Category Archives: Component 3

Final Critical Reflection Essay

Standard
  • How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
  • How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions? 
  • How do your products represent social groups or issues? 
  • How do your products engage with the audience?

 

Branding is a coherent set of values that the audience will embrace and buy into. Throughout the three products I tried to do this by incorporating themes, representation, images and design that are unique across all three products to create a sense of a brand. These being the soft, warm and loving feel, but also showing the target audience to not be afraid of social norms. To create a successful brand, it needs a uniqueness that can be easily recognised by the brand’s target audience. The mission statement states the brand is ‘old school with a modern twist’. This implies that the intended target audience is younger than the typical indie folk genre audience.

Although the intended target audience is younger than usual, I still wanted elements of the indie folk genre present. Nature and wilderness can be seen across all three products. For example, the use of trees on the digipak, a travel/nature highlight on the social media page and the locations of the music video. By including the nature aspect across all of the products, signifies the soft and warm feel of the brand, complimentary of De Saussure’s theory. This was represented within the music video with the natural environments such as the small woodland and pond.

Another way the products work together to create a brand is the brotherly bond between the band members. This symbolic code is present in all three products. For example, the coherence of the family-like bond is shown in the image on the digipak of the band members helping each other play the guitar. The personal aspect, such as going live, on the social media page and the general bond shown between them in the music video indicates the band has a family-like bond.

The authentic honesty of the brand is also present in the products. The band isn’t the typical ‘cool’ inspirations that a younger audience would look up to, however they are presented with an attitude of not caring how people view the band. For example, the costumes that the band wear in the music video and digipak are quite unconventional to the indie folk genre. The social media page shows the bands confidence in themselves as they share more personalised stories. The coherence of the authentic honestly through all of the products creates the uniqueness of the brand.

 

When researching indie folk music, we found that music videos in that genre didn’t have an equal split of performance and narrative in the video. However, they all had a very soft feel to them, with nature being a conventional location. We watched a music video by Mumford and Sons, ‘Hopeless Wanderer’ (2013) which showed us how the use of camera and editing, sound, narrative, performance and star image, also known as Laceys repertoire of elements, show the expectations of generic conventions of the indie folk genre in the music video.

One convention I wanted to include was the natural, rural like settings within the video. This convention was a key one I wanted to include as it really incorporates the indie folk feel. I was able to use this convention by having a shot of the whole band in a romantic pagoda. This created a similar feel that one shot in the Mumford and Sons video had, in a small field, trees in the background with a band member playing the piano.

The mumford and sons music video portrayed the band as a group of close friends that have a brotherly bond between them. I also wanted to embrace this convention as this can paint the band in a good light. It also displays the band on a more personal level for the audience. I tried to show this within the music video with the bands friendship and love towards each other.

A convention I challenged was the costumes the band wore. Typically indie folk music videos have a working class folk look. I wanted to present my star as more of a nerdy character. This adds the ‘pop’ genre element into my music video which is more attractive to our younger target audience.

 

Representation is a key convention to any brand. To represent our stars in the digipak we had to use a range of different colours, typefaces, poses and lighting to convey the generic conventions of the indie folk genre, but also using these things to challenge the conventions. Dyers theory of the paradox of a star represents the two sides of our star as old school but yet still attracting a young audience.

To represent the stars within the digipak, I wanted to create a sense of brotherhood between the band members. I did this by taking ‘natural’ images of the band members such as the one image of them helping each other with the guitar.

Playfulness was another characteristic of the band that I wanted to represent. To do this I decided to use a filmstrip to show a series of serious and fun images of the band. This creates a friendly manner of the band which is attractive to a younger audience, but also indicates that they are serious about their music.

I still wanted to include the generic conventions of the indie folk genre, nature being a common theme within this. To represent this I included a forest like background, behind the filmstrips. This made the album more generic to the genre

Another main idea I wanted to get across was the romantic side of the band. To represent this I used a silhouette of a lighthouse for the double page spread of the digipak. The lighthouse can be seen as a very passionate yet lonely place as reflected in the music video.

 

 

Engaging with the target audience is key to advertise and promote any social media page. One goal of a marketing campaign is AIDA (attract, interest, desire, action). A social media page is good for creating a community or fan base for a brand. It allows fans to interact and participate by liking, sharing and commenting on posts, Shirky’s theory on audience participation. This ensures the brand fulfils their uses and gratifications. This theory by Blumler and Katz explains four key elements to a successful and engaging product. Social interaction, personal identity, entertainment and information. A social media page can offer these by interactive stories, posts on feeds and the community that is created by all of this. Adding in all of these key elements ensures the brand keeps an engaged and active audience.

One way to keep an active audience is with a Q&A. By putting this element onto a story it allowed the audience to ask any question they wanted, that the band would then reply to. This invites the audience to participate with the brand and the fanbase. This interaction with the brand gives the audience a sense of belonging to a community which will keep them engaged for longer.

Other opportunities can arise to keep the target audience engaged. Another way I did this was by using a countdown to the new album release. Adding this to the page’s story daily gave something for the audience to watch out for e.g. information and gave a sense of anticipation for the audience, keeping them engaged. This provides elements of AIDA of gaining the audience’s interest and creating something for that interest. Timing is key in order for marketing to work effectively. Keeping on top of what is trending is not only attractive to the target audience but other audiences and therefore they are more likely to be engaged and interactive with the brand.

One last element that was essential to keep the audience engaged was sneak peaks. I wanted to ensure that there was something to enable the audience to interact with each other. This refers back to Blumler and Katz uses and gratifications of social interaction within the target audience. Small, regular updates will make the target audience want to check the page so they don’t miss out and then to engage and  share what they have found out with other fans.

 

 

 

Social Media Page Draft 2

Standard

Link to Social Media Page

https://www.instagram.com/_hopelessromanticsofficial_/

 

Teacher Screencastify

What Went Well;

  • We have added separate highlights to the page so it is easy for the audience to locate the necessary information for tours or other events happening with the band
  • Different types of merchandise has been added and is easy to access
  • Although it isn’t a necessity, there is a link to a website which adds more professionalism to the page

Targets for Improvement;

  • Link to the youtube channel in the bio hasn’t been linked to anything, therefore cannot open the youtube channel
  • On the website there are many sub pages that haven’t got any information on them, can be deleted as they aren’t important
  • For our collaboration with Timberland we will try and share an image with one of the band members actually wearing items from the brand, e.g. shoes or a jumper, to make it more realistic

Focus Forward

Overall our social media page has all the key conventions that are generic to our genre. We have added a range of images and videos, posted on the feed and the pages’ stories that keep our target audience active and entertained. We have been giving daily updates on our digipak release, therefore once it has been completed we will be able to post the finished front cover onto our feed.

Social Media Page Draft 1

Standard

Social Media Page Draft 1

Self Assessment 

Reflection

This is our first draft of our social media page. We decided to use Instagram as it has a much wider range of audiences who use it and as we are trying to attract a young audience this was the best method for advertisement. Posts include promotion of the new album, insight to some of the bands personal lives and other marketing techniques like merch and interviews.

Final DigiPak Draft

Standard

Self Assessment of Final Draft of the DigiPak

Reflection 

Most indie folk albums are very simple. We wanted to create a similar feel however also wanted to show off our editing skills using Adobe Photoshop and InDesign. We kept most of the generic conventions of a digipak; band/album name, song titles, image of band etc, of an indie folk genre but added elements from the pop genre to make our brand unique.

We kept our colour pallette simple as most indie folk albums don’t use a wide range of colours. The colours we chose were neutral colours with green to stand out in the background for the front and back cover. For the double page spread we decided to switch up the theme a bit and go for the lighthouse with the light shining onto the CD. This is still conventional for our genre as it creates the warm and loving feel of the brand which will attract the audience, referring to Barthes semic code.

The images were mostly of the band just being themselves, for example the image of the two band members helping each other with the guitar. This shows off Dyer’s theory of brand values and how they are portrayed through the meta-narrative.

DigiPak Draft 3

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DigiPak Draft 3

This is the third draft of our digipak in a CD case.

Peer Feedback

For peer feedback, we asked other students to guess the genre of our digipak. This was going to indicate if we had gotten the generic conventions of the indie folk genre correct and that it showed on the product. From the results it shows that we have successfully gotten the indie folk genre across. There are a couple of tally’s for ‘pop’ but this was slightly expected as we had incorporated some elements of the pop genre to our digipak.

Targets for Improvement

  • After printing we have found small mistakes that need to be fixed. For example, the green background for the front cover doesn’t cover the whole page, so we need to extend that. We also need to get rid of the white boxes around the two black hearts in the title.
  • We need to edit the images in the film strip. In most of them you can see some parts of the studio that we were in. We also need to colour correct all of them so they have similar lighting.
  • The fonts for the backcover need to be changed to a better font that is conventional to the indie folk genre
  • The lighthouse silhouette also needs to change. We need to add where the light is coming from on the lighthouse

Focus Forward

After printing we have found some small mistakes that can be easily fixed with some quick adjustments. The main thing to focus on are the images, After colour correcting and editing these the digipak will look much more conventional to our genre.

Timeline and Marketing Ideas

Standard

SandBox Marketing Research

Reflection

I chose to look at these sandbox research articles as the artists have a are similar way of promotion on a social media page that we also want to create. They all used social media as a way of promotion and engagement of their fans and also to gain a wider audience. By reading these it has given us some ideas of how we can use our social media page as a way of engaging with our target audience and promotion of our brand. These artists promoted their music in a way that will attract their group/ target audience which supports Gauntlett idea of collective identities. It’s suggested that everyone belongs to a certain group which is widely constructed by the media.

 

Timeline and Marketing Ideas

Reflection

This is our timeline to help us plan out our marketing ideas for our social media page. This is very helpful as it gives us a guidance of when we need to post things on our social media page leading up to the release of the album. The different coloured post-it notes indicated if the post needed to be an actual fixed post, a story or a story highlight. When creating this timeline we also had to think about our target audience and what would attract them to the page.

Digipak Draft 2

Standard

Digipak Draft 2

 

Teacher’s Screencastify

This is the screencastify that our teacher has done. To summarize, they layout and theme idea is good however the masthead needs to be played around with. Our main issue if the images. We need to go back into photoshop and crop and colour correct all of them.

To Improve:

Masthead – For the masthead we have decided to add in a heart as the dot of the ‘i’ or change the ‘o’ in ‘romantics’ to a heart. This adds the level of uniqueness we are missing.

Images – We need to go into photoshop and firstly crop the images so you can’t see any of the background, so it’s plain white. We will then discuss how to colour correct the images. Some ideas we already have is to make each individual photo a different colour all together or we will have different areas of an image in colour and the rest in black and white. This is so in the image we can make one particular thing stand out more than the rest.

CD – We need to add in a circle on our third page to mark out where the CD is going to go. This will then help us to line up the light from the lighthouse so it shines onto the CD.

Background – We have discussed changing the background colour so it’s not just plain white. We feel that the plain white could give off more of a pop genre whereas we want it to look indie folk. Therefore we may change the background altogether to something that is less ‘pop’. Nature is a key idea in indie folk so we will likely incorporate that into the background.

 

 

Digipak Draft 1

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Digipak Draft 1

This is our first rough draft of our digipak front and back cover.

Self Assessment:

The main thing we focused on in this first draft was the rough images and the main layout of the pages. The images still need to be worked on in photoshop but by putting some in, it has given us a more clear idea of what layout we are going for and how many images we will need for that. We have added in some text, however we will need to explore with different fonts and what best suits our brand/genre.

Targets for Improvement;

  • Edit the images in photoshop – we have discussed having a different style/colour for each image
  • Swap the ‘Sont Title’ text with actual songs that will be in the album
  • Add in the other key conventions needed e.g. copyright text, record label logos, album name
  • Add in more detail in the background so it’s not as plain and simple

 

Audience Interaction with a Social Media Page

Standard

Screencastify

Reflection

This is our group screencastify of a social media page. We needed to look at another band from the same genre, indie folk, so we had a better understanding of what conventions are needed when we come to make our own social media page. We found that most of the actual posts on this social media page are serious and are to do with concerts and music the band is creating/releasing. However there is the odd post where the audience is able to see the band members personalities come out.

Focus Forward

We now have a very good idea of what we need when we make our social media page for our band. We need an element of seriousness to the page but also snippets of the band members personalities to add a more personal feel to the page.

Social Media Page Terminology

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Social Media Page Terminology

Reflection

This slideshow has been an extremely helpful piece of research. It has allowed me to look deeper into the technical conventions of not just a social media page but one that is conventional to our genre, indie folk. Promotion is one of the most common occurrences within the platform. This is because the page is a marketing campaign for the brand and promote their brand wherever they can. This has made me release that when it comes to making our own social media page, promotion needs to be the number one thing that we focus on. From here we can create awareness of our brand and then start to connect with our intended target audience.