Market Research Album Covers (JONNY)

	EXAMPLE ‘The evolution of man’	MAROON 5 ‘Overexposed’	ONE DIRECTION ‘Take me home’
Images	The albums show a person holding a picture of the artist example when he was young over an image of a crowd at a festival. The style is very retro and has a ‘home made’ feel to it. The image on the album is creative as it indirectly relates to the title ‘evolution of man’ as in a way the image shows the ‘evolution of example’.	The album comprises of a number of hand drawn unusual images with a pink/ purple colour scheme. The images and the colours are bright and so attract the eye but do not tell a story or have any other purpose on the album cover.	The band is clearly represented in the album cover. The fact that they are all round a telephone box gives a British representation in international markets.
Brand Identity	The iconic Example logo is placed on the top left of the album. This makes it easily identifiable for his fans, however it is not as easy to identify for consumers browsing in a shop.	The band name is placed along the middle of the album, however does not stand out as much as the same colours are used. The name of the album is crushed along the bottom of the album. Although the album cover is unusual it relates to their other albums in terms of design.	The brand identity is extremely strong with all of the band being placed in the image. The name of the band and album name are clearly presented. This makes the band easy to identify for consumers, even those who are not as familiar with the band.
Presentation of artist/ band	The album presents Example through his younger self. This portrays a sense of innocence. There is also the idea of achievement, that when the picture was taken he dreamt of being famous and the fact that it is placed over a massive crowd means that he has achieved this.	There are no images of the band, however arguably they are famous enough to get away with this. The creative album image may be used to indicate their creative music style.	The fact that they are jumping and climbing on the album cover connotes youthfulness, energy and fun. The fact that is a sunny day means that the songs are likely to be happy. These are all things that we relate to boy bands, especially One Direction.
Other information	This album cover is effective however suits artists/ bands that are already famous. Our album will need to promote ‘The Village Musicians’.	Although I like the design of the album as it would stand out amongst all those other CDs in HMV. It would be expensive and time consuming to produce the images. Similar to the Example album, it would not promote our band.	In my opinion the album cover is too cheesy. However in terms of concept and promotion of the band, something similar to this would be good for ‘TVM’. However it would be important to make sure that we didn’t alienate the male market.

Digipak Market Research In HMV (JONNY)

After being given our brief to create an album cover for ‘The Village Musicians’, I sought to conduct some market research in one of the UK’s largest music retailers ‘HMV’.

The first thing that struck me when walking in to the store were the vast amount of different sections ranging from band t-shirts to tablet computers (their product range is extremely diverse!) Looking around the shop, to the left a large purple sign caught my eye ‘Chart’ with a music sign next to it. I decided that this would be a good place to start!

The chart music was aesthetically well displayed with lines of the albums all in unison. In my opinion, this allowed the artwork of the album to stand out far greater than if there had just been one album per artist. 
An album that stood out for me was the new One Direction album which had different visual versions of the album, with the image of a band member on each. 
This gives the consumer more choice (or dare I say, for real fans, the opportunity to buy all 4!) I found this interesting due to the fact that we are also promoting a boy band, although arguably with much greater musical talent than 1D. 




Moving on from the chart music, the main section of the store is devoted to what seems like every album ever created, literally thousands! I payed specific attention to the Rock and Pop section as I felt that was the genre our song best fit in to. As you can see from the pictures, its not easy for an album to stand out when there are this many. The Rock and Pop section seemed to go on for ages!





 The albums are firstly categorized by music genre e.g Rock and Pop. They are then sub categorized by alphabetical order of the album name.  There are also other sections such as 'greatest hits' which contain compilation albums with a selection of an artists/ bands greatest hits. This methodology makes it very easy for browsers to allocate the album they may be interested in purchasing. 

 Along with looking at album designs and artwork, I spent some time analyzing the market for music DVDs  This is a much smaller market with the picture to the right showing the whole of HMVs selection. I wanted to compare different styles of music DVD such as; performances, documentaries and compilations.  

 Once again coming back to One Direction. I have found 2 examples of performance DVDs. The model of these specific DVDs is to film the band during their live concerts, possibly add some extra footage such as back stage interviews and package it all in to a DVD. A perfect item for fans who were unable to get tickets for the concert- the next best thing!
Alternatively I found this hybrid music DVD which consisted of a collection of Elvis Presley's greatest performances. This product was aimed more as a collectors item with a high quality box to encase the DVD with a small book including information on Elvis also included! 

 This music DVD is a documentary looking at the history of Rap music and its development throughout the years. It is called 'something from nothing the art of rap'. The purpose of this DVD is to educate the viewer about the music genre, teaching them to have a greater appreciation of the song. The video is directed by ICE- T who is a well known musician in this field of music. 

 Along with the conventional forms of music DVD that I mentioned above, during my market research I came across a 'fly on the wall' style documentary which follows the band around as if you are living the life that they have. The example that I took a picture of was called 'being... N-DUBZ'. The idea of this genre of music DVD is to allow the viewer in to the day to day lives of the band, something that is not normally shown.

After conducting my market research I stopped off at the listening post to see what styles of music were being played. Similar to the shop the selection of songs available to have a brief listen to (30 seconds) were in its thousands. These were all in a database with a search toolbar at the top of the screen, you could search by song name, song artist or even by genre. While I was very impressed by the vast amount of songs available, it was disappointing to see that 'The Village Musicians' were not one of them! 

From my market research I have conducted that CDs are much more viable then music DVDs. I believe this is due to the increased usage a CD can have over a DVD. A CD can be listened to passively (whilst driving a car, doing homework etc) a DVD needs your full attention. It is clear to me that a lot of effort goes in to designing the artwork for an album cover as when albums are faced with such competition against hundreds of other albums as shown in my images above and that many different tactics are used to do this (bright colors  quirkiness of the cover, no images/ no words). These all give USPs to the album covers, and increase the chances of a browser picking the album up! Having spent time in HMV my opinion is that the CD sector of their market is focused at the older demographic who would still rather listen to a CD then download the song online. This opinion was backed up having during my time viewed the majority of CD browsers as 40+. This market research will help me develop my own ideas for an album cover representing 'The Village Musicians',  

Editing Schedule (JONNY)

I created this editing schedule at the beginning of November after we had completed all of the filming  and had uploaded the footage on to the computer. I coordinated our availability through both of our school time tables. I then created a schedule on Excel placing hourly slots in line with our lessons at school.

I started by placing our media lessons in the schedule and then proceeded to place our own personal availability following that. Sections marked 'J+J' were when both of us were available to edit the music video. Along with using this time to edit the music video, we also re-shot our stop motion. The stop motion was shot on Wednesday the 14th and Monday the 19th where we were both available for 2 hours (it was a long process!). We stuck to the schedule most of the time, but when we were unable too, we made sure we found another hour where we were available. Overall we spent just under 30 hours editing our final music video, meeting checkpoints along the way e.g the rough cut which we set a deadline for Friday the 9th (this was achieved- just!). The use of a schedule allowed us to be efficient in our time management as we knew exactly when we were needed to edit. This allowed us to schedule our other plans around these times, thus avoiding conflicts which may have caused unavailability for editing.  

Mood Board Representing Our Music Video (Jonny)

This is a Glog that I created, which gives a brief representation of our music video through words and images. It represents ideas that we had and implemented in our music video. This mood board was created on an online software called Glogster EDU.

I have had a Glogster account for a while now as this was one of the technology's that I used for my AS portfolio, and so was familiar with the set up of the software. Glogster edu allows you to set up a simple account which is free, however you can upgrade to a premium account paying a monthly fee. I used the free version which allows you to import images, videos and music to create a mood board which they call a 'Glog'. It is a very simple product to use and is quick to use if you already have the images saved. Another great benefit is that similar to other online programs I have used, you are able to embed your final product on to your blog. which makes it look that bit more professional! 

The Decision To Place Stop Motion In Our Music Video (Jonny)

For our A Level Media project Josh and I really wanted to push the boat out and try as many filming techniques as possible, as to allow our music video to really stand out from the others. Something that we were both very interested in was the video effect of stop- motion. Our interest in creating a stop- motion sequence increased after both watching the following video on YouTube...


 

We came across this video when writing a blog post on similarities between our bands music video and that of Noah and the Whales. The girl that created this video was also doing A Level Media at the time. Knowing for sure that we now wanted part of our music video to contain a stop motion sequence, we then set about finding the best way to do this. A video that I found on YouTube gave us a good basic knowledge of how we should go about creating our stop motion...




This video was created by a group called 'storm the castle' who among other things educate people in different filming techniques. The advice given in this video- although quite simple made us aware of problems we did not anticipate occurring. The video also gave us one of the most important pieces of advice for our stop motion sequence, which was... USE A WHITEBOARD. I can not express how much time this saved us, as it allowed us to modify an image without having to draw it again from scratch (as in the Noah and The Whale stop motion). Haven taken on board the advice given, we set about creating our stop motion sequence.

http://youtu.be/uhrmCTcF7B8

This was our first attempt at our stop motion sequence. Although it was effective in terms of looking like a moving image, we were unhappy with the camera movement. This was due to the fact that images were taken holding the camera free hand, rather than using a tripod. Another error was lighting. By only using natural light our images were inconsistent, instead we should have used photography lights similar to the ones used in our green screen. Because of these errors we have decided to learn from our mistakes and reproduce the stop motion sequence, this time with tripods and lighting.

Construction of the Storyboard (Josh)

We made story board so that when we were out of set filming the music video we had something to look back at and were able to make the video as good as possible due the amount of planning.

We used one post-it notes for each different shot that we would take. The meant that we would easily be able to visualise what we would need to do at each different stage of the filming. Using Post-it notes meant that if we decided to change the order it which we were to have the scenes then we would be able to move them much easier than if we used storyboard paper like we did in year 12.

We took great care when drawing the scenes on the post-it notes so that when we changed the storyboard into an animatic to show to the actors they would have an even better idea as to what we wanted them to do as oppose to if the drawings lacked detail and we just spoke the instructions to them.

All of the drawings were originally done in pencil and then colour and outlining with a black pen was added after. This was so that if we made any mistakes with the drawings we could amend them much easier than we would be able to if we drew them in pen straight away. The pen made the drawings easier to see on the animatic as they were bold and colourful.

The storyboard to a number of weeks to perfect and we both feel that this was time well spent as without a brilliant storyboard it is impossible for anyone to create a brilliant end product. Here Jonny and myself are discussing the order in which we want the post-it notes to be. There were a lot of scenes that we weren't sure of the order and once we had put them in different orders on the animatic we were able to decide upon the perfect order for all of the scenes in order for us to make what we hope will be a really good music video.

Here we are comparing our original planning notes to the storyboard that we are in the process of creating. We wanted to make sure that we gave our self some guidance to how we would make the storyboard so that we didn't begin to come up with stupid ideas that seemed good at the time but once it came to filming them were impossible to actually pull of

Health and Safety Risk Assessment (Josh)

There are a nuber of risks that are involved in the construction of our music video. Most of these were during the narrative part of the filming.

The Tree
  There are always a number of safety issues surrounding putting a man up a tree with a guitar. Before sending Mike up the tree Jonny went up to ensure that it was safe and the ladder was footed by myself so that it didn't fall over whilst he was up the tree. Jonny checked that the branch could hold the weight both when we originally found the tree and then once agin on the day of shooting.
  To get Mike up the tree we used a ladder and ensured that he would wear shoes with a lot of grip in order to make sure that there was minimal chance of him slipping out of this tree. Once Mike got up the tree we made sure that he was comfortable before handing him his guitar. Once Mike was in position we made sure that the filming was done as quickly as possible so that mike didn't have to stay up the tree to long we did ensure that the film was to the highest quality.
  We used a ladder to get Mike out of the tree so that it was as safe a possible. There was one more thing that we needed Mike to do at the tree, hang off of a lower branch and then drop for one shot that will be used. Before doing this Jonny checked that the branch was able to hold the weight

The Field
  There is minimal risk here; the only that we found was rabbit holes along the down hill where the actors would run. For this reason before we started shooting the footage we walked up and down the hill to check for holes. We then found an area that there weren't any holes and began shooting the film.

The Bridge
  Once again there was minimal risk at this location. The only risk was that Mike could slip on the bridge. The prevent this we made sure that Mike had grippy shoes so there was minimal risk of him slipping.