Our Final Video

Alterations made along the way

The finished edit of our video, differed in a few ways to the initial plans that we had. The biggest change was that we had to rearrange our storyboard in a few areas and leave out the alleyway sequence. We could not film this intended sequence due to lighting issues, the light in the alleyway was too dark and could not be seen very clearly, even when we tried to lighten up the shots by using the light effect on Final Cut Express. It was also raining on the only day we could film and therefore this ruined the continuity of our overall video. If we had included the sequence, it would have looked clearly too edited and would have been obviously different from our other shots, this would confuse our audience and we decided that it would be best not to include this sequence.
We also decided to change the image we initially thought of putting behind the green screen. The first thought was to have a sort of concert ending, with a stage background and try to create a crowd supporting the band, this would highlight their success. However, we could not think of a very successful way to represent the intended 'crowd' and so, in order to highlight the more humorous side of our video, we decided to include pictures of famous landmarks from different countries such as the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. This gave a light hearted feel to our video, that we felt the audience would have appreciated. We also used these images as a way of showing that the band are now very successful worldwide and have truly picked themselves up from the rut that they were making of their life and therefore this emphasises the lyrics and overall theme of our video.
These changes, although not intended, have proved to be successful, although we feel that the alleyway sequence would have created a more diverse video, having introduced a new setting, but the shots were not up to the standard that we had hoped and so could not be used in our video.

Ancillary Products- Magazine Advert

After researching several different magazine adverts, we came across what seemed to be a common formula. The picture was either the album cover or a very basic picture showing the artist or reflecting a theme. We decided to carry on these conventions and went with the idea of reflecting the 'No Identity' theme. Having previously created the digipack, we were fresh with ideas and decided, in order to relate both the digipack and magazine advert together, we should use a picture that we had used in the album as the main basis for our advert. We did not want to re-use our album cover because we felt this would show no creativity within the band. The banana would have provided a rather bland advert which, although would have linked to the band, would not have conveyed the information that we wanted. So it was decided, by a process of elimination that we would used the blurred out picture as our starting point for the advert. Although we were not pleased with the overall look of this picture, the advert itself seems to draw away attention from the quality of the picture.

We started with the picture in front of us on Adobe Photoshop. We played around with several different tools and exploited the picture by changing the effects, experimenting with 'Charcoal' and 'Brushed' but we decided that it would be best to stick to the simple original format that the picture was in as it had previously been edited for our CD and we felt that over-editing would ruin our picture and the simplicity we were hoping to give off. We came across an aspect of difficulty when it came to trying to add text. After serious amounts of cropping and then pasting into many different softwares such as Fireworks, Photoshop and Preview, we eventually managed to get rid of the white box that appeared behind out text in every picture. We used a variety of different fonts for our advert to show diversity and each new font conveyed new information about the album.

Targeting our specific audience came through the mention of iTunes. We know that most people nowadays use iTunes to download their music and so we knew that if we mentioned this aspect, we would attract most members of our 15-25 year old target audience. Having shown the Apple logo, we also felt that we should target those who still buy physical albums and so also included the HMV logo. This shows where the album is available to the audience as they will all recognise these well known logos. Another way of showing how modern the band are, was the inclusion of a BBM barcode, where those with a smartphone, specifically a Blackberry, can scan the barcode and will then receive information of the band. We also made a reference to Twitter in our advert, as we know how this way of socialising is becoming more and more popular with many celebrities gaining 1 million followers. So this mention of Twitter is intended to bring publicity to the band by getting as many followers as they can so they can tell people more about their music.

As previously stated, we intend for our advert to be published in 'The Fly', however, most adverts also appear in more social magazines such as Heat, OK and Hello. However, if our advert was published in these magazines, they would not be targeting our specific audience and so we feel that The Fly or NME would be perfect magazines to advertise our album as they will appeal and attract our target audience of 15-25 year old males.

Our magazine advert, we feel, is very successful. It tells the audience the essential things they need to know, tells them where they can download and buy the album, what the album looks like, what the main song in the album is called and also how they can interact with the band itself through their website and Twitter.

Ancillary Products- Digipack

The inspiration behind the message of our digipack came as soon as we decided that the album should be called 'No Identity', this emphasises the idea that in the song, the boy did not have an idea of who he was at the beginning. On that basis we came up with several different ideas that we felt could represent this theme.

Idea 1
We initially came up with an idea that would show a picture of the main character, duplicated 4 times. However, each person would be digitally edited to be a different colour. This would show the confusion which has lead to the boy not knowing who he is and overall, not knowing his identity. After making the sample however, we felt that this was not showing off our full knowledge of the software, Adobe Photoshop, that we were using. Adjusting each individual colour using the tint and saturation effects gave us many different options of how to represent each picture.After much deliberation we found that these colours were the best outcome we would get.

We did not feel that this idea had been represented in the way that we had first hoped, and despite multiple efforts to adjust the pictures, this was proving to be a time consuing task and we decided it would be best to think of other ideas.

Idea 2

The next plan we came up with, again reflected the 'No Identity' theme, but in a comical 'Where's Wally?' type way. We again used Photoshop, however also had help from Adobe Fireworks, and using the eraser tool, cut round a picture of the back of George's head. We multiplied this numerous times and pasted each head into a row on the screen, eventually filling the canvas. Before we had even put the one face of George we were going to put on, in order to show that out there he could find his identity, we had decided that this picture was not what we had thought it was going to turn out like. The hair proved to be a big impact and seemed to take over the whole picture and therefore missing the point of the picture. We did not think this was a very successful idea and this showed that you have to try everything out first before you settle on specific ideas because, on paper they may look clever, but after actually putting the picture together, it may not turn out like you hoped.

Idea 3

As they say '3' is the lucky number, and as it turned out, our third idea was deffinately the most effective and we chose this to be our main album cover. Thinking still along the theme of 'No Identity' we came across the idea of silhouettes. A silhouette shows the outline and shape of a persons body, but not their face. So along these lines, we pasted a picture of George onto paint and used the 'Brush' tool to black out his face, arms and legs, but leaving his white printed t-shirt. We decided to leave this because this shows the band's signature style and emphasises a convention of the indie genre, printed t-shirts. After making one silhouette we decided to make another, but of George in a different pose. We did this three times and evetually after using Photoshop, Fireworks and experimenting with a new software called PhotoPlus X2, managed to organise our pictures showing varying poses that George was standing in. These silhouettes, together created an effective background and we changed the size of some in order to vary this more. After choosing the 5 most successful pictures, we decided to have one normal picture of George, as to not confuse the audience and this will make him recognisable to those who had only seen the video. We rotated one picture of him in order to create a 'back to back' effect and we found that this also reflected the humrous aspect of our video. When choosing the font, we went on Google and came across a website called http://www.1001freefonts.com/. This website gave us a range of fonts to experiment with and in the end we chose a font called 'Ashcan' as we felt this was rather youthful looking, optimistic but also jagged. For the title, 'No Identity', we chose a font called 'Carbon Type'- which is very similar to the font of a typewriter. We used this as this shows an authoritative yet traditional idea.

After we had found the fonts, the last thing to add was the parental advisory sign and also our record label, Cherrytree records, symbol. After finishing this we had completed our album cover, which we felt was a huge success and was the most interesting and creative idea out of all the previous options. The silhouettes help to emphasise the album title and the banana on the t-shirt also adds a humorous aspect to the whole product. We felt that the pictures could have used a little more editing and could have been better quality, but the overal final outcome was successful.

Inside the Album
The rest of the album, of course, was based around the 'No Identity' theme and so each picture reflects either an aspect of this, or an aspect associated with the band. The inside left picture, as typical to most CD conventions, has a thank you note to the fans but is also quite humorous because the image is of the banana that is shown on George's t-shirt throughout the video and also runs as an occurring theme through the digipack and magazine advert. As with several artists, the obvious being Justin Bieber and his purple hoodie, clothing can often represent the band and we felt that this banana could show as a good way of other texts making intertextual links to our band. So we emphasised this banana as much as possible in order to make it memorable inside the audiences heads and therefore they would associate banana clothing with our band.

The image behind the CD shows George, however, his face has been blurred out, which helps to emphasise the 'No Identity' theme. We blurred his face using iPhoto and the 'Retouch' tool which tries to take out any blemishes in a photo. Normally you would use this tool very sparsly, but in order to make the whole face blurred, we had to use the tool multiple times to make the whole face blurred. Although initially this seemed to be quite successful, we found it hard to merge the skin and hair colours together as this created a very dark splodge on the side of his face. To fix this, we had to edit the blurred version and make it slightly softer by increasing the saturation and shadowing. Again we used iPhoto to do this and it made the picture softer, however, we are not that satisfied with it as the outline between the forehead and hair line is very obvious, and if we could change anything about our products, this would be one of the first things. 

The back of the CD, we decided to leave quite basic, similar to the back of Kate Nash and Ellie Goulding's albums, and this simplicity is a convention of the indie genre. Having kept a recurring theme of white throughout our album, it made sense to have a white background. The white could be interpreted in different ways. When searching for what the colour white could signify, we came across this website http://crystal-cure.com/white.html which, on the opening page, explains how white can signify a fresh new beginning, brings about mental clarity, purifies thoughts or actions and also clears obstacles away. All these are very relevant to our overall theme that you can always turn your life around no matter how bad it is getting. So this shows that the white is a real signifier of our meaning and although each audience member will decode their own meaning, the preferred encoded reading from us, the producers is that it reflects a new, fresh beginning. We decided to re-use the font that we had used for our front cover and so went back to http://www.1001freefonts.com/ and again chose 'Ashcan'. In order to comply with typical CD conventions, we included the copyright law and symbol along with the compact disc logo. To make the product complete, we used a barcode to make it look professional and realistic. 

Evaluation

Overall, we are very pleased with the outcome of our digipack. The themes are clearly represented as well as the band, whose identity, although ironic to our album name, is revealed throughout this album with every picture, colour and font having a significant meaning. If we could change one thing, we would try and make the blurred face picture slightly more professional looking, but we tried our best to find many ways of doing this and eventually could not find any so we had to settle with what we had. 

Original Digipack and Advert

We took inspiration from Example's 'Wont Go Quietly' album cover and decided to create 9 different panels of the main singer in varying costumes. Using photoshop we decided to exploit the light and use the glow effect in order to enhance the colours and brightness of each individual picture. We think that this is successful because it reflects the album by having a light-hearted, comedic vibe. It is eye catching due to the brightness of the green colour of the hat and also would appeal to our target audience of 15-25 year old males because of the way in which it is set out and also the name of our band itself, 'The Midnight Beauties'

Our digipack:

The front cover

Inside- left of CD

Behind the CD 

Back cover of the CD

Magazine Advert Research

Magazine Advert Research on Prezi

HMV Research - George

When looking round the HMV Store, we were set the task to of researching album covers of the genre that we had done for our music video ourselves which was indie bands(Alternative). The first album that I saw was Take That. The album had the band standing on telephone wires wire with a plain blue background, this stood out to me in many ways. The first way that i felt it was my favourite was the unusual image of the band grouped together standing on a telephone wire, this stood out to me straight away and is very eye-catching to buyers of cd's. Another