Digipak finals designs

Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In my production of my music video I used a range of new technologies who help me produce my work. Fisrtly in my pre- production and planning stage I used the internet to help me with my planning. Sites such as youtube aloud me to get instant viewings of any band I wanted for my specific genre of the artist I chose. Youtube also hosts a huge range of music videos from different genre’s that also helped me to get ideas for my own music video. Having instant access to any video helped to give me inspiration for shots to use and ideas for narrative structure. Having the technology to be able to blog your work online was a big help to me because I could present all of my work it a neat and orderly fashion. The use of labels also helps if you want to refer to some work that you have already done.

In the production stages of my products the use of new media technologies helped me a hug amount. With the editing of my music video the use of Adobe Premiere Elements allowed to easily upload my footage I had taken on my camera and organise and edit it efficiently. Using Elements also aloud me to reverse my footage to get the backwards narrative I wanted in a short amount of time. I also could layer selected clips and sounds over each other easily. Other features that elements has that contributed to my work was that I could adjust the speed of my video clips for example if I wanted to slow down a clip and make it longer I could do this with only the click of a button.

During the production of my digipak new media technologies such as Photoshop aloud me to get the best image I could possibly get. With my work I could change the layers so I could overlay images on top of my vintage background. I could also add effect to my images such as dodging and burning. I also reduced the opacity of the doves in m artwork so it blended in better with the background image.

In my evaluation stage being able to upload my work onto a blog and being able to add images to it was one way that I used new media technologies. Other ways I could of done this was in a presentation with sounds and clips. Seeing as the evaluation section is broken down into four questions being able to use different blog posts makes my work into manageable chunks.

In conclution the ways I have used new media technologies throughout my construction and research, planning and evaluation stages has helped me and also made my work more appealing to view.

Audeince Feedback Questionaire

Are you Male/ Female?


Did you like the Video?
[ ] yes
[ ] no

If yes, what did you like about it ?
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What was it about the video that most appealed to you ?

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What was it about the video that did not appeal to you ?
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Do you think the music video portrays the genre well?
[ ] yes
[ ] no


If yes, why?
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Do you like the digipak artwork?

[ ] yes
[ ] no


Do you think the artwork goes with the genre of the artist and why?
[ ] yes
[ ] no
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Question 1: In what ways Does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real Media products?

For my music video itself my music video uses conventions of real media products in many ways. The first way that my production uses conventions of real media is that the format of my production is a music video and music video’s are a form of real media. My music video uses forms of real music video’s by using a series of performance shots paired with narrative shots. My video production also uses genre as a real form. The genre for my artist is indie-acoustic. The uses of a real genre links in with using real media forms. My music video uses certain conventions such as characteristics of the genre it belongs to. For example the props that the character are wearing are very indie influenced. The use of certain shot types links in nicely to. The narrative structure for my music video is backwards and the video is shot all with a backwards narrative. This links to the indie genre and certain obscurities that videos on that genre have. The backwards narrative idea was inspired from the Modest Mouse video for ‘little motel.’ This product has a completely backwards narrative and that inspired me to use a reverse narrative. Other videos Such as Mutemath’s ‘typical’ and The Verve’s ‘bittersweet symphony’ also uses backwards narrative so I watched these for ideas and got influence from them. I shot my music video as if the narrative was forward. It was at the editing stage where I reversed the narrative to get the style I wanted.


For my digipak side of my product I also used conventions of real media products. In my research if CD covers and artwork I decided to go for the layout of a standard Jewel case because I felt that the case itself didn’t need to be fancy or stand out in anyway. During my research I looked into a huge variety of different artwork from the indie genre and various hybrid subgenre’s that related to my work such as indie-folk, indie-pop and indie-rock. The artwork that really inspired me was from and E.P. by a band called Broken Records. They used the idea of the gramophone playing out disdorted shapes. This obviously related to their band name. the idea of a broken records playing out noises. I took this idea with my work but chose to use doves coming out of the gramophone with musical notes and getting bigger the further they come out. This makes reference to the title of the song I used ‘let this white dove sing.’ I didn’t use white doves because I felt that the doves and musical notes was reference enough and using white doves was a little over the top. I also found out later in the editing stage that white doves did not work with the vintage sandy background I used to place my images on. Also during the editing stage I ran the image through Photoshop Lightroom to give the image a Vintage effect overall. By doing this it ties in nicely with the characteristics of the genre.


With my magazine advert I researched music magazines that were closely linked to my genre. The best magazine I found was NME. I felt this was the best because it had a large selection of adverts that appealed to me and also linked in with my artist. With my advert I used the doves from the album art because I felt that using that gave it to appeal to my audience and get the same theme of the doves flowing through it. Also the advert is promoting the E.P. so keeping the dove theme is a good idea. In NME most of the advert used shot of the bands album or incorporated their artwork into the advert paired with shots of the band. I challenged this convention because I didn’t not use any shots of the artist at all. I used the vintage layout with the doves. I used a different less scriptive font to talk about the E.P. and gave a rating at the bottom of the advert.

Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

My questionnaire I created was handed out to 15 participants of mixed gender from my selected target audience. I also posted my questionnaire on my social networking sites(facebook, myspace.) I found that the feedback I got from the questionnaires I handed out was more reliable that than the ones posted online.

From my questionnaires I can see that 70% of the participants liked the music video. Interestingly most of that percentage were boys. This shows that the music video and the elements within it appealed most to boys and did not appeal that much to girls. This could be linked to the genre of the artist. That the female participants with not like the indie-acoutic genre or that they did not like the video. From my results I can see that 80% of my participants wrote that the backwards narrative worked well and it was some of the backwards narrative scene that grabbed their attention. For example to scene where the girl in the video is pulling the flowers apart and throwing them on the floor.





I asked my participants if they thought the music video portrayed the genre of the artist well. 55% of my focus group said that parts of the video suited it very well where other shots were lacking in representing the genre and were basic shots that did not flow very well and made the narrative hard to understand at times.

With my digipak side of the questionnaire I found that my focus group much preferred the artwork to the video and I saw they had much more to talk about when it came to the artwork side of things. 90% of the participants said that they thought that I carried the same theme through out all my designs well and the genre was very easy to establish from just looking at the images. I found from my questionnaires that a few of my participants really liked the concept of the vintage style background and the idea of the doves and music coming out of the gramophone and how it linked with the title of the song. 20% specifically said that they liked the font that I used and thought the Arty calligraphy text linked in well with the genre and almost blended in nicely with the feel of the image and wasn’t to harsh.

Question 1: In what ways Does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real Media products?

For my music video itself my music video uses conventions of real media products in many ways. The first way that my production uses conventions of real media is that the format of my production is a music video and music video’s are a form of real media. My music video uses forms of real music video’s by using a series of performance shots paired with narrative shots. My video production also uses genre as a real form. The genre for my artist is indie-acoustic. The uses of a real genre links in with using real media forms. My music video uses certain conventions such as characteristics of the genre it belongs to. For example the props that the character are wearing are very indie influenced. The use of certain shot types links in nicely to. The narrative structure for my music video is backwards and the video is shot all with a backwards narrative. This links to the indie genre and certain obscurities that videos on that genre have. The backwards narrative idea was inspired from the Modest Mouse video for ‘little motel.’ This product has a completely backwards narrative and that inspired me to use a reverse narrative. Other videos Such as Mutemath’s ‘typical’ and The Verve’s ‘bittersweet symphony’ also uses backwards narrative so I watched these for ideas and got influence from them. I shot my music video as if the narrative was forward. It was at the editing stage where I reversed the narrative to get the style I wanted.


For my digipak side of my product I also used conventions of real media products. In my research if CD covers and artwork I decided to go for the layout of a standard Jewel case because I felt that the case itself didn’t need to be fancy or stand out in anyway. During my research I looked into a huge variety of different artwork from the indie genre and various hybrid subgenre’s that related to my work such as indie-folk, indie-pop and indie-rock. The artwork that really inspired me was from and E.P. by a band called Broken Records. They used the idea of the gramophone playing out disdorted shapes. This obviously related to their band name. the idea of a broken records playing out noises. I took this idea with my work but chose to use doves coming out of the gramophone with musical notes and getting bigger the further they come out. This makes reference to the title of the song I used ‘let this white dove sing.’ I didn’t use white doves because I felt that the doves and musical notes was reference enough and using white doves was a little over the top. I also found out later in the editing stage that white doves did not work with the vintage sandy background I used to place my images on. Also during the editing stage I ran the image through Photoshop Lightroom to give the image a Vintage effect overall. By doing this it ties in nicely with the characteristics of the genre.


With my magazine advert I researched music magazines that were closely linked to my genre. The best magazine I found was NME. I felt this was the best because it had a large selection of adverts that appealed to me and also linked in with my artist. With my advert I used the doves from the album art because I felt that using that gave it to appeal to my audience and get the same theme of the doves flowing through it. Also the advert is promoting the E.P. so keeping the dove theme is a good idea. In NME most of the advert used shot of the bands album or incorporated their artwork into the advert paired with shots of the band. I challenged this convention because I didn’t not use any shots of the artist at all. I used the vintage layout with the doves. I used a different less scriptive font to talk about the E.P. and gave a rating at the bottom of the advert.

Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think that the combination of my main product and my ancillary products are very effective. Firstly I think this because My use of images is coherent throughout all of my ancillary products. I make very close reference to the title of the song and the doves part of my production. The title of my song is called ‘let this white dove sing’ so for my dikipak production I decided to keep the idea of the doves flowing through it. I also wanted to make reference to the notion of the white doves singing to link it back with the title of the song. I did not want to go for the simple idea of just having a white dove singing. Instead what I decided to do was go for a flock of doves coming out of a gramophone. This was liking the notion of the song title with the artwork then I decided to also add musical notes coming out of the gramophone. This was the bridge between the doves and the singing but also could have an underlying meaning of singing about doves which relates to certain lyrics in the song.

The theme of doves flows throughout all of my digipak work and also in my magazine advert. The style of my artwork fits in very nicely with the genre of my artist so this boosts my target audience appeal. Because the combination of my work is very consistent with the reference to the doves and the song title I feel that it would work very well across different platforms. For printing purposes the images I used are very basic and one colour. This could of gone two ways. Either my target audience would not like this because its to basic and boring or they liked it because it wasn’t too fancy. It was plain but still eye catchy. In my audience feedback I found out that they did like my artwork and found it worked very well a large percentage of my demographic also said they really like the dove reference. Having the artwork basic this would help in print productions and it would very cost effective and easy to quickly reproduce. Items such as instore posters and merchandise such as t-shirts and mugs would work very well with the dove artwork and the gramophone. For internet purposes the dove images would be very effective in popups or youtube adverts. Throughout my digipak production work to ensure my work was effective I chose to keep the same fonts on all sides of the cd package designs. I also chose to keep most of the images the same.In my magazine advert I chose to carry on the reference to the song title by having the doves on the advert with the artist and the song title underneath it

The Male Gaze

The concept of the gaze is one that deals with how an audience views the people presented. The gaze can be thought of in 3 ways. 1.how men look at women 2. how women look at themselves 3. how women look at other women. Laura Mulvey Used the term "male gaze" in 1975. she believes that in film audiences have to view characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male. The featurs of the male gaze consist of: the camera lingers on the curves of the female body and makes women sexual objects. In 1990 a theorist called 'Jonathon Schroeder' said that " to gaze implies more than to look at- it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the objects of the gaze."

The gaze in Film and TV

1.sin city
2. James bong(collection)
3. Thelma and louise
4. Anchorman
5.Primeval(tv)
6.Heroes(tv)
7.disclosure
8. The martix trilogy
9.Hollyoaks (tv)
10.Skins (tv)

DigiPak Ideas

Font ideas for my Digipak
















Artwork Ideas

























The idea for the gramophone links with the signing of the song.

DigiPak Planning

For my music Video Digipak. i am going to look into different types of Music packaging to see what i think would suit my video production. possible ideas was a standard jewel case and to produce the slips to go inside it. This would be a easier approach but may not look the most aestheticly pleasing. Another idea i had was to take the shape of a jewel case but add extra foldouts to add appeal to the packaging. because my artist suits the indie genre i thought that i could possibly try a retro approach and create vinyl packaging. i like this idea and feel that it would suit my target audience. although doing this i would have to produce a bigger/higher resolution image which may be costly.


Jewel case







Jewel case shape with fold outs









Vinyl


















Dimentions for Packaging

Jewel Case - 142 mm × 125 mm × 10 mm

Vinyl - 12.375 inches square