Advert Construction

Advert construction from cherrycai11

Digipak Construction 1

Digipak construction from cherrycai11

Font Choice

Front choice from cherrycai11

Advert Plan

This page contains the planning I have undertaken with regards to the light painting photoshoot required for the magazine advert.

The same as the digipak plan, this planning for the ancillary text was done by hand on paper, which has been scanned in and shown above. Hopefully the texts written on the paper can be read.

These are the light painting images chosen as the final pictures going to used in magazine advert as well as the chosen background.Besides adding the light painting images above the chosen background, the final advert will contain "release date" "record label" "two dimension code" "official website".

Choosing Background

As I have mentioned before, the front and the back of my digipak are designed in the same background ( shown on the picture above). In my previous idea, the colour scheme of the background is purple with some universal cartoon pattern on it. As we can see, the image of background is very important for the digipak so it has to be attractive and colourful in order to make the album stand out. 

I found that it was hard to find out the perfect image which was exactly the same as my thought. So that  I was just looking for some suitable pictures but not focused on one type of background images. I just downloaded all the images which I thought they were probably suitable, and then gathering them in here below.

Although there are some universal cartoon patterns on it, I think it is too dazzling which can not be perfectly combine with the image of William. So that I do not think I will choose this one as the album background. 

This is a tiled background image, which I can edit the size whatever I want. But this image is too girlish in my opinion, it does not match with the artist who is a male.

For my background of digipak, I am looking for a picture fulled of cartoon patterns basing on black colour. I noticed that I wanted to use purple as the colour scheme of background, but I did not find any suitable purple background picture in the Internet. 

The idea of using vibrant background with cartoon patterns came out when I found the album cover of MIKA. 

                                               

  

Considering the background is going to combine with other pictures in order to create a whole digipak front/back/magazine advert, I think I should better choose a dark colour scheme background with some repeated patterns on it.

Finally, I choose this images as the final product background. This background will be used in both digipak and magazine advert in order to synergy. The album digipak and the magazine advert will be created with same background to make sure that it is in the same style. Moreover, the advert may be put in everywhere,i.e. underground,bus stop, shops, it is important to help people be familiar to the album front cover. The more people see, the more popularity there will be. 

Digipak Improved Plan

Previous Plan

New Plan(Improved Plan)

Base on my previous plan, I did some improvement in order to make the digipak look better and more reasonable. As we can see the picture above, design of the back and one of the pages inside are changed. The artist is always the selling point in purchasing a album, so that I think the previous one is lack of star images. Too many pictures of scene are unnecessary since people may buy the album in order to get some photo-shoots of artist. Thus, I changed one of pages into a mixture of three images of William. As shown on the left bottom we can see the combination in my mind still combining the images and background(the same as the front and the back).

Some short comments are written on the paper by hand, hopefully you can see them clearly.

In term of the back cover of digiapk, the song list will be put in the middle of the whole back cover and the "bar code" "record label" as well as more imformation about this album will be put in the bottom line.

Others are still remain the same, hopefully this plan will be the draft of final digipak product.

Evidence of photo-shoots for both pieces

To be honest, I am not good at taking photos of objects. In my previous plan of digipak, I have to take some photos of some recreation facilities in the park. Although some ideas have come out, I still can not create them as the same as my thought. 

In this situation, I asked my friend Season for help, who told me the idea about light painting. The screen shot of my iPhone is the evidence of asking for help. As we can see, he was willing to help me and we made a decision about shooting on Thursday afternoon. The photo-shoots were divided into two parts, one was taking photos in the park of recreation facilities, the other one was taking light panting pictures. In addition, the star images also will be used in the digipak, but I had taken pictures of the artist before, so I just needed to take the pictures of scene on Thursday.

These are the evidence of Season taking photos in the Burn Valley Park ( taken by me). 

All the evidence photos were taken by iPhone.

            

         

A series of photos below are the evidence of us taking light panting pictures.The location is easy to find as long as it is dark enough.
These photos were showing that Season were setting  up the tripod and camera.


Season and I were deciding the most appropriate location for us to write down the words in the air. Actually, we had tried in different locations for many times. But fortunately, we got some pleasant photos finally.

As we can see( not very clearly), there were two people standing in the face of the lens.  At first, the products were not very good, because the time was too short( maximum 30 seconds) while the words were too long. Due to the words which planed to write down were too many characters. We decided to let two people write at the same time.

In order to get the perfect one , we had taken lots of photos. The two ladies in the picture below were my friends as my assistants to assit me.

Digipak Plan

This page contains the planning of the digipak with regards to the photoshoot I have taken. The picture below is the draft planning done by hand on paper ; the sheet has been scanned in. 

As I have mentioned before(Digipak mood board), I am going to combine the 'star image' and vibrant colour together. The main colour scheme of the digipak will be purple, which is a little similar to Justin Bieber album-My Worlds. The picture on the lower right corner is the front cover of the digipak, as we can see, William's image covers the most space of the front and his name is shown in the middle. The background is full of cartoon figures, and the main colour of the background will be purple.

The photos below were images I was going to use in digipak. When I was picking them up, a new idea has come out and this was the reason why I have chosen four photos of William. As we can see, there was only one image used in the 6 panes digipak, which I thought too less. So that I would change one image of one of the panes, which was instead of star image.

These are the images I am going to use:

Contact sheets of images for both pieces

These are the images from the photoshoot I conducted with Season outdoors. The photoshoot divided into two parts, one was shot in the dark, the other was shot by day. Everything of photoshoot was fine due to the good whether by day. However, the most difficult things in taking the picture was writing down the words in reverse. To present the characters in a correct order, we had to write the words in reverse of each character. Season was an expert in writing it as he had done this for many times before. Therefore, I took charge of the button of camera, Season and Coral (assistant ) wrote down the words in the darkness.

As we can see, there were plenty of shoots of the light painting because most of them were failed or test shoots. During the shooting, I found that the most difficult in taking light painting pictures was hard to measure the distance between two words,so that sometimes the characters would overlap. After trying for few times, we got the good effect pictures finally.

All the photos have not been edited yet, also, I have not made any decision about which photo will be used. These are the pictures shot in the Burn Valley Park. Actually I am wondering to take more pictures of the park later as the pictures are not enough.  

There are the images of William which I am going to combine one of them with vibrant background. Most of the shots are high-angle medium shots which is highly focusing on his face and facial expression. Furthermore, William is appearing mainly in the centre, looking directly at the camera. This is important for cover of digipak to pull audiences in since most of the pop geren albums have done. 

The main issue I had during the shoot was that some of images were blurry as I set my camera at manual focus. At first, I want to create the image of artist with blurry background because it is much easier to edit in photoshop ( sectional cutout). The first four images in the first line were the test shoots of manual focus. Although they were not in good effect, I still determined to try. Luckily, some of them can be used probably. 

I am going to use Photoshop to edit the images , which is the most familiar photo editing software for me. In addition, Season is an expert in Photoshop as a photography student, so that I can ask him for help in editing as well as improve my skills in using photoshop. I am hoping to see some creative results. 

Stages of Digipak and Advert development

Rough Cut 3

Finally, the video is completed, even though this is still a rough cut.

All of the gaps in the video have been filled and I do concern about whether the narrative can be understood by audience because it still looks loosely so. Although this is the last rough cut,in my mind, there are plenty of editing stages can be put in the final cut in order to increase the visually interesting. 

The part of rap has been filled by a series jump cut of the main character William and support narrative. This new part of the music video looks rough and brief in my opinion. According to my storyboard, there will be a rapper acting this part, he is rapping while walking down the streets which has shown in previous. Unfortunately, I can not find the suitable person to be the rapper as they can not acting and rapping like a black people. Therefore, I have to changed the previous plan in order to fill all the gaps and complete the music video. I have filmed some clips of William walking in the park at random. I have filmed it in different angles so that the idea of jump cut just comes out. In addition, I have found some clips filmed before also can be used which is surprisingly suitable for the gaps.At last, the final rough cut is compeleted.

Additionally I am going to keep editing the 'rap' part and try to increase the visual interests as well as  the other parts of the music video.I will be able to make final adjustements to my video based on audience feedback. These are as follows:
Solve the lip sync problems (the lips syncs of some places are still out of line)

Adjust the colour of the frame ( some frames look strange)

Moreover, I have to add the record label in the beginning of the music video as well as the name of director and so on. I will try my best to make th music video better ,I feel its a little messy now to be honest.





Special photo shoot idea

As I have mentioned before, I want to do something special with my advert artwork and I have got an idea from my friend. My friend Season is studying photography in the same college as me who is very talented in it. He shares an idea about the photo shooting with me, which is painting with light (Light Painting). The light can be used to write words and the camera can records it as long as the background is dark enough. 

 

Light painting is a  photographic technique in which exposures are made by moving a hand-held light source or by moving the camera. The term light painting also encompasses images lit from outside the frame with hand-held light sources.By moving the light source, the light can be used to selectively illuminate parts of the subject or to "paint" a picture by shining it directly into the camera lens. Light painting requires a slow shutter speed, usually a second or more. Light painting can take on the characteristics of a quick pencil sketch.

 

There are the test shots of light painting.

 

 

Magazine Advert Mood Board/Digipak Comparison

To be honest, I seldom purchase music magazines which contain lots of album adverts. Besides creating a digipak as the course required, I also have to create a magazine advert. In order to get more familiar with pop genre music adverts, I have done some researches about advert and I have found these magazine advert below from Google. Both of them are presented by famous pop artist, likes Madonna, Katy Perry, P!nk, Hard Candy. Moreover, these adverts will hopefully inspire the creation of my magazine advert through a greater appreciation of the convention and design.

The reason why I put those two magazine cover in the first line of the mood board(the 'Hard Candy' one and the 'Madonna' one ) is they are exactly the same picture as the front cover of their digipak. They are just in different image size added more information about the new album, likes released day, slogan, i.e.  In my opinion, this marketing method can be regarded as "synergy", which is the poster of album advert  put everywhere, likes undergrounds, bus stops, magazines and so on. And the image of poster is exactly the same as the album cover. The poster in everywhere reinforces people's memories about this album, though they may not want to buy one, they have already learned the name of the artist and have been familiar with this album cover because they have seen it for many times. 

However, although some magazine adverts are not exactly the same as its album cover, they always follow same style, themes, colours and layout as the album they are promoting. But the 'star image' is usually remained as the biggest selling point. Female pop singers usually show the body shapes in advertising in order to attract male audience. Looking at the advert of Katy Perry, she is in a sexy position standing in the middle of the image. The background is white which is in contrast with her red dress. Her red dress is really close-fitting and sleeveless which makes her look sexy and attractive. Moreover, the artist's name is above the image of her in sharp pink colour. The whole advert is really simple and concise so that the star image and the words can stand out. 

On the other hand, I personally think Madonna's album advert in the third line is really interesting and artistic. We can see Madonna's face at the first sight, and her name is above her in capital characters. Looking at her face carefully, we can find there are more other images of Madonna showing in it. It is so creative that easily brings deep impression for audience. To be more precise, people would have more interests in this album because this pop genre album looks different from others which is creative.

In my own album advert, I want to do something different and special. As a new brand record company, I wonder to highlight the style of my company so that I think I would not use the image of artist in the advert as the pop genre adverts usually do.But the name of artist probably is the main point in my advert artwork. 



Digipak Template

In order to produce my digipak in correct measurements, I 've downloaded a digipak template package from internet including PSD format. So that it can be opened in Photoshop and much more convenient for me to add picture in this bland template as the images for each layer be imported and placed within the guidelines given.

This is a blank copy of the template below, all the lines can be seen clearly and each page has name on it telling me the each image is placed in which it has to be.

Choosing Artist's Name

All artists have a name, whether is a stage name or their real name.Because I have to create complete new brand identity for my artist, I need to think about what my artist' name is.

My artist' real name is William Lee, although he is a Chinese, he is created as an English pop singer in my expectation. As a reason, he needs a English stage name as his identity. Actually, I think his real name "William" is quite appropriate as it is a popular English name. As I 've been highly inspired by an American recording artist and songwriter  who is William James Adams. He is better known as Will. i.am, which is due to the characters in his real name divided into three parts. I think this name is quite creative and interesting, and it is also easy to remember ,which again is important considering that I want to try and push William's popularity.


Moreover, I am going to design album/magazine artwork by using the name in form of "Will.I.am.", because I think that is easy for audience to remember the artist as the form of name giving strong memory.

Album Artwork Mood Board

I have to create a digipak as my course required in A2 media studies. In order to understand better of digipak conventions, also need to take inspiration from more unique album artwork within the pop genre, I have found those images below from google to produce a mood board to get more ideas about my production. Moreover, the existing album artwork I have chosen below are the same style as the digipak in my mind of my music video.

As we can see, all the album covers are quite colourful and vibrant, which are typical pop genre style. In term of colour scheme, they prefer to use pink, red, purple which kind of bright colour rather than use black and grey (black and grey usually are used in rock/indie genre of digipak). Notable exception this include Hard Candy, Nicki Minaj, Avril Lavigne, Rihanna, Justin Bieber and so on, however all the album cover I have chosen using 'star image' to reinforce the idea of artists. In addition, the name of the artist are always in the biggest type front shown on the cover. Because the artist is always the key to sell the albums, they are the selling point to increase the promotion.

To be more precise, looking at the album presented by Rihanna. The whole front cover is filled in by her face, the colour scheme of the cover is consistence with her hair colour. When Rihanna releases this album-"Loud", she is well- known and liked by many people. Therefore, this new album cover is so simple which only contain the star image and the album name. The publisher dosen't put the name of artist in the front, all they need is just using the image of Rihanna's face because she is famous enough to let everybody knows her. On the other hand, the album cover without artist' s name can attract people to buy the album as they are curious about who is she? In order to stimulate audience' buying inclination, the image of Rihanna shows her eyes are closed and her mouth is slightly opened seems wanting to say something/sing.

Interestingly, Coldplay's album does not include an image of their own. As we know, Coldplay is a male band so that their target audience will be female. The front cover of their album just uses brightly coloured patterns and the sky with clouds as the background. And the image of a female in the middle of the cover which is not very clearly combining with the background and patterns. The band do, however, like to portray themselves as being quite indie and mysterious to some extent.

In order to create a typical pop genre digipak, I am going to combine both 'star image' and vibrant colour together. The main colour scheme of my product will be purple, pink and grey, which is similar to the album of Justin Bieber shown above. Moreover, in term of front choice, I have noticed that the type face in each album are in the similar style. Therefore, I am going to choose some interesting type face and use them both for the album name and the artist name.

Rough cut 2

Unfortunately, I still could not get the rest part of clips which are used to fill the rap part. Because the form of clips exporting from my own camera could not be read in Mac, the only way to convert them was asking for help from a teacher in our college, he had software in PC to convert those clips from MTS.form to mov. In this situation, I decided to edit the part which I have put in time line first. Here below is my rough cut 2 ,with a substantial amount of progress has been made.

Comparing with the last rough cut, the biggest change was that I used colour correction to change the colour of frames. As we can see, the colour of the opening shot had been changed into black and white which was following my storyboard. Basically, I just dragged the "set" module to the minimum so that the frame presented a based black and white which I would adjust more detailed in next rough cut.In addition, I also changed the colour of frames matching the beat of song. i.e. When William was going down the street and dragged off the price tag on passerby, the colour changed alternately from black and white to original colour. It enriched the visual effect as well as brought intensification to audience in my opinion. This was just an attempt for rough cut but I thought that I would keep it in final cut.

Besides changing the colour into black and white, I also create a flashing effect by changing the screen in different colour(some parts are designed as flashing between original colour and 'black and white').The colour of screen changing withe the song beat brings out much more intense feeling for audience, also, it brings visual interest though the frame still the same.

This below is a screen shot of the comparing between original colour and edited colour.

This is the colour correction which is quite convenient to adjust.

In term of being visually interesting, the video is more creative with an increased range of visual effects,e.g. slow motion, the usage of reverse. To be honest, it is a cumbersome work to link the image with the song beat. They are hard to match each other perfectly unless keep trying to change the speed of the clip.In this rough cut, I changes the speed of the opening into much slower. I have tried to match the step with the beat, even though I have tried range from 30 to 120 percent of speed, it still can not combine together very well. As a reason, I decided to adjust much slower which is one step for one sentence of lyric.

In addition, I think the beginning of the music video is still a little bit odd in my eyes. Actually, I also used different speed in this part to have a try, but the result still the same, I still can not match them very well. So I just leave them for now, but I am planning to change the idea of editing.

There are some very small gaps remaining between two clips, their existence sometimes are quite helpful as they make the beat fit with the image. Therefore, I may keep them in final cut.

The last but not least, at the start of video many clips have been moved out of the sync.The lip sync in rough cut 1 is even much better than this one. The reason why is getting worse is ,when I editing other clips I forgot to lock the part I have finished. So they are moved by mistakes and I even don't know. The main concern for me now is that I have to rearrange all the thing again, because there is no gaps at the start of video. If I want to move one of the clips forward or backward, I have to move all the clips forward or cut a little bit of prior one.

In my next rough cut, I will fill all the gaps and get a draft final product. Moreover, I will create more visually interesting by using the effect in Final Cut.

9 frames analysis 2

Recce of Location

I earlier stated that I'd like to film in the park for a number of shots which is needed to create a happy atmosphere with people playing and having fun in there. Basically there were some lovely parks in Hartlepool so that I just selected a weekend before filming day and went around every parks. 

 

Here is the Burn Valley Park which is near either my accommodation or my college. It is quite convenient for actors and me to get together because all the actors who have been asked to join in my video are living around this park. There are slides, swing as well as other recreation facilities which provided for actors playing.On the other hand, this park is not very big indeed, so that I can include most of facilities and people in my camera in one frame.

This is another park on the other side of Burn Valley.There are more recreation facilities in this one, however, it is too far away from our college and accommodation comparing with the first park I have mentioned. It is difficult for me to bring a lot of people to here because they only have limited time which is quite short. I can not waste our time in moving to the location. But I still think this is a good location which can be used in my music video, as a reason, I choose it as one of the location for William 's solo part. I plan to shoot this part during half term so that we have enough time to find a perfect location and filming perfect clips.

Otherwise, I also went to the Summer Hill in Hartlepool investigating whether this is a good location or not. As we can see, there is a big lawn with a number of recreation facilities.The view is quite wide and beautiful which is fantastic to create a good image effect. However, there is a big disadvantages for locating in this park, which the land is unsteady. The camera is extremely hard to be fastened on the lawn, so the frame might be not horizontal. This is the reason why I didn't choose Summer Hill as one of the locations used in my music video though I had filmed some short clips in here.

This was a street near where I lived,which was a quiet as well as less crowded places to go.Therefore, this was a quite suitable place for my music video of the street part. Actually, my ideal location was a street which was very busy with stores, cars and shops. However, the ideal location was too busy since I filmed the street part in the afternoon about 5 o'clock, and I didn't bring my assistant with me. The only thing I can do was that found out another street not that busy but fitting with my storyboard. At last I chose this street as one of my locations.