DVD/digipack analysis: layout, brand ident, image, text (Jonny)

Digipack A

 Single Fold Digipacks

Digipack B

These single fold digipacks are what we would most likely use to promote an up and coming band who were releasing their first album. A single fold digipack would be sufficient to place a disks worth of music inside, on most of these designs there is also enough space to place information on the band (either a booklet or leaflet) this is important as it also gives information about the band whose
 main objective is to promote themselves.
 A single fold digipack is also the 

Digipack C

Digipack D

cheapest to produce which is important to consider as new bands are likely to have a small budget to spend on production, it will also allow for the CD to be sold for a reasonable price to the consumer which increases their chance of impulse buying to see whether the band are any good.

Multi- Fold Digipacks 

Alternatively we may choose to spend more of our 

budget on the digipack production, in which case we may

Digipack E

decide to produce a multi- fold digipack which looks more impressive than the single fold and presents the band with greater professionalism. 

Digipack F

 As there is space for 2 CDs we may choose to include special features such as other songs or the music video 

with deleted features, this would also give the 

CD a USP with its special features against

buying the track online.

Digipack G

 A multi- fold digipack also allows for better

 presentation of the bands information such

Digipack H

 as with digipack E which incorporates a small book in the centre of the pack and digipack F which allows you to place small 'free-bees' inside such as stickers 

and badges (these items would also help promote the band).

Digipack I

As there are more folds there will also be more panels of the digipack which would allow us to place more images of the band on to the pack, this would help promote the bands image (which is important for a boy band) to a greater extent than the single fold digipack.

Text Designs  

Text A

Our inspiration behind the album font was simplicity. We felt this represented the village musicians in both their songs and their appearance as a group. We felt that with an album cover, sometimes less can be more especially when trying to inform your consumers about a new band. I have created some basic font designs which may help with inspiration to design our actual

Text B

album title. Texts C and D are very natural in appearance with
the theme of mud and carved wood respectively. Where as on the
other hand Texts A and B while still simple are a bit more animated
with inspiration from old fashioned story books and comics.

Text C

Each of these fonts would allow us to market the album in a different way. For example... Text B could allow us to design a comic book style image of the band on the album cover, the
theme could continue throughout the album on to the CD design

Text D

and the information booklet.

Brand Identity And Album Covers

Album 1

We have included some images of previous album covers

along with images we felt most suited the identity of the band

and would be well suited on a new album or on a promotional advertisement. Album 1 and 3 are examples of past album covers

which are very similar to our simplistic text designs, both of which contain the logo of a bird in a circle (it is important that we place this logo in a prominent lace on our album as this is a large part of the brand identity). The images on Album 2 and 3 represent the band in very different lights. Album 2 represents the band as energetic and youthful- something which may have greater appeal 

to our target audience of the 13- 21 year old market. Album 4 however portrays the band as a serious and mature band which if used as a album cover may appeal to the older demographic 

Album 2

who are interested in listening to new up and coming bands.

Obviously these images were taken by someone who had ideas that were different to ours.If we were wanting to use an image of the band for our album cover, we would use images such as these for inspiration, however ultimately, we would ask to have a new photo shoot where we could use our own creative ideas to portray the band. However as I have stated above the last two album covers did not contain images of the band and therefore we may choose to follow this theme by using a image such as the logo or maybe

even an image which relates to the album name or inter textual

links with the lyrics 

Album 4

Album 3

Lyrics

This here is a "wordle" of the lyrics to our song. This has enabled us to see which words are used the most in our song and which we should add more emphasis to whilst producing ideas for the video. We chose to use wordle as it meant that we were able to see exactly this which means that we are now able to produce the best possible music video focusing on ideas and words that we wouldn't have if we hadn't used this technology.

Original brainstorm (Josh)

We wanted to have ideas of what we were going to do before we started to make a storyboard for the film. This involved sitting down looking at the lyrics sheet and seeing which lyrics jumped out at us and seeing which ideas we had for the video. We decided the best way to plan was to write ideas next to lyrics and then see which ones by the end of the session we would use. By the end of the session we had enough ideas to build on to make the best video possible.

Music Video Survey Responses (JONNY)

Our Survey was created on surveymonkey.com and was shared via social media (facebook and twitter) among our friends. We had 25 responses with a variance in information. We have broken this info down and have represented it via graphical form. The responses are as follows….

Q1. How old are you?

We used this question to determine how many of the participants were in our target market 13-21. 83% of respondents were in our target market, the most popular age being 17- 19, this was probably due to the fact that the majority of our friends are this age. Although we took in to account all responses, we paid particular attention to those that were in our target market.

Q2. What is your gender?

This question helped us compare the differentiation between the demands of the male and female market. Our target market is aimed at both, but we are aware that they may have contrasting opinions or demands for a music video. We had a good response from both male and female which was important! We had a larger male response, once again most probably down to a larger percentage of male friends on our social networks.  

Q3.In an average month how many music videos are you likely to watch?

This question began our analysis of our target audience’s perception of music video. In this question we hoped to measure the importance of music video in a person’s life. This was one of the hardest questions to analyse as we had such a mix of answers. Something that the chart does not show is that the majority of those that stated they watched a lot of music videos were in the younger demographic. We have interoperated this by considering that watching music videos is a past time such as, playing computer games and surfing the web. The older people get, the less time they have to spend on these activities.

Q4.Where are you most likely to watch a music video?

From our previous research, we were aware that there were many places where people can consume music videos. We wanted to look at what was most popular. Are questionnaire showed us that over 50% watch videos online on websites such as YouTube. Following closely behind were music channels such as MTV with just over 30% stating that they would prefer to watch them on there.

Q5.  When do you watch music videos?

Again this question helped us tap in to the market for music videos, letting us understand popular times in the day where people would watch them. The overwhelming majority of participants stated that they would watch music videos at home after school (possibly as a past time). There was also a small majority that stated that they watched music videos at the gym. Music videos are often consumed in a gym as channels such as MTV are frequently played.

Q6.  What do you expect from a music video?

This question started to look at our target markets expectations from a music video. Again opinions were very varied and were difficult to analyse. What we have concluded is that it is important to include a variety of music video genres to our video in order to gain a larger section of the market.

Q7. What are your views on boy bands in general?

This question poked fun at the variance of opinions on boy bands but was also used to help us analyse how easy it would be to promote ‘The Village Musicians’ if we chose their song for our music video. The majority of our respondents did not mind boy bands in different variances.

Q8. What genre of music video do you like?

This question linked with that of 6, allowed us to identify what style of music video would best suit our target audience. The two strong favourites were performance and narrative, we are likely to include both of these in our music video!    

Using Survey Monkey

This was the first time that I used survey monkey. Similar to other programs it required us to set up a free account which was reasonably simple. What was very impressive were the many formats of questionnaire that you could create on the program (open questions, closed questions etc..). The program also suggested better ways of expressing the question. Once we created the questionaire, it provided us with a link that we could share in order to have people answer our questions.  
 
Once we had enough respondents, the website allowed us to analyse the information. It gave us the option to see our results in graphical forms if we upgraded but we decided against this and instead created the graphs ourselves on excel. Overall I feel that this program is one of the best I have used in terms of practicality and the sheer number of things it was capable of doing. This is a tool that may be useful in the future, either at university or in a future job.

Jonny Cash: Hurt (Josh)

The song was originally by Nine inch nails their version was more of a rock song whereas Jonny Cash has changed it into an acoustic/folk song which means that its easier, with the slower pace for him to produce a video that looks fantastic and all of the images that are on display fit in with the lyrics of the song. This would have been harder had he made it a fast paced cover.
The first reference to his personal life is early on in the video where we see an image of a sign for this museum. Written on the sign are the words, closed to the public, the timing of this image highlight how badly this affected him as he is singing about hurt and pain as this image appears which converys that he really did have a strong passion for the museum and was geuinly deeply saddened by it having to be closed due to him going bankrupt.
 
The main focus of the whole video is Jonny Cash in a reflective mood about the mistake that he has made in life. There are references to his time in prison which due to the timing of it is clear that he has regret of. The reason for why he was in prison was due to his addictions to perscription drugs although he was never actually sentenced to any jail time. There is talk of how he remembers everything when an image of a younger happier him appears on the screen.

 

The what have I become lyric is accompined by an image of him performing the song. This shows the audience a literal interpretation of this and what he now looks like. This could however be interpretted as him showing regret for the wasted part of his life and how he wishes that he hadn't of made some of the mistakes that he did. This is followed by an image of him on stage perfroming to thousands of fans. This is accomponied by the lyric "you could have it all" which shows that he knows the mistakes that he made and that it was his fault for why he went bankrupt and for some of the other issuse that he had.

There are many images of his late wife when the lyrics talk of happiness and a sweetest friend. This conveys that the best and happiest part of his life was the time that he and his wife had together during their many happy years of marriage

To conclude the whole video takes the role of a narrative of him reflecting on his life and all of the regrets that he had.

 

 

Font analysis: DVD and magazine ad (Josh)

Most record labels have a particular font that is associated with them as well as individual bands having this as well. We want to find out how much the font really says about the band/product being sold. We don't we to misguide the audience about what our music genre is and what our product is by simply having the wrong font for what we are sell (The Village Musicians). This is why we are going to look at a couple of different products including DVD covers from bands as well as a magazine advert.

Firstly I am going to look at the font that is used on a DVD cover for the one direction tour DVD up all night. This DVD has three different fonts used one for the band name, another for the tour name and finally for what is actually on the DVD. The main writing on the DVD is the band name which is written in a much larger and more bold font than the rest of the text on the page. This helps to draw the attention to the name of the band and means that people that are going to buy the product are easiy able to find it. This means that we should have any writing of the band name large so that people have there attention drawn to it more easily than they would if it was the same size as the name of the tour. The name of the tour is in white making it easy to see on the black background and it also matches the colour of the band name. The final text on the page which says "The live tour" is in capitals this is so that people are fully aware that the tour was filmed in front of a live stadium audience and hasn't had anything changed on it this is important for the band so that they are able to maintain a positive image of being honest with fans.

This here is an example of a band advertisng a new album that they are about to release. Once again there are a number of different font types. This once again has the bands name written in the boldest and largest font on the page and shows that this is seen as the most important part of any publication that is advertising a band. This however has the album name in reasonablly large writting as this makes it easier for the audience know what they are looking for on itunes or other similar music websites. This is in a gothic font which fits with the genre of music that the band produces. The text at the bottom of the page is much smaller but does stick with the colour scheme that would be expected by a band of this genre.


To conclude the font that a text is written in is quite important but the most important is that the band name is the largest writing on the page so that the target audience is able to find the music when they go to a shop to buy it.

Contacting the band asking for permission (JOSH)

We decided to contact the band as a matter of courtesy as we didn't want to break any copyright laws. We felt that the artists would probably like to know that there is someone is creating a copy of their song through video as they could like some of our ideas and use them for a future video that they may make for the song.

Below is a copy of the message we sent:
Hello,

We are a group of students from England. We have a school project to make a music video for a song from a band. We have been fans of your music for a long time and would like to share your music with the rest of our class. We would just like to ask if it is ok for us to use your song "all this time". We have got some very exciting ideas for the video. We look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks

Josh Mugridge and Jonny Murray

And here is their response:

Hi Joshua - We really appreciate your asking permission. In this day and age it is a rare thing being respected in this way. We would be fine having you use the song with a couple requests: 

1. credit given to Village in or at end of video and on any print materials
2. We are Christians and would appreciate it if the video stayed "clean" in content. IE: no nudity, ludity etc...
3. A copy of the video sent to us upon completion.
Thanks for listening and we wish you well!
Blessings,
Cate Wilkinson (for Landon who is in India at the moment)

The response meant that we got the go ahead to complete the videos that we already have some exciting ideas for.