Our shoot is pretty simple we aren’t going to be using the actual photos taken as we will be painting all the artwork and graphics. The photos taken are for reference when painting the hand and the face.
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After decoding a professional digipak, it was time to begin encoding our own digipak through the imagery used and overall design of the cover.
These are the ideas we came up with along with some analysis of our designs.
To prepare for my own Digipak, I decoded this professional digipak. It is important to analyse a real world example like this in order to pick apart the MES, conventions and design techniques used in order to appeal to the target audience. This has helped further my knowledge in design and layout for a conventional digipak within my chosen genre.
The reason for making this look book is so that we could analyze common themes among different bands in the genres branding and image. To do this we gathered tour posters, album covers, and other promotional material from a handful of bands and then analyzed them individually to pick out key themes and similarities. Many of the tour posters are illustrative based and use big bold type faces to grab attention. The use of colour is also important to take note of as, although the colours are vibrant and bright, there tends to be only two or three colours used. This was a useful task for us as it gave us an idea of what our digipak will look like in order to appeal to our audience and communicate ideologies.
For our Digipak, we want to follow the common theme of a more illustrative based look with a limited but vibrant colour pallet. This will provide a familiar look for the audience but refreshing in the sense that it’s an original idea.
After finishing up with the music video, we had to start thinking about how our band will be marketed and viewed by the public. These slides explore aspects such as target audience, unique selling point, call to action, and our mission statement. By writing up our ideas and coming up with an idea of how our band is to be presented, we are able to use this with designing our Digipak and social media page in order to tailor to our audience.
From this feedback and other feedback, it is clear that the only thing that we are really missing now is close up shots. We did have a shoot planned specifically to get close up shots but that has had to be postponed. We still plan to do this however as close up shots, specifically of the singer, are an important convention for our genre. It is essential for conveying the star image to the audience through the facial expressions of the singer and portraying emotion.
These improvements outlined above will be made to change the overall look of the video. We want the video to look follow conventions and look grungy and rough, hence the feeback from specsavers telling us how to add grain and motion effects to the video.
Me and Max analyzed this video from a previous year to see what they did well and set some targets for our own video. I picked this video as the performance section is of a band and it has a similar narrative structure.
The quick pace of edit in this music video works well for the genre. There is also a good use of visual effects throughout the video which are well placed within the edit to work well with the structure of the song. There is also a subtle but effective colour grade over the whole video. The range of shot lengths and angles is also done well with plenty of close ups on the band. The mise en scene for this video, costume and props in particular, is strong. The bands look follows genre conventions well and shows clear star image.
The main goal of the narrative shoot, besides the actual filming it’s self, was to ensure that, by utilizing mise en scene and camera, the character was portrayed correctly. We made sure to use canted angles and jump shots to show the character as imperfect and troubled. We had Max’s character in dark and baggy clothes to reflect his mood.
Our second shoot involved gathering all the footage we needed to display the narrative. This was a much more efficient process when compared to the performance shoot. This is due to having a much clearer vision and plan of what we needed to film. We had a story board which acted as a base of the shots we needed. We looked at the story board a wrote down all the key shots and what angles were to be used and also went and added some extra notes of footage to get to potentially use in-between the key shots if we needed.
Throughout the filming process, I directed Max to help get the best performance possible to help clearly display the narrative. This often involved me telling him to try and put more exaggeration into the emotions he was meant to portray. For example, in any shots where he was standing or walking about, I told him to slouch his shoulders forward and to be loose and relaxed with his movements. This helped to show his character in a state of poor mental health and low motivation.
However, looking back at the footage once we we back in school we realised that a large amount of the footage was out of focus which meant we had to shoot again during our summer holidays. We followed the same process as before but just had to make sure that the camera was all set up correctly for each shot. We also made a small costume change as we thought that having Max wear black clothes fits better with the image we were trying to portray.
