I thought it would be a good idea to analyse an exsisting magazine advert for a band/album to understand what is expected of an ad, and what vital elements should be included and what is not so important.
Here we can see the digi-pak cover for the album being advertised on the abover spread. The imagery is the same on the advert as that of the album cover, therefore ensuring recognition of band and album when seeing the ad, and/or finding and buying the physical album.
I was looking on the NME music magazine website to try and get some examples of advertising campaigns for bands and songs, and to maybe gain some further ideas of what is expected of a digi-pak and what we definitely should try to include.
We knew as a group that in this day and age, purchasing a physical album is a lot less likely than downloading it off the internet; therefore we knew that for a digi-pak to be successful it needs to stand out and be something audiences WANT to own, rather than being something to store the disc in that ultimately ends up taking up space on a shelf.
I came across a feature about the new 'Radiohead' album 'King of Limbs' and there was an interesting thing about the releasing and buying of albums in our current society:
"In an essay on censorship he wrote last September, Colin Greenwood referred to a batch of new songs and said the band had 'begun to wonder about how to release them in a digital landscape that has changed again.'
Turns out the answer is: pretty much the same way they released 'In Rainbows' (i.e as a surprise). By offering two versions - the music-only download, and the 'premium' physical edition - they're embracing the digital era while rewarding more committed fans." [http://www.nme.com/]
From what Radiohead are doing in releasing their album digitally, as well as offering a "premium" physical version, we can see that current indie-rock bands want to keep the physical album alive, and keep providing their most loyal fans with good quality, treasurable album packs that will be admired and purchased almost as a separate product as well as the music - rather than just having the songs downloaded on their computers and ipods. This has encouraged us to try and make our digi-pak almost a piece of art in itself, instead of just a sleeve to hold the disc, because if we were making a real product to put on the market, it wouldn't sell unless it was something different, special, and sought after by our target audience.
In today's lesson we compiled a questionare to help us gain information on what will and what won't be well received by our target audience. The questionare was made up of several closed and open questions that would hopefully give us indication of what to include within the appearance of the album cover, and also the content e.g lyrics, band information etc. We posed the questions to a small portion of our target audience; 16-24 year old males and females who are fans of the indie-rock music genre. We currently have the results from this in a grid, but we will endeavour to put the ones we can into a simplified graph format to put on our blogs, as so to make clear the reasons and intentions behind decisions we will make for the design of the digi-pak.
For our ancillary tasks we must firstly design and create an appropriate digipak/album artwork for our song and video - therefore it must be similar in genre, style and feel to our video production. THEN create an A4 magazine spread advertising our band and video..
We haven't yet carried out our questionare or done in depth research, these are just our initial musings surrounding the task of the digipak. A couple of album covers that we already knew of, of bands that are within the indie rock genre can be seen below;
We particularly liked these album covers as they were good inspiration for our own work as we knew, from the style and features of our music video, that we wanted elements of hand drawn style imagery, as well as photographic snapshots of the video - which can be seen in the 'Wombats' album art, where the background image is a photograph, but the typography is made to look scruffy and hand drawn. Again with the Mika one, there is a photograph of Mika himself, surrounded by cartoon images, and the typography again appears hand written - we definitely wish to take this recurrent idea on board with our design, and work on a font that we can create by hand to use for the typography on our front cover i.e title of song/band, and to use inside or on the back for other information such as song lyrics, band information etc. Using a font that appears hand drawn, I think, is a really indie-rock feature, that I've seen a lot, and think looks really effective in creating the D.I.Y style that is desired by indie-rock fans. It also links well to our video as we used hand drawn animation and typography over the top of our shots to create an individual, indie style.
Over different lyrics - chosen specifically to link roughly with what the song is saying - we will have various animation sequences.
- Leaves 'raining' over him
- A flower growing and wilting
- A picture frame being drawn around his face
- Clocks around his face - maybe the hands spinning round? (probs a bit ambitious with the time restraints we have).
- Sunshine rising and setting around his face - 'Radio daylight Radio darkness'
General things like this, hand drawn on photoshop to give that effect of a kind of jumpy, sketchy animation - hopefully it'll go right and we'll have time to finish it. (AND OUR TIME AND EFFORT IS RECOGNISED WHEN MARKING EH EH HINT HINT... :'( )
On a last minute desire to jazz up our lip syncing shots we were inspired by music videos in the same genre as ours, that combine some sort of animation into their videos to add a different dimension to the standard footage, and make the videos stand out and be more quirky and in a 'DIY' style as desired by indie-rock fans.
The shots we want to add this too are the ones where Alec is simply miming the words to the song, which is what we thought we needed because we'd only use short snippets of these - BUT because we underestimated how much time and space our stop motion sections would take up of the song, we have longer gaps to fill, THEREFORE need to have the singing and lip syncing shots on for longer than planned - and they are really boring and basically just his face. SO because they HAVE to be longer to fill the gaps in the timeline, we need to spice 'em up a bit, so we're exploring how we can use animation - preferably hand drawn images, appearing around him when he's singing, to make the shots more interesting. Anna does Art A-level and therefore has good knowledge of photohop, so we managed to work out how to put a video clip into photoshop, splitting into separate frames, allowing us to draw on each frame - so when put together it looks as though the animation is moving independently next to Alec singing. EASIER SAID THAN DONE - it took an age.
Just a quick example - a 3 second clip of Alec singing about 3 words was equivalent to about 500 frames when exported to photoshop.. and every single one of these had to be drawn on, continuing the image from the previous one (for which we were using tracing paper BLUE-TACKED onto the mac screens..) so this took about 3-4 years, then every single layer had to be saved SEPARATELY as it's own file, then imported onto final cut as hundreds of still images, cut down to 0.1 seconds long, so to move quick enough so the lip syncing was correct, and placed in order on the timeline, taking about another 4 or 5 years. Then all of that time and effort was equivilent to about 3-4 seconds of music.. of which we have 4 minutes of that needs to be FILLED with alecs face..
