Research and planning – Digipak: Identifying conventions and analysing existing digipaks

GENERIC CONVENTIONS & ANALYSING DIGIPAKS

A digipak is the packaging of an album. Its purpose is to promote the album, as well as offer the audience information about the album. Conventions include the track list, warning signs for explicit content/lyrics, company name, album title, artist name, bar code, potential stickers with information such as 'deluxe' version - and essentially, the album itself. Other conventions include a theme (typically consistent with synergy of other products), particular language (often dependent on the genre and target audience). Connotations that can be drawn from a digipak include concepts and themes surrounding the new music. This can amplify star image when used in the right way. Star image helps to build the connection between and artist and their fans. Additionally, digipaks are everlasting products which secures that connection. 

ANALYSING DIGIPAKS

Little Simz

• Main image: there is no main image; instead there are a collection of hand-drawn images. They are roughly drawn, which could be portraying a particular lifestyle, and insinuating to the phrase "life isn't perfect". It gives off the impression that the artist herself drew these sketches, which strengthen the idea of a flawed lifestyle as she had to start from scratch to make this cover.
• Colours: the colours used are within the greyscale. This makes it look like an unfinished draft, relating back to the rough look which perhaps insinuates urban lifestyle roots. 
• Sub images: in the bottom right corner there is a sketch of a woman with non-human characteristics such as wings, no eyes or hair. This might have been a subtle yet clever way to insinuate that the artist is of a higher being, supposed by Dyer's Star theory of stars being extraordinary
• Star Image: two of the main images are of the star. A crown is drawn onto one and a cap onto the other. This portrays that she is important in the music industry, yet keeps who she is true despite fame and fortune. Artists with this humble streak are less likely to be attacked for crimes or deviance. Also, fans in the audience have been drawn with their mobile phones recording her. They are below her, indicating shes on a stage, showing that they worship her as a fanbase. Lastly, a 'sold out' sign shows that she is a popular artist.
• Adorno's popular culture: Passive masses are encouraged by showing the members of audience consuming her music by recording with mobile phones.
• Info: parental advisory sticker, proof that the album still lies within the Hip-Hop conventions.
• Overall image: Effective because the flaws of the drawing portray her as a growing artist and down to Earth

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Rick Ross

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A$ap Rocky

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From this research, we have chosen to take the rough sketch idea from the Little Simz album because we agree that it is a genuine convention of Hip-Hop music, considering the connotations drawn from it (such as portraying a flawed lifestyle). 

Similarly, the Rick Ross album has an effect on it which makes the image look half complete. This also connotes the idea of hard work, which is what our artist is encouragint through morals.

Planning: Pre-production paperwork

PRE-PRODUCTION PAPERWORK

Before we started filming, each group ad to create documents that the filming crew and characters need to sign. This is because we will be making sue that we are ale to film on the day and we have permission from everyone in order to film. 

Research and planning – advert: Creative brief

CREATIVE BRIEF FOR POSTER ADVERT

Oasis Academy Hadley

South St, Enfield EN3 4PX

Artist: Frankie Felone

Album name: What If it’s Felone Season?

Release date: 15^th February  2016

Project Managers: Gizem Mayil, Khaled Jaffer, Lara Lawal

 

PRODUCT OVERVIEW

Who is he?

Frankie Felone is an American rapper who launched his career from performing in local rap battles and making mix tapes in his home made studio. As his reputation grew, he started being hired to perform at urban   festivals and soon headlining shows Eventually he was known for creating a new sound, experimental Hip hop, which created a new audience for him leading him to get signed to a major label company Esoteric records due to the co-founder witnessing his raw talent several years ago. From here, he started to play more of a dominant role for the company where he would write, produce and direct videos for other artist's music. This then enabled him to expand his reputation and name on the Hip hop scene. As he went from performing in small clubs to arenas, it enabled people to know what his music was about and even though his videos were rather commercial, his lyrics were quite niche at the same time resulting in international fame on the Hip hop scene, there is definitely a demand for his 3rd album release.

THE MAGAZINE ADVERT CONCEPT

What is it?

We want to create an advertisement that best represents star image in order to pull in a variety of different audiences from the international hip hop scene. We want to create something that will appeal to our audience and also that will reflect the genre we are making our music video for, ‘oh well’. The advert poster will be a very illustrative of his fame and what’s going on at the present time rather than his past or what he wants to work towards. Now that he has a strong and large fan base, this poster is specifically to appeal to them as they can feel closer towards our artist. We are creating this advert as we want to maintain his star image: this in turn will boost our chances of having a music video on the top 10 charts.

Why are we doing it?

Felone's 3rd studio album will bring success to an international audience and the digipak creation will help in order to do this. The art work on the album cover will be crucial in our success. The consumers should be able to understand the values and ideologies as well as the themes the artist is trying to portray. The pictures, typography and backgrounds will allow us to communicate visually to our audience. The theme of the album which is ‘about his fame’ will allow the consumers to understand the Hip-hop genre, without even having to listen to the music. In more technical terms, we are investing in synergy to enhance the promotion of the album due to the rise of globalization, allowing content to be seen through multiple media platforms. 

Where do we want the advert to be seen?
As the world is now highly digitalized, people often do not pay attention to advertisements on the street. Though we believe it may work depending on the area - as it is in the Hip-Hop genre, a good location may be within urban areas as Hip-Hop is associated with them. Online we plan to show it through social media such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as these are some of the top 3 popular social network platforms. 

What is the reaction we want?
We are targeting young adults within the age group 18-25, both males and females and of white/black ethnicity. We want the audience and the consumers to feel like they can understand the artist and enjoy his music to live their lives and get over the problems that come with being of around that age and ethnicity, which is explored  a lot through Hip-Hop music. The target audience should be able to build and develop a relationship that is different from other artist as this one is about getting to know your true self.

How will we know it worked?

We will know if our album was successful from the sales. We will compare these alongside our sales figures to enable us to see if our album was a hit. Following on, we will be hosting a focus group to allow fans and consumers to look at our first drafts and give us there feedback on our album designs. From there criticism we will know ways in which we can improve.

Felones campaign dates:
Press campaign: 6th January 2016
TV Launch: 10th January 2016
Album Release: 15th February 2016

 

Research and planning – Digipak: Creative brief

          

CREATIVE BRIEF 
FOR DIGIPAK

 Date: 11/12/2015     

Album Title/artist: ‘Felone Season' by Frankie Felone

Project Manager: Lara Lawal

Release Date: 15th January 2016

Product Overview:

Frankie Felone is an American rapper who launched his career from performing in local rap battles and making mix tapes in his home made studio. As his reputation grew, he started being hired to perform at urban   festivals and soon headlining shows Eventually he was known for creating a new sound, experimental Hip hop, which created a new audience for him leading him to get signed to a major label company Esoteric records due to the co founder witnessing his raw talent several years ago. From here, he started to play more of a dominant role for the company where he would write, produce and direct videos for other artist's music. This then enabled him to expand his reputation and name on the Hip hop scene. As he went from performing in small clubs to arenas, it enabled people to know what his music was about and even though his videos were rather commercial, his lyrics were quite niche at the same time resulting in international fame on the Hip hop scene, there is definitely a demand for his 3rd album release.

What is it?

We want to create an album cover that best represents  star image in order to pull in a variety of different audiences from the international hip hop scene. We want to create something that will appeal to our audience and also that will reflect the genre we are making our music video for, ‘oh well’. The album will be a very informative about his fame and whats going on at the present time rather than his past or what he wants to to work towards. now that he has a strong and large fan base, this album is specifically to appeal to them as they can feel more closer towards our artist. We are creating this album as we want to maintain his star image: this in turn will boost our chances of having a music video on the top 10 charts.

Why are we doing it?

Felone's 3rd studio album will  bring success to an international audience and the digipak creation will help in order to do this. The art work on the album cover will be crucial in our success. The consumers should be able to understand the values and ideologies as well as the themes the artist is trying to portray. The pictures, typography and backgrounds will allow us to communicate visually to our audience. The theme of the album which is ‘about his fame’ will allow the consumers to understand the Hip-hop genre, without even having to listen to the music.

A$AP ROCKY - Long. Live. A$AP 

sale figures: 520.000 sold

RICK ROSS - Mastermind 

sale figures: 420,000

What is the reaction we want?

We are targeting young adults within the age group 18-25, both males and females and of white/black ethnicity. We want the audience and the consumers to feel like they can understand the artist and enjoy his music to live their lives and get over the problems that come with being of around that age and ethnicity, which is explored  a lot through Hip-Hop music. The target audience should be able to build and develop a relationship that is different from other artist as this one is about getting to know your true self.

How will we know it worked?

We will know if our album was successful from the sales. We will compare these alongside our sales figures to enable us to see if our album was a hit. Following on, we will be hosting a focus group to allow fans and consumers to look at our first drafts and give us there feedback on our album designs. From there criticism we will know ways in which we can improve.

Felones campaign dates:

Press campaign: 6th January 2016

TV Launch: 10th January 2016

Album Release: 15th February 2016

Limitations?

• It may be hard to keep consistency with the four panels. We plan to carefully select a colour scheme and font theme, in regards to genre conventions, so each panel is in co-ordination with each other.
• Some ideas we have, such as transparency, might be hard to do on a computer. It's easier with an app, however the quality often decreases from phone to computer. A USB cable may prevent this.

Research and planning – Digipak: Digipak information

DIGIPAK INFORMATION

Artist name: Frankie Felone

Theme of the album: About his fame

Album name: "what if it's Felone season?"

Tracklist:

- Intro

- Revival

- Insomnia

- The game's mine

- Oh well

- I'm so blessed

- Young Frankie

- This hip hop

- No bystanders

- Stop that freestyle

- Bonus track : Felone season

- Outro

Music Institution: RCA records

Production Company: Esoteric Records

Parental Advisory: Yes

This has been beneficial so we know as a group what information we need to include in our digipak. We must make sure that we include all this. The tracklist also gave us an idea of the theme of the album.

Planning: Editing

EDITING

•Slow motion editing:

 Slow motion editing will be used at the beginning when the camera focuses on the male artist's upper body walking of him in the lift and also in each different location to show iconography before the artist entering the room. I have chosen this to do this in the lift because it almost creates a sense of tension as we want to know who is in the lift. This allows the audience to have an idea of the male artist being confused and discombobulated as a stimulus before the actual narrative within the music video starts. Showing the iconography in slow motion also allows the audience to identify what kind of setting there is before actually seeing the artist there.

•Cloning

 cloning will be used in our video to help emphasis the hard working aesthetics male character artist provides to his fans. This editing technique also helps to represent our theme in the music video which is creativity. The music video that influenced us to make this choice was the music video of 'Frozen' by Madonna . The reason is because the video is only 3 minutes and it will take up time to show him doing different things in one shot therefore it would be more time efficient to clone were used to enhance the energy he was showing in the video.

•Text flicker

This is another editing technique that we plan to use in our music video. The reason being is to present the name of the song in a more fancy way in order to catch the audiences eye. It's also mainly used to build hype on the song before actually hearing the lyrics whilst we only hear the instrumental. The video that influenced our decision was school boy q featuring Kendrick Lamar 'collard greens'. we see the letters 'JDDC' flicker at the beginning however it wont be as quick the flicker will last much longer.

•Magazine styling

A magazine style will be utilised when we use our artist at the end to pose for a magazine with the female models with a fade to black edit around him to make it look more professional. As the instrumental of the beat slowly fades away so will the image of the artist, turning into a black screen. the purpose of this editing technique is to prove to the audience that there is a string presence around him.

•Overlay

The overlay editing technique will be used when the artist is in the car being driven to the next location. This will show the multi-talent of my artist so the audience will admire him and this will enhance his star image. We also realised that by using this technique it make the visuals flow and change in a relaxed manner. 

Planning: Locations

LOCATION

Our group have detailed the locations in which our music video will be shot in. Generally, we have chosen locations to represent the lifestyle of the artist - such as the recording studio which shows that he's working on his music. 

Planning: Characters

CHARACTERS

In this section of our planning we had to decide on who our characters are going to be in our music video. We had to think of suitable characters that would fit in our music video and be able to portray the story line in the best way possible. Characters would play a significant role in determining the success of our music video as they would have to appeal to the target audience and stick to conveying the generic convention.

Businessmen - our first set of characters will be introduced at the start of the music video where we will see them miming and deciding what to do with the digi pack. this will be whilst the song is playing and the artist enters the room. an example from where this is seen, is Chris Brown's official music video for 'Till I Die' ft. Big Sean & Wiz Khalifa. The idea of these characters is inspired from this music video however the difference in this is that the office worker's in Brown's video don't expect him to be there and are rather annoyed with his presence.

Producer - the purpose of having the producer within the visuals is to show he's the man behind the artists sound. As the artist enter the room we will see the producer greet the artist and tell him what to do by miming instructions towards him. This is an example as well as an inspiration from The Game's music video 'dreams' where we see the notorious producer, Dr Dre at work with the artist.

Dancers - The use of the dancers in the music visuals will be back ups for him creating a music video. they will enable my artist to look more appealing and entertain as well as knowing he can rap, the artist will discover he has more traits and skills. Justin Bieber's music video for 'confident' is an example we will use as its a perfect representation of the kind of dancers we want, we don't them too have much of a personality, they're mainly there to show their skill.

Female models - Lastly we plan to have 2-4 young women to play as the young female models in the final scene where the artist will be seen at a photography shoot. a sense of Mulvey's theory of 'male gaze' in music video inspired us as by having attractive girls we will attract a more mature male audience. An example of where this is seen is Action Bronson's video for 'Acting crazy'.

Most of our characters consist of having shorts cameo roles assisting the main artist within the music industry. We want to show that it is not just him as an individual indulging in success. Instead, we want to show all the people who contribute behind the scenes and what it is that they actually do. Thus extra characters are essential to portraying a sense of realism within the music industry, as the roles we are constructing are likely to be encountered in Hollywood. 

Planning: Lighting and colour

LIGHTING & COLOUR

LIGHTING

1. Austin Mahone - Dirty Work

This video has very high-key lighting which fits with the office atmosphere. It makes the characters seem more alert and ware of their workplace, which is how we hope to portray our artists, as he is a businessman. Therefore in the opening scene of a meeting room, we will use high-key lighting to emphasize the professional environment. 

2. Lil Wayne - A milli 

The lighting in this music video is natural lighting in the scenes which the artist patrolling the streets preparing to shoot a music video. The lighting represents a natural effect which makes the scene look more realistic in comparison to the other parts of the music video which contain various amount of lighting techniques. Moreover, we would like to use something similar when showing him patrolling the corridors of the office building in order to make everything look naturalistic as we don't want the audience thinking its some sort of flashback. In addition, this is because it will help the audience to relate more to the scenes which take part as they look realistic. Lastly, the use of this lighting will help as the colours through editing will be able to stand out more.

COLOUR

1. Chris Brown - Turn Up The Music

The opening scene of this video shows Chris Brown in a car during night time with the street lights on.This creates a slightly orange/green filter, making the area look very urban. We plan to implement this in our music video because,as Hip-Hop traditionally stems from urban areas, we want to keep that conventional characteristic by alluding to an urban setting.

2. Band aid 30 - 'Do they know it's Christmas?'

The colour in this music video shows where artists are presented with a performance. The colour represents a glamorous effect which helps to enhance star image. This helps the artist to appeal to the audience as the audience is attracted to the appealing star image on screen. We would like to use something similar when presenting our male character in the music video as he will be in a studio himself performing. Due to us focusing on the hip genre the dark colours make it a lot more conventional as its common in existing music videos. there weren't many videos that created the studio theme which is why i went along with it. Lastly, this is because we want our male character to appeal to our audience members as I believe this is the most effective way of attracting an audience.

Planning: Artist image

ARTIST IMAGE

Personality traits of our experimental Hip-Hop artist:

1. Passionate - Hip-Hop usually involves themes of life experience, rags to riches...these are sung well in a passionate perspective.
2. Egotistical - the whole song is about how he once was, what he did and how he is now.
3. Deterministic - this is shown in his continuous varying activities through the videos, and the lyrics which amplify his perseverance. 
4. Influential - audiences will be inspired to have goals and aspirations, by showing his hard work in the industry.
5. Arrogant - the artist is the centre of attention through the music video, and dismisses those who aren't in his group

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Morals and Values of the artist:

1. He values achieving money and fame as this is his personal idea of what success means. 
2. Those who don't work as hard as him are dismissed through the lyrics, which shares the ideology that you have to do something in life.
3. He has materialistic values, for example showing off his clothing.  
4. He sees himself as superior due to his actions in life, which links to the egotistical personality trait.  

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Media Perceptions:

1. The music is genuinely niche, yet the artist is portrayed in commercialised ways - for example, having lots to do as a performer.  
2. He values status in the media and his image supports being a part of hegemony. 
3. He is very competitive in the industry, shown in when he confidently flourishes his DigiPack, and in the lyrics which shun other people.  

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FOUR SIMILAR ARTISTS

These solo artists of the Hip-Hop genre have created the revolution of Hip-Hop; to stop dressing 'hood' and start dressing casual-smart, while singing about the same things.

They're businessmen, as our artist is, which is why they inspire our ideas through attire. Professional, dark clothing on a man indicate intelligence which many women find attractive. Our artist's song is purely about his work life, which is why he should follow in the example of how these men dress.

Each artist shown here wears white (in one form or another). This shows that their intentions are pure and good, they want to run a business through legitimate means. This is what our video will be displaying - hard work in the right places get him far.

For the second half of the video we have been inspired by a Hip-Hop artist wearing all black. This is because there is a literal lyric in our song that mentions his black attire. We think this is used to represent the mystery behind his success; as he doesn't let outsiders into his group (also expressed through the lyrics) all they can do is wonder.

These ideas have bee devised to visually fabricate our artist's personality traits, morals and media perceptions.

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INTRODUCING OUR ARTIST

Age: 21

Ethnicity:

Physique: lean, moderately fit, healthy

Costume: suited & booted / all black

Hair and make-up: slicked back hair; neat and tidy

Body language and facial expressions: confident body language, serious facial expressions, arrogant interactions with other people

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LINK TO THEORY

 Goodwin

We will be using star image as the narrative revolves around the artists’ life in the music industry.

An intertextual reference is made to his life with the promotion of the digi-pack within the video.

Genre characteristics are not being precisely followed, though the setting of a recording studio may apply.

·       Dyer

Most of the video will be performance-based. Some concept shots at the beginning during the meeting scene

·       Mulvey’s ‘Male Gave’

Our genre is known to sexualise women, however out video challenges this trait as there is no focus on women, nor sexual themes.

·       Adorno

The artist is alluding to the ruling-class through encouraging morals of success and wealth.