Brand Identity Question

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

For the most part, the audience was unable to identify any problems with any of the texts. Except for one shot in the video, a point of view shot where Andrew is supposedly looking over the desk at what the other students are doing, saying that it's very unsteady and a little 'drunken'. As it was too late to change it at this point, we couldn't do much about it, but we did identify it's source; it had looked a little odd without something there and it was the only thing we had, given the chance to redo it, we'd have a much more stable shot. With my ancillary texts the only problem identified is that it was a little lacking in pictures and that the text on the page was unreadable, but that was just because iWeb wanted to display it dodgily when I clicked 'visit', it was easily fixed. I couldn't really get anymore on this, seeing as the people I asked on deviantART didn't fill in the questionairre I did on survey monkey. I also got a bit of conflict from one person saying that my homepage was too simple, whereas another said that it was a good thing that it was simplistic, so I decided to keep it pretty simple.

My predictions of the target audience were fairly accurate in my opinion, from what we saw from things like the demographics of the video. The most common age group that had viewed the video were 18-25 year olds that lived in English speaking countries, though if I remember correctly a couple of Spanish or Portugese people had seen it, but they don't count as part of the target audience. Unlike the unreliablity of certain peoples we did show the video to our class, quite a few of which would be considered part of our target audience. Another thing that I half expected was that they would prefer to see another video rather than a website seeing as most people I know that like the group would much rather watch videos than read content or actually by albums, let alone singles. I'll admit that I was a little disappointed that this was the case with our group, but I was glad at the same time since it meant they liked the video that we all worked hard on.

The TA seemed to like pretty much all of our video (oh how huge my ego must sound) With the video what seemed to be the most popular section was the part where it all rewound itself. Though one or two people didn't understand why it had happened, most people thought it was pretty clear. Another part that the people were joined in their veiw of is that the effects were excellently used. The target audience also responded well to the effects used on my webpage and digipak to create the more grungey, destroyed looks of the images within them.

WhyamIpostingthissolate?

Blogger and images are not bros. But I used photobucket to upload the image so loop hole it. B) I'm annoyed that it doesn't fit nicely onto my blog though, tch. Blogger wont even let me resize it. :'c

Whelp.

Survey money is not very helpful. |: Neither are DeviantART watchers. I got a grand total of nul replies. I am so popular.

Sarcasm. Sarcasm, everywhere.

I feel that using survey monkey is not really a very good idea, unless you have a large group of people that you can pressure into it by not allowing them to leave the room or something like that. Otherwise, I wont be using it again. . .

Probably.

Audience Feedback for video

This is a nice video to us questioning the rest of the class about our music video as evidence of audience feedback.

This is my website to go along with the video we made and my digipak . . . which I have yet to put on here.

Well, well.

We decided to change the plot line/ narrative of out story a little; we had the shots that were originally had him breaking out and then the end being a flashback but it didn't really make very much sense. So we decided to have some sort of perilous event happening, but because reshooting at this point would be impractical we decided that it would be best to play around with the effects.

The end effect reminds me a bit of those videos where you see a nuclear explosion. . . Only without the explosion, then the rewind would be like the whole "life flashing before your eyes" concept you supposedly get when you die.

Video Finishing

Oh yes. The music video is now complete. In this last lesson we played around with the colours some more and made it a sort of yellowish and blue colours until the mask comes off. We also made a simple title using a program called LiveType to create a simple title for the video like the ones that come up before and after (well, a little at the start and a little before the end) of the video to make it look more official.

In lesson today we started to mess around with the effects, since we've done all of the editing (as in putting it in order and trimming). We added in some saturation and and contrast effects to the start of the video and experimented with the chroma keyer effect. We thought that it would draw more attention to the masks and make it look more oppressive in a way. We also used the earthquake effect to help build up to him taking of the mask and it hitting the ground and added in another effect to our CCTV footage to make it look more like it was done with a camera.

We aslo got some audience feedback on our coursework so far. The majority of the feedback was good, though a continuity error we fixed. People seemed to really like our effects and thought that the narrative was pretty clear, so it's all good.

Digipak Designs

When designing this digipak I used the masks as quite a heavy influence, as you can probably see from these images. I chose to make a link between the website and the digipak by planning on using the same sort of grungy effect (not that you can see in the plan) and then a link with my video by using stills from it, namely of Andrew wearing the mask and then without it, since we hadn't found a use for that shot, and it was a pretty cool shot. But I still think that mask should be the main link with both, as they're also on my webpage, albeit small on the website.

CD Cover Comparison

Out of the three that I analysed, I decided that the KJ52 and Aesop Rock covers would be most relevant to me and decided to compare them. Both have colours (obviously) but use them very differently, where the Aesop Rock cover has a fairly limited palette, the KJ52 one seems almost random with the colours chosen, giving it a much more lively feeling than other. They also have a different feeling, the Aesop Rock's cover's cartoon makes it seem considerably more mature than the guy sitting on the television and indicates the difference in age of the target audience, leading me to believe that the Aesop Rock one is aimed at an even older audience. I feel that this is reflected in the music, as Aesop Rock's music does tend to have a much more serious tone than KJ52.

I still stand by my decision that the KJ52 iconography isn't as strong as the iconography for the Aesop Rock cover. Although the genre itself is easy to tell, within it's genre it's not very unique at all, where as there aren't that many bands with a similar iconography to Aesop Rock's. The KJ52 iconography could easily be copied and made just dissimilar enough to avoid lawsuits, like Tetris and not being able to call a falling blocks game anything ending in 'tris'.

I've learned that the iconography itself can be easily tweaked or meddled with to make two completely different looking covers that still fall within the same genre iconography. I've also learned that the late teens to very early twenties are quite the varied bunch. Many of the covers aimed at them that I've seen are completely unlike another of the genre.

The KJ52 Five-Two cover features the lead in the group of the band, suggesting that he is the main focus of the music. From this and the way he's dressed I'd say that this was a pop group or RnB. The colours used within the picture also suggest this because they're all pretty bright like pop music albums usually are. Subsequently, I'd say that the target audience were teenagers. due to the clothing style and the colours used, bright colours usually appeal to younger audiences, but by dulling them down slightly (in this case making them lighter) lifts the target audience's age range from children to teens. I think it's not a very strong iconography itself, but it could be easily translated to other media, i.e. using light colours on a website or the artist wearing the same style of clothes in the video.

The Aesop rock cover for Bazooka Tooth features a cartoon of a boy, rather than images of the band, implying the the band is indie or alternative. The colours used are also mostly yellows, browns and greens, again a common colour scheme for indie music. From this and the more mature style of the cartoon, I'd say that the target audience were people in their late teens to mid twenties. The fact that they seem to be in school uniform doesn't change my opinions on the matter, due to the colours and style. I think it's successful at creating a brand identity

purely because of it's cartoonish style, in a similar way to the Gorillaz are famous for their cartoon alter egos and I can quite easily see them having an animated video and patterns like the wallpaper in the background.

The cover for the Tchaikovsky Collectors edition, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra features a photo of Tchaikovsky as the main focus, and the addition of decorative floral patterning indicates that this is a classical album. The mentions of symphonies and orchestras also helps to make this completely clear (though the Trans Siberian Orchestra's probably not the best example for mentioning orchestra related names connoting classical music.) From this I would say that the target audience is probably gender neutral, due to the mention of Romeo and Juliet, and aimed at people around 28-36 because of the grey colour scheme. I'd also say that it was people fond of Tchaikovsky's works, due to the large picture of him on the cover. I think that this could potentially be a fairly strong iconography, though it could have been stronger had it been related more to St Petersburg. But as It's probably for people that know the artist, they would probably know that he's Russian.

Narrative Filming Done

Awwyis. We've finished filming the narrative part of our film. It looks pretty awesome so far, but the doors here don't know how to close themselves. They kept opening when they were like, less than an inch open. Bleh. But apart from that, all went well. Though we might not have enough for the whole song, we can just film a quick performance if we need more meat on the bones. To make a clear iconographical link we could have the group members wearing the mask and can then put images from the video into our CD covers and website.

Brand Identity

How have you used web page conventions to create brand identity?

I have used the conventions of a webpage to create brand identity

Layout/navigation/video
Specific aspects of the convention (what have you produced, how did you you do it?)
How the use of the convention reinforces the use of the convention reinforces the recording artist's iconography and brandidentity

Haha Awesome.

We started our filming yesterday. I think it went pretty well, we got quite a few shots of the large group of children marching and in the classroom, but I'm not entirely sure we're gonna have enough footage. We might have to improvise performance or something. Hopefully not though.

Shooting Schedule

If we don't have the masks by Wednesday:
-Shoot the CCTV shots of the building. This will be needed to do without any person in shot.
If we do have the masks be Wednesday:
-We do all the marching shots with the kids, all shots where they are moving in main street e.g. the shoes, the rebel looking
round the queue etc. We will have to do these shots during lesson time so no disturbance will occur.
-Shoot the classroom shots where all the students are working then the rebel runs out. This will involve the whole cast as well as
the marching will. This will require an empty classroom which won't be interfered with during shooting.
-We will then do the escape scene which will also involve the whole cast including teachers. This will require some outside work
therefore the weather will need to be right - sunny, not wet.
-Then we will do the toilet scene with the rebel boy. This will not take long but is an important part of the video.
-We then will shoot important shots such as the CCTV or certain shots of the teachers e.g. one walking on the bridge.

This shooting schedule can be spread out over two days but the same cast would be preferred in order of them knowing what they were doing and how to act the part etc. If this isn's possible then it isn't a major problem as most of the cast are wearing masks so no one will know we haven't used the same people. The rebel will have to be the same as his identity is shown and to keep with continuity he has to stay the same.

Masks

For our film we needed to include masks to make the group of kids all look the same. Originally we had planned to use plain white masks. But when we saw the the comedy and tragedy masks like the old theatre ones. We're going to get 29 happy masks and one sad one for the rebelling child to wear. We had also considered using the editing software to blur their faces, but this would have been far too difficult to do due to the limitations of our software and it would have taken more time than we have to edit each and every one of the faces in each of the frames.

We also plan to use chroma key to make the gold of the mask stand out in the shot to draw attention to him since he's the main focus of most of the video.

How have you used web page conventions to create brand identity?

I used a combination of Gimp and Photoshop to create my banner, the latter of the two ing the preferred software, even though I only actually used it for the font effects. For the background of my banner I used a photo of Hollywood to relate to the name of the group, setting it to multiply so that it would pick up the grungier looking texture and greyish blue colours of the layer below. I then used these colours as my website colour scheme, bringing out the blue on one of the buildings into the back of my menu bar to make it stand out more. Though I had originally been going for more green colours, I decided that the bluey grey would look better. I've also only used red once in the logo to draw the audience's eyes to it, just to make sure they'd see it. I also used a different font for the name of the single to be released in the corner, again to draw the audience's eyes too it, since I want them to buy said single. I tried to keep it relevant to the lyrics and topic of the song rather than the band itself, but used colours from the rest of the site so that it would still fit in.

For the main body of the text I used arial, everyone's default font just to make sure that people could read it. I would have used the type writer is font as well, but I thought it'd be best if they could actually read it as if they can't read it, I can't convince them to like the band and spend their money on them.

In lesson we discussed our ideas for our music video. We decided to do it about the fairly oppressive way we tend to view the school system. We're planning to make them seem like prisoners with in this system, using teachers like a sort of dictator figures and riot police. To give this narrative we're going to have one nonconforming student that's 'breaking the mould' and later encourages the other students to rebel along side him.

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Music Video Moodboard