Digipak // fifth draft

Changes I have made:

I haven't made many changes her, except for the favourite place panel. Now, I have placed it within a polaroid, to fit with the rest of the digipak. It also makes it look more exiting and less plain. I had to also place and image behind it to, so decided to use the old background from the CD panel as I did like it. Everything else remains the same

Problems I now faced:

Again, I'm still very unsure of the favourite place panel, and still considering changing it.

Digipak // fourth draft

Changes I have made:

I have now moved the "Story of The Rabbit" panel and placed it on the CD panel. It will be revealed once the customer removes the CD, which I feel is in a better place than before as it will definitely catch their attention, and obviously they will remove the CD to listen to it. Also, I had to fill this space, so I decided to include a picture of Scott Garcia's favourite location in London, to make it feel more personal and allow the fans an insight to part of his life. The image on the CD panel has also changed, I feel this new is much stronger than the previous selection and connects well with the favourite place panel.

Problems I now faced:

I'm very unsure on the favourite place panel, it seems very plain compared to the rest of the digipak, so I may have to change it.

Digipak // third draft

Changes I have made:

After much deliberation, I decided to remove the competition from the six panels. The reason for this, is due to the fact that the competition won't last forever but the digipak will. This lead me to decided to remove the competition panel, and instead have it as a slide out sheet of paper, thus not removing on the digipak and the buyer will have the choice of keeping it or throwing it away. Another change I have done is moving the "Story of the Rabbit" panel to the top row, to make room for an image of Scott Garcia. The main change here is having a new image of Scott Garcia on the bottom row of the digipak. The idea here is to see the front cover, open up and see Scott Garcia as if he is in the mask, then see the back of the mask. I thought this would be a cool concept, and more importantly, try and destroy the assumptions of Scott Garcia being the rabbit. The story also does this, as it clearly explains what the rabbit is and why it is used by Garcia.

Problems I now faced:

As of yet, there are no problems that I have faced. I will be showing this digipak to various people who fit my target audience and receive a response from them. Then, I will make necessary changes.

Digipak // second draft

Changes from the first draft:

Now, I have removed Scott Garcia's face from the front cover and now it just has the rabbit head. I have decided that it would be best to remove him from the front cover, as it makes him stand out far better, and the images are clearer and more prominent. I have also reduced the sizing of the logo and album name on the spine, making it less dramatic and ultimately making it cleaner. 

Problems I now face:

With these changes come some problems. For example, Scott Garcia hardly features on the album cover, and now is dominated by the rabbit. This will confuse the potential buyer, thinking the rabbit is the artist. I feel like more work needs to be done here, and I will need to work out a suitable way to have the front cover as is now, and have Scott Garcia featuring more within this digipak.

Digipak // first draft

This is the first draft for my six panel digipak. I decided to include the story of the rabbit head mask, and why it is linked towards Scott Garcia. This is to give the fans a better insight into Scott Garcia's life, and also to try and remove the confusion of the rabbit being the artist and not Scott, as I was advised by my teacher that people may think the rabbit is the artist.

When showing this too my teacher, I received positive feedback, with some minor changes. I was advised to remove Scott Garcia from the front cover, and just have the rabbit, as dance music genre artists tend to not feature on the front cover. It should be noted that in our audience research, people did say appearance is important, thus why adding Garcia onto the album, but with the rabbit head faded in the background to not make it heavily focused on his looks. I'm concerned that if I do remove Garcia from the front cover, people will believe the rabbit is the artist, so I have not fully decided whether to remove him or not. If I am to remove him, I will place more images of him inside the digipak.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the first draft and its outcome. I feel like this is a good step in the right direction.

Tutorial

Animatic // video

The pitch // video

The pitch // feedback

We received feedback on our pitch. The feedback was pretty positive, with people saying they like the logo, name, music video idea, genre and various other elements.

Things that need developing:

The main feedback we received about developing is the location of a club. We are going to film the outside of a club, then ask the drama department when they have free rooms, uses their lighting and make it look like a club scene. Also, people have said that they feel the target audience needs to be expanded up to 30 years old. We have took this into consideration, and have decided to do so as we realised they do still go clubbing and they would be hearing this type of music.

Overall, we were very impressed with the feedback we received, as it shows that we are on the correct track and shows that our idea is so far successful.

Production log // November

Above is what I intend to do throughout November 2013. Most of it concerns blogging, digipak and music video editing. I hope to have the second draft of my digipak done by the 18th, and start to plan the next music video shooting in an attempt to start filming the next part in December. 

Digipak poster

Here is my analysis of posters advertising the albums, featuring Rudimental - Home, David Guetta - Nothing But The Beat and Rihanna - Loud. Both Rudimental and David Guetta are of the same genre of our artist Scott Garcia, but for the third, Rihanna, I decided to look outside of the dance genre to get an idea of what others do for these posters, which may give my group a better idea on how to make our own when we come to do it.

Planning the first shooting

Since we will be filming on the 30th of October, Kate cleverly decided to create a mind map to use as a plan for the shoot. She included everything we need, which we can use as a check-list before we set off to film, and make sure we have everything we need to avoid a re-shooting. Below is the mind map.

Journal #6 // first shooting

We decided to utilise our free time, and begin to shoot our music video. We wanted to get the hardest part out of the way, which is filming up London, so we can focus our attention on other tasks and not worry about it any longer. Before we set off, we made sure we had our storyboarding sheets, all the necessary equipment and costumes as we don't want to have to re-shoot anything that involves going up London. We also had to make sure we knew which locations we had to go, and make sure it would be okay to film there.

We managed to film everything we needed to get, which is a success. On the other hand, we did experience some difficulties. We wanted a location with people around so we can get some reactions for out video, yet at times, since it is London, it became too busy and we had to wait for the crowd to go down otherwise they would walk in front of the camera and ruin the shot. After a while people did notice what was going on and avoided doing so. A good thing to come out of the busy crowds was that it gave us more reactions to film for our music videos, with some people even recording Kate dancing in the rabbit head, which we felt would be very good for a music video. We wanted to have real reactions from a genuine public, and did get permission from the shots we did film to use in our music video. We were very careful with the shots we did take, doing them multiple times as we really don't want to trek back to London for re-shoots.

Here are some exclusive music video shots from the day:

Journal #5 // outfit

In the dance genre, you tend to get very realistic narratives and themes. Taking this into consideration, we wanted our rabbit head character to be wearing a tracksuit. We want our character to be realistic (forgetting about the rabbit head) and have an urban edge to his appearance. Researching into other music videos, they tended to have characters donning tracksuits. Here is an example of what we would like the rabbit head guy to look like:

Journal #4 // storyboarding

Today we begun to storyboard our music video idea. Due to making the storyboard video for our pitch, we have a very strong idea of what will happen in each section, and what we actually want to happen in the video, thus making it a lot easier and quicker to produce this storyboard. While fleshing out the storyboard, we played the music at the same time, so we can get the timings correct, as the beat in a dance genre video is very vital.

Here is our storyboards:

Journal #3 // pitch

We pitched everything we have done so far for Scott Garcia. We discussed the appearance, song choice, our idea for the music video, record label and lots more in order to received feedback from the class and teacher, and to evaluate whether we are doing the right thing, and any changes that need to be made before we progress any further.

After the pitch, we asked the class their opinions on what we have achieved so far. We received good feedback from everyone, with some minor adjustments. Below are what they said about our pitch.

Survey responses

Click to enlarge

These answers show that those who answered were in our target audience, as we feared that if they weren't we wouldn't be able to include their responses. It is important to note that, as a surprise to us, the responses showed that appearance is important for an artist, so I have decided to look a little more into my digipak and see how I can make this work for me. Dance music was the most popular genre along with pop, which is a very pleasing result.








To the left shows how the audience reacted to the name "Scott Garcia". The responses were positive, saying how the liked the name and it fitted well with the dance genre. This is good news to us, and we had some difficulty selecting the artists name, and opted to us a random name generator due to the fact that we just couldn't decide, and by the audience responding in a positive way is a huge sigh of relief.








We also asked people to respond to our brief for our artist. Again, we received positive feedback, with someone saying "he sounds like someone I would listen to" and "fits the dance genre" and various other good comments on our brief.











Here we asked peoples opinion of the look we have chosen for Scott Garcia. We were very pleased with the responses, as we wanted Scott Garcia too come across as smart but have a sense of mystery behind him. One person said "Looks very sophisticated and mysterious" which is exactly what we wanted. Also, someone said "Nice but wouldn't associate it with dance genre" which we took into consideration, but have dismissed as everyone else has agreed.







Finally, we asked the audiences response on the song choice "Warrior's Dance by The Prodigy". The responses were again positive, some saying "good choice", "catchy", "such a tune" and various other praising comments. We thought people would like this song choice as much as we do, and glad that our assumption was correct.






To summarise, as you can see the audience have reacted in a very positive way. This shows that we are most certainly on the right pathway, and that our ideas for our artist work with the genre we have selected. With that comment on the appearance not working with the dance genre, we already decided that we wanted to break the mould of the dance genre, and offer the public something new and not conventional, so we have justified why we won't be taking their comment into account.

Journal #2 // front and back cover

Today, I decided to start taking pictures for the front and back cover of my digipak. My idea is to blend Scott Garcia with the rabbit, so when you view the digipak you can see both Scott Garcia's face and the rabbit head mask. I will do this by lowering the transparency on the images with photoshop. These images will also be used on the rest of my groups digipaks, but they won't be using them on the front cover, instead they will appear on the collage that will be featuring inside the digipak.

We also decided to get some shots of the rabbit mask to use for the competition. The competition will feature inside the digipak, giving the buyers a chance to win the rabbit head mask used in Scott Garcia's video. The use of this is to engage the audience, and giving them more of a reason to purchase this album, as they need to get the unique code within to enter online.

Audience survey

We decided to conduct audience research on our artist before continuing further. We sat down as a group, and planned what questions we would like, prioritising which would get the best possible answers. Above shows the types of questions we asked.

Logo selection

The image above shows the logos we liked for our artist Scott Garcia. Our goal was to find a logo that is simplistic, with a slight dance edge as we looked into other artists and they had a similar goal to this.

The first logo seemed far too simplistic, and didn't have the edge we wanted, and by receiving no votes from our audience, proved that we shouldn't use this logo. The same for the second logo also.

The one that received the most votes was the one we liked the best. We felt this emulated our goal the best, with the slightly weird styling of the 'A', and adding the red gave us that slight dance edge we wanted. The font itself is very simplistic and bold, which would definitely stand out on an album, and be easy to read and recognise.

As a group, we did like the fourth logo, it had that edge styling we wanted, but we thought it wasn't simplistic enough, and we thought the 'S' was too strange, and we felt that this would be harder to comprehend than the third logo, due to obscure lettering.

 For the fifth logo, we said that this was our second favourite, if the third was too fail we would select this one. It had that simple design, with minimal but effective twists too the lettering making it stand out more, and far easier to read than the fourth one, which would be important when someone is buying it in a shop as they need to be able to recognise whose album it is.

Finally, the sixth logo received the second highest votes on the poll. I was surprised by this, as this was one of my least favourite logos. I felt it just didn't work with the image we are trying to create for Scott Garcia, and I just didn't like it.

Music video // ideas

Our group decided to make a video to assist us in describing our ideas for our music video, almost like a storyboard in a video format. The song choice "Warrior's Dance" plays in the background.

Description:

Our video will begin with our character with a rabbit head. He is walking through in a busy street with his boom box, places it down then begins to dancing. Dancing is his dream, and he just wants to be noticed, but as he starts, he attracts the wrong kind of attention Unaware of the disgust from the public because he is a rabbit, he just carries on dancing. He begins to notice that they are not impressed by him, and they start throwing things at him. The rabbit gets upset, so he runs away. He decides to be normal, he should get a job. He begins his job hunt, and comes across a suitable role. He goes to the interview, where he is turned away for being a rabbit - no rabbit signs are placed around the room. The rabbit has had enough of this discrimination and chucks the table over in the room, where the interviewer calls for security who chase him out the building. He is then running home again, the stress has became too much and he begins to cry. He stumbles across a leaflet advertising this new nightclub, which he wants to go to as everyone dances there. He arrives at the club, knowing he probably won't get in, so pushes his way into the club trying to hide his rabbit face. He feels great and in his element when he is in the club, as he is surrounded by dancing people. He soon forgets about his rabbit head, but others don't let this slide by. They start chanting and want him out, as they too don't like rabbits. He is oblivious too this, and continues his dancing. As he makes his way around the club, he finds a female rabbit head, the first he has seen in a long time, and they fall in love.