Contact sheets and shoot evaluation

Post shoot we had to choose a few shots from over 150. The working album title we have is “Melodrama” but we want to give the idea through our digpack that Annabelle Anduga, our star wants nothing to do with all of the drama going on.

The shots I especially like, are those we shot on a longer exposure so her body is in motion and the colours bleed into one another .

This is what I mean and is probably one of my favourites from the shoot. I particularly like how its sending the message “I’m not looking at you but I can see you”, and I feel as if it would definitely be used somewhere on our digipack.

Thinking ahead to future shoots, I feel as if we absolutely need to have our star dressed in more jewelry to reinforce the idea of her recent entry into great wealth and to further express our star has great freedom of expression through her fashion statements.

Pre-shoot preparation

Here is out signed risk assessment outlining any given risks to our studio shoot.

This is our production meeting agenda following today’s meeting 02/11/22. This is a key component to any shoot as it divides work allowing for less stress and anxiety on shoot day.

Sketching out mockups of our digipack

We thought we would use our previously touched on knowledge of photoshop for our digipack. We want to cut out three different shots of Annabelle Anduga and place them in the corners and centre of the digipack front page. This use of repetition reaffirms the sense that this is and independent indie synth pop artist – encoding that it is all her, the producing singing,  engineering – the lot.

The way this front page is linked to our genre, indie synth pop, is that the usual digipack covers of the genre like I researched are minimal. Not much is going on in terms of writing but what are usually noted as conventions  of the front cover consist of popping colour, bold makeup and outgoing costume. We need a recognisable star image, appropriate props to convey our narrative of our young birthing star Annabelle Anduga and to not keep things too complicated in order to allow our brand to be decoded shared and talked about by our young audiences.

What artists of our genre are doing with their digipacks

A digipack is essentially a CD case with covers front and back. The music industry has sort of evolved to digital streaming and sharing but the digipack would still have the same album cover in most cases as a digital version or even a vinyl version.

The conventions that should be followed on the digipack are the barcode on the back, so the item can be sold. The track-list on the back, in order for the buyer to see what exactly they are buying, (the content). And the copyright owner. This is to avoid unlawful plagiarism.

more conventions on the digipacks are, Artist name and the Album name but in recent times both can be left out and a digipack will still sell. As the age of the independent artist is upon us, who are we too know who is good and who isn’t anymore so the artist name has kind of lost it’s value.

What I learnt from this digipack, is that to convey our genre indie rock/ synth pop we must throw the normal convention out of the window and approach the digipack with an experimental mindset. The pioneering genre highlights the postmodern age we live in, we see this through 3D renderings of our favourite artists on their digipacks on FKA Twigs’ LP1 and commonly we see they represent themselves as stars as supernatural and otherworldly creating appeal and intrigue as to what sent them in this artistic direction. Kaytranada’s digipack “BUBBA” for example.

Refining our star’s image

We assembled a Padlet to start gathering together some of our early inspiration and generate the mood of our star image. This will help us going forward because we are closing in on a brand image, and theme as media producers. The digipack will require us to understand our genre and audience deeply and using this using this Padlet an almost blueprint for our style of work will help enormously.

Looking into the near future when we will be building our social media page, we want our integrated advertising to maintain a repertoire of elements, may that be something as random as our independent indie synth artists carries a keyboard in her car at all times in case she is ever in the mood to play or has an idea for a song. Things like this about our artist need to be written down in order to best communicate a convincing star to a niche audience.

Familiarising ourselves with our values as media producers

We put together a Digipack & Mission Statement slides to help us group the competition as media producers, consider the unique selling point (USP) of our brand, as well as a tight focus as to who our audience actually is all shaped around our star – Annabelle Anduga.

Now that we have a clearer understanding on who exactly our audience is, we now need to shape our brand to fit the consumer – Teens, young adults, hipster old people. And more specifically, grungy rebellious 13-19 year old predominantly females.

We also have some valuable knowledge as to who our competition may be.  With this, we can level up and clear the competition by considering areas like our integrated advertising, promotions and distinct star imagery.

Looking forward on a brand perspective, we now now our advertising, promotions, music and star image must be coherent . That they must appear as a package this is key information to creating a good brand.

We ended the task with putting together a mission statement. A mission statement allows a company to establish their purpose. the what, who and why behind all brands is their mission statement.

Our Mission statement:

“To give the youth the confidence to stand out through our bold star. We want to grant our audience the freedom of expression through our music. Free to express themselves in how they dress also being able to flow freely while listening to our pioneering, alternate and infectious synth tracks”.