.

We also used another character on this shoot. This character is signifying the nightmares in our video. The costume mise en scene for our character was black fur hooded jacket and a simple black mask this looked very effective and should work well in our video.  We thought the use of fire would be a good thing to include so we shot the nightmare character burning paper in his hands. The fire also has demonic denotations such as hell and torture which we thought worked well for our nightmare character.

Jake with camera 

One main thing that assisted us during our shoot was a snory camera which provided a CU of our characters face. The snory cam set up was poor and the thing fell apart as we were placing the camera on top of it - though it was previously made by another student. We improvised and got cling film and wrapped it round the camera and the wooden arm.

Behind jake on the picture on the right is the underpass location. this is an abstract location which looks very effective on the camera. We shot a variety of different shot types to make sure we got the variation we needed first time round.

Yet again we encountered the problem of our SD card being full which has brought us to the conclusion that we are going to buy a new one.

Camera 

Faithless The Dance collectable boxset

Faithless are to release a strictly limited edition official book in a collectable box set called The Dance. This includes a book describing their 15 years of success in their own words. The book also includes two limited vinyl discs with a number of exclusive remixes and two cd's and an exclusive print.

This is the link to the pre-order http://faithless.sandbag.uk.com/Store/BoxSet.html

Faithless book cover

The upcoming release of this book shows that there is clearly a market and a wide fan base for Faithless. In retrospect we will be creating a cut down version of something similar to this but just a CD cover. Because we have know where near the budget to produce a piece of merchandise to this standard. However, we can also get some key ideas and inspiration from this for our album artwork and magazine ads.

Book images

There is a key theme throughout the box set as the colours all link together which runs through out the book. The use of images really gives it some flavour and would indulge the reader, which is something we should look to use.

The lead member of the band always looks depressed

Permission request

In order to use the track 'Insomnia' - Faithless, we would need to request permission from the record label. After looking at the Insomnia Wikipedia page I found that the record label was Cheeky Records/BMG, bearing in mind that BMG is an international conglomerate and the parent company I thought we may be more successful if we were to contact the subsidiary - Cheeky Records.  After extensive searching I found the contact details for Cheeky Records...

This is the email i sent to Cheeky Records...

Hi, I'm creating a music video for Faithless' 'Insomnia' as part of my Media Studies A-Level. This is not for any commercial usage. We would like your permission to use the audio track for 'Insominia', for example when publishing our completed video on YouTube (not least as this helps us gain audience feedback on rough cuts and final cuts of our video). We'd be delighted to discuss the concept we have for this video if you are interested, or to simply answer any further questions you might have. You can also address any queries to Mr Burrowes, Head of Media Studies at the school. 
This is one of our sample clips testing different editing styles, if you would like to take a look at one of the clips we would plan on using.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9X4zkmEP4g

This attempt failed because it wasn't a valid email address. Therefore i went to Faithless' website where there is a contact section, i could copy and paste the same message to the contact box and proceed to send the message in hope of a reply. Because its not a direct email it may be un-likley to get a reply although we are very hopeful.

Creative Arts Evening 4th December

On the 4th of December we volunteered to use our valuable free time to participate in the creative arts evening. The arts evening ran between 7.00 - 9.00 and as well as our media subject there were the art, drama and music department all showing off their work.

We had come up with an original idea previously to the evening for a potential viral aspect. This was that we would place our iconic chair image in different locations of the school. We would then proceed to tell the visitors the whole concept of our original video and what we were planning on doing. Secondly, we would tell the visitors to lip sync a specific line and we would then edit them all into one clip along with the mp3 in the background.

We had a variety of people sitting in our chair ranging through different age groups luring them in from outside the door showing them our 'different' set up. The experience was very enjoyable for our group as we were able to get peoples opinions and positive feedback. We edited the clip as we went along, taking the SD card to the Mac at relevant intervals. Surprisingly we had all the lines lip synced with-in the first hour of the evening. Thus giving us more time to master the editing and prepare it for our 8.40 premiere in the main hall.

This was a very good way to promote our video as a lot of people were highly interested in what we were doing in our actual music video. We took the opportunity as well to advertise the IGSmediastudies   YouTube channel as a lot of people were interested in the previous music videos that were made by other students.

We learned that:

• When needed we can edit very fast
• Our directing skills have been improved
• We have very good people skills

Therefore, all in all the evening was a success for team Deja Cu. We were impressed with the amount of people that showed up and were willing to interact with our video. 

We hipe to have the full video edited by the 6th of December where it can be viewed on our Youtube channels. 

Shoot 4: Shoot: 4th December (narrative, curly hill woods)

On the 4th of november we decided we would use our lesson time to shoot a proportion of our narrative scenes. 

Once again we did not stick to our shooting schedule.

We shot in two different locations these were Brooke street bridge over the river river Wharfe and Middleton woods at the top of Ilkley. When filming on the bridge we aimed to use a variety of shots including LS, OTS, CU ect. Our character would proceed to walk along the bridge and stop to look down at the river. We carefully framed our shots so that there were no cars or other people on show, this was because we wanted to show our characters isolation to the world and we thought if we included cars in these abstract shots it would affect our preferred reading.

When shooting in the woods the backdrop was perfect as the sun was just rising so it gave our shots an early morning effect which is what we want to achieve as are character would be awake in the early morning. Again we used a variety of shots which we aim to use for our narrative scenes as our character walks through these woods. We differentiated between POV shots and OTS shots as well as MS, LS and ELS. One shot which we thought would particularly work well was a POV shot which the camera tilted to look up at the trees and then rotated quickly. This could be a possible conventional ending point but also the sky could signify dreams, which he is hoping for but he cannot sleep.

One problem we encountered was our SD card being full which was a problem to a certain extent. As a result of this, we had to delete footage, though this was luckily on our Mac. We are planning to buy a bigger SD card or even better several and we can appoint certain scenes to certain memory cards to help organisation and time management.

Shoot 4: Planning: 3rd December (skatepark, bedroom, brooke street)

As our third shoot didn't go as according to plan as we had hoped. Therefore, we will be using our shooting schedule the third shoot for our forth shoot to save time because we have missed some vital shots and scenes that still need to be done. As a result, it is arguable to say that we are behind schedule now however, we will be using the time we have left efficiently to get our full rough cut shot and edited.

Shooting schedule shoot 3 from CurtisTiplady

Mise en Scene:

Mise En Scene: The mattress

For our third shoot i we decided that we would use a prop that we thought would work well in our music video. This was a mattress which linked in perfectly with our music video - Insomnia. 

We put the mattress in an open field as you can see from the picture on the right. We filmed a variety of shots using the mattress and emphasised that our character cannot get any sleep, that his bed is like just sleeping in an open field. 

The mattress

We plan on experimenting with this prop we may layer a clip with our character trying to sleep in his own bed.

There was one problem that occurred which was that when we filmed the mattress we left it bare, with no covers or sheets. This would give our shot a preferred reading that he was actually trying to get to sleep not that just he is lying in a mattress in a field.