FINISHED PRODUCT

THE POSTER

FINISHED PRODUCT OF THE DIGIPACK

TASK 1: In what ways do your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Camera

CHALLENGES- As he writes on the perspect we wanted to create the feeling for the audience, as if he was writing directly on the camera. There are no performance elements, neither does it contribute to a narrative.
At the beginning of our music video we have him out of focuse and the audience sees the title. As we have a focus pull to him singing, the audience is introduced to the title of the song, whoch is not typical for a music video. It challenges conventions of other music videos and artists, seen that Peter & The Wolf cares more about his ideas and music, istead of showing off in front of an audience and presenting as much as they can.

Style

CHALLENGES – because these shots are more filmic and different than a usual music video. There are no special effects, narrative or performance, as he is only shown walking up the stairs.

Seen that we wanted our music video to follow the genre, which is Indie, we experimented more with our shots. We used close ups and other shots on his hands, feet and over all on his movement, which we thought is more important to us. In other music videos, they probably sell on looks and performance in the video, which we didn't focus on, and therefore I think it challenged the convention.

Dancing

DEVELOPS – dancers are often used in music videos. The different to our music video is, that they normally are rather commercial dancers that dance for or together with the artist and therefore the song is dancy. In our video our ballerina is part of the story. This is why we neither challenge nor use this convention but we develop the dancer idea and put it into a completely different content and music genre.
In the music video of Beyonce, "Love On Top", she has several men as background dancers, which immediately show, that it sells to a specific RnB/girls audience. The dance style is rather sexy and up to beat and contrasts our sophisticated ballerina, which is a more artistic element in our music video and shows the seriousness of it.

Performance a)

DEVELOPS – it develops the convention, as we see the artist perform but instead of acting it he just stands still against the wall and doesn’t even look into a camera. This specific shot conveys to our genre. The artist doesn't sing into the camera and his audience, instead he stands still, leaning against a wall and concentrating on the lyrics and not on his looks or performance. This might contrast Katy Perry's music video to California Girls, where she uses a lot of props and people to sell it to her audience. She also sings to the camera, which Peter & The Wolf doesn't do, because we keep it simple.

Performance b)

USES – it uses the convention as we show the artist playing his instrument, or rather see close ups of his hands playing which is commonly used in music videos that are by brands or artists that play their music themselves. We did this in order that the audience sees the connection/link between the artist and his love for music.

The performance is our key convention. Just that at some point in the video it is playing itself, which seems rather sophisticated. We took a normal element and subverted it.

Special effects

USES -  it uses the convention especially nowadays as the technology gets better and better and more artists use CGI in their videos to add value and the level of interest , or enhance the look of the video. We used simple and not many special effects. Not to go with today's technology, but I think it goes with our theme and genre.

2 PANELs OF DIGIPAK

-         The font CHALLENGES convetions of almbum cover styles because we kept it really realistic by using the actual artist’s writing and scribbling to underline the genre of Peter & The Wolf, which is Indie. This specific font makes our digipak more realistic and personal.

-          We also use the same background wallpaper as in the video ionstead of coming up with a whole new fancy design, which creates a link between the artist in the video and the artist on the cover.

-         Also, we don’t use and photos except for one Polaroid which CHALLENGES the convention of using new technology to edit photos. It is kept very simple and has no photoshop changes.

The Poster

-         Simple, no photoshoped changes made.

-          Using a known photo from the music video we remind the audience of it and maybe encourage customers to create a style or unique selling point.

-          It also refers back to the genre of the music, which is Indie.

-          Eg her we can see how RnB/HipHop uses “sex sells” to promote their music.

How is the artist represented as a person?

 He stares melancholy out of the window into the wide world. Which refers to his genre.

Whereas “The Prodigy” stare with an aggressive expression right into the camera/audience conveying the feel that the band and their music is though and loud and intrusive. Also they want to take over the world with their music, whereas Peter just cares about his music because it makes him happier and it’s not about marketing himself. (This is just seen as his reputuition as an artist, obviously he wants his music to sell good.)

EVALUATION TASK 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts ?

The script:


• Richard Dyer’s theory of star image
• What’s his star image?
• How is his this sold through video, digipak and poster?
• How do they work together?

Richard Dyer&Star image
Richard Dyer is an English academic who specialises in cinema and analysing the extraordinary world of ‘stars’ in the entertainment industry. The term star refers to artists who live their life publicly due to their work and are therefore seen as almost superficial creatures. He argues: ‘Stars are commodities produced and consumed on the strength of their meanings’ making the point that the artists’ image needs to be well established which is done through the marketing campaign around the music. The star images consist of particular characteristics of the artists, for example rebellious/anti-authoritarian, plus their looks and their music genre. Sometimes, the background of the artist is very important as it can contribute to the image, giving reason for certain behaviours. A pop-star is different to a performer, Dyer claims, as a star is promoted to this status by management and has an identity or persona which is not restricted solely to their musicianship.
A star is constructed out of 2 paradoxes, Dyer says. Number one is the star has to be simultanously ordinary and extraordinary, so that fans can look up to them and adore them but also relate to them as human beings. Paradox number two says that the star has to be absent and present at the same time, the fans should feel close to them, have posters on the wall and watch interviews, but also know in the back of their mind that they would never get to know the star they admire. This is how the star image works but it is of course different applied depending on what kind of artist is dealt with.

Identify the artist & image/3 key qualities of image
Peter & The Wolf is an indie artist and therefore I would describe the constituent features of his star image as creative/talented, sophisticated, intelligent and original. Because of the importance of creating a star image we created a campaign for Peter & The Wolf to sell both his music and image. This includes a music video alongside the new single, a digipak of the new album and a poster to promote the album release.
These three products promote the star in different ways each but overrall work together.

Identify our target audience
The audience we target with our artist is aged between 17 and 35 years, male and female, and a more intellectual and middle-classed audience. As it’s a calm and easy music sung by an unintrusive singer it will appeal to an group of people that might be occupied with a job and listen to calming background music, or to younger people that are rather individual and don’t like following the mainstream music.



How are these qualities shown?
Our main product is a music video which is supposed to promote the song by creating a visual. This encourages repeated consumption and brings it to the grand advertising platform, television. Our aim was to make a music video that was original and different. It is artier and more melancholic than most videos which tend to be very fast paced and colorful. We focused on strong, well composed visuals, such as the shot when the artist stands behind the perspex covered in scribbles and the stark contrast between the ballerina in the white room and the color of her lips and mask. These visuals aim to create a special atmosphere and give the music video an intense, serious and artistic mood that provokes emotions and thoughts in the viewer. We made these creative decisions to emphasize Peter’s own image and style, which is a calm, passionate musician who seems not to care about the world. The muted colors, naturalistic lighting and a realistic environment promote the idea that Peter might be slightly mad or depressed. The focus is only on Peter which reinforces that he is a solo artist.

The digipak was created with the intention of maintaining the same style as the music video. We did this in order to construct a unique selling point and a face of the whole campaign as he is a new artist. For example, we used the artist’s hand writing for the font of the cd cover and inside layout just like we used his scribbling in the music video as an element in the music video. This makes the digipak more personal and individual. We also used the red wallpaper that was seen in the video as part of the layout in the album which contributes to our aim to create the face of the campaign. All the elements of the digipak help to build and sell the artist’s star image.

The poster’s purpose is to advertise the artist, in particular his new album that includes the music video song. The photo is chosen from a shot we took on set and strongly conveys the mood of the music video as well as reinforcing Peter’s image and personality of being sophisticated, serious and deep.

All of these different media products work together to construct the image of Peter & The Wolf by creating a face and look for the artist which is substantial and stays in consumers heads. As his music is not mainstream, the target audience is a niche audience that is already interested in indie music. All of these produced media are made in order to promote and sell his music which is the final goal!

Comparison with real artists
In terms of image we took some inspiration from artists such as Bright Eyes and Patrick Wolf, who are independent alternative musicians that have similar personalities and star image to our artist Peter and the Wolf. Those musicians are not appealing for a wider audience.
We got inspired by music videos from Birdy’s cover version of Skinny Love and Patrick Wolf’s ‘House’ for our location shots. The main inspiration for our studio shots came from Bright Eyes video ‘Lucky Easy Free’ which we interpreted into our concept

EVALUATION TASK #3

Helena Lageder - Evaluation Task 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback? on Prezi

EVALUATION TASK 4 : How did you use new media technologies uin the construction and research, planning and evaluating stages?

The script:

In our music video we shot on two locations, one of them, and the first one you will see was shot in the studio.
The studio setting of our music video was filmed in a warmly lit environment, and when we got around to editing the video we realised that we didn’t like how orange the footage had come out. In order to change this we used a programme called ‘Color’ to pull down the amount of reds in the footage leaving it with the cool blue colouring. This gives a similar atmosphere to the other examples of indie films we had watched, from artists like Bright Eyes and Patrick Wolf that we looked at on online sources such as YouTube, MySPace, google, soundcloud, iTunes and official websites to make research into the indie music industry to collect inspiration and knowledge about existing artists and especially their music videos which contributed to some stylistic ideas of our video.
For most shots in the studio we used a Sony F3 camera with a prime lens as it is very useful for so called beauty shots (For smooth skin etc.). For the focus pulls we had to change the lens as you cannot zoom with it.

When changing our location to the house we noticed that the lighting was quite warm again and therefore we put some blue tones on top of the lights to make the images look colder. Again we used the Sony F3 camera, because of its clarity and amount of details when having a close ups. When shooting the ballerina we took the Sony NX5 camera, which does not have the same quality like the Sony F3 one but it was useful for us because we were shooting two scenes at a time in order to get more material done in less time. So while one part of our group was shooting Peter, the other group was shooting the ballerina dance sequence. This time we did not have the equipment of a CD player so that we had to use our phones in order to make use of a playback.

For the special effects when bringing the flowers back to life we used After Effects in Final Cut Pro which allowed us to cut out Peter and arrange the background so that it the fading into the live flowers look ‘natural’ to us. We put everything back in place and created a change that look ‘right’ for our eyes. In order to lead the viewers look we made use of a zoom as well. This process is called Masking.
After this scene we had another bit where we made use of after effects. That was when he is finding the Polaroid picture between the books which is then starting to move. In order to create the impression of a moving image we had to do a similar thing to the still image in After Effects. We used an empty Polaroid so that we were able to cut out the black bit and place the video clip into the empty frame.
Even though Peter tried to be still, his hand was still moving a bit, therefore we had to freeze the image (his hand) and only have the inserted clip moving. The interest of the audience will be focused on the clip so that they may not notice the fact that we froze the other image. Over all we had to images in one.

Looking at the very last bit of our video you might notice that we had to slow him down a bit when walking out of the door. Again we did that with the help of Final Cut Pro. (Slowmotion)
Still of digipak:
We wanted to repeat the theme of having a Polaroid in the Digi pack, because we thought it could be one of his trademarks that is going to be repeated throughout his image. Therefore we took a photograph of him wearing a wolf hat and change the colours in Photoshop so that it had a vintage style to it. After having turned the photograph into an old fashioned picture we inserted the image into a digital Polaroid frame. On the front cover we decided to leave it with a Blanc front cover with nothing on it but the Polaroid and on the back we did the same thing but with the back of a Polaroid. On the back we had written the tracks of the CD in his handwriting. The inside included lots of his personal writings that were thanking the people that supported him. In order to make it personal we had him coming in again and he had to write some the track list and the tank you … list. After he had written all that we scanned it into the computer so that we were able to work on it digitally and insert all the letters etc. into the Digi pack. On the other side of the cover, as well as on the CD itself we put in the wallpaper of the house setting. We took a picture with a Canon camera beforehand and then we did some colour changes as well in order to create this vintage look. In this case we made use of Lightroom which helped to change and contrast Hue and Saturation as well as the colour settings.

Show video diary:
On the set, we also made a short video diary t5o show some behind the scenes footage. We filmed this with an iPhone 4S and cut it on iMovie on a Mac.

Onto blog
• Pre-production: When we discovered…
• Onlining/offlining process
• Evaluation process and used technologies