genre research into digipaks

Avril Lavigne

   

This is the digipak from Avril’s greatest hits CD, we chose to analys her because her genre is pop punk which is similar to our electro pump she is just slightly more ‘tomboy’ than our look is but she still appeals to young girls like us. The theme of the digipak relates very well to her style and the way she comes across to her fans, her style aspect is very important as she has such a different style to most female singers. Avril’s look is very punk and rebellious represented by the clothes she wears and the dark eye make up you can clearly see in the photos. The black background and bones on the CD clearly link with the rebellious genre style. The pink areas sell to young girls as it’s a popular colour with girls and shows that she still represents feminism. The large photos sell her to fans as she is looking very glamorous and that gives young girls a reason to look up to her.  I think this digipak is very successful as even I, not a massive fan of Avril can see that it all links very well to what Avril represents to strongly targets her young girls target audience.

Lily Allen

This digipak is for Lily’s ‘its not me, its you’ special edition album.  The font and size text for Lily’s name is very bold and clear with a white outline making it stand out, which means as there is no close up on her face people will be able to quickly see whose album it is. The digipak is unconventional in the way there is no big picture of her, I think this shows that she is not all about her looks she cares more about being creative. The large letters in the picture are relevant as they are using in her ‘Fear’ music video spelling out her name. I like how the front and back are lied out cleanly, there isn’t too much going on, which I feel is pointless as it draws your attention away from the music. I think the large 3D letters are really cool, and as she is a fuck out going girl, the subtle use of colour make it that bit more quirky. I think this digipak represents her in a slightly different way, as its not evolved around her look its more her expressing her style. Its also very unconventional of all the fonts to be different people normally stick with just one for all the different titles, instead she has a different font for the album name, its in small hand writing under her name which is harder to read but shows her as some one who doesn’t follow all the rules. As the layout for the front and back are very simple but memorable so are affective, and there is a clear link between the two as they both have the large letters.

With both Avril and Lily they have bands but in in their pictures you can't see anyone else and theres not even a hint of instruments which just shows how the female singers are the mosth important people, this is how we will want it with it all being about Emma.

Whose getting what

the group discused how Sarah had sent some emails to our cast about costumes, where she found out our bar tender had the right costume we wanted.

they looked at the rest of the costumes Sarah had researched into:

Decisions were made that Greg and Toby would be our removal guys wearing big boots, denim jeans and a plain white top, which are easy as the boys will have these outfits. We aslo wanted them to have these builder belts to make it very obvious what they were, i found that i have one at home so we need to source where we can get another one from.

  So Hendrick (the bar man) has his costume, Greg and Toby (set builders) have theirs, Jack (the potographer) has a simple jeans and top costume that we have seen him in and liked, we want Maxim and Theo (band members and cafe boys) to wear casual dark clothes which is very simple and im sure they have these, Plum (make up artist) will be wearing all dark / black clothes so that she doesnt take any attention away from Emma.

I went and spoke to Jack to make sure he understood everything as he wasnt replying well to our emails.
Mina and I went up and edited the annimatic that we filmed yesterday in the lesson, while we did this Layla and Sarah continued working on costume.

This is a list they made for everyone:

This is a list of props we need to ask the drama department if they have:

this is an email Layla sent to Emma to see weather she had any of her costume already :

This is an email Sarah sent the cast askig to do a rehersal:

What we have left to do :

• get the rest of our costumes
• buy our props that we are getting
• paint sets andput it all up
• production schedule
• call sheet
• organise more rehersals with Emma

Copy right permission

As part of making a music video with an existing song we had to contact the artists or label they are signed to too ask for permission to use their song. Because the band aren't hugely well known, there wasn't a huge amount of information on them but i found their small label company and sent them an email. I never got a reply from them, so I'm not sure whether they saw it or not but we at least tried to contact them.

the Storyboard

This is our finalised time line that was edited from after the meeting with the set designer:

As our time line changed so we had to re-do the storyboard so that it fit, i also agreed to film it to make our annimatic.

costumes

While i was away Layla and Sarah started researching into the different costumes in our video. This research is very important as our video is 60s theme we need to make sure that all the outfits fit the look otherwise the mise en scene won't quite work, its also important for us to source our costumes now so we don't have to worry about them the week before and we will be able to get the stuff we want now.
They started with Google researching 'Cheap 60s vintage clothes' and found some good websites 

A good website that Layla found was called 'Pop Boutique', the clothes were too expensive for our budgets but it was helpful to have a look at the styles.

these dresses wouldn't quite be flattering enough for Emma as we want her to look sexy and they aren't quite enough, but as the style is so 60s we will want to find something very similar. The look we really want is a Twiggy style for Emma, its perfectly 60s, girly but still has the sex appeal, but these dresses weren't enough like hers so they carried on searching.

They were struggling to find flattering enough dresses so they tried looking up 'Twiggy style dresses'

Layla found and thought a pink 'Hibiscus' dress was most like what we wanted, in further research she found an article with a similar dress in it from Monsoon

sadly the dress was sold out but it was very helpful and showed that if we researched enough we could find one that would fit in, luckily Layla managed to find similar dresses:

the meeting with the set designer

I was very annoyed to have missed this meeting and felt very bad but we all feel very confident about our music video preparations as everyone is working hard and we all know what we want the finished product to look like.

In the meeting the girls presented the idea of our music video to the designer,They went through step by step the individual sets, first was the dressing room:

We will be able to provid a lot of the props for this room luckily. It was decided that we will have cream/white flooring and walls which is what we wanted, this is simplest and what they would have for a dressing room and to make it look more girly we can decorate it with flowers, lights and pinky objects.

First photo shoot:

This is an easy set for props as we just need to same white/creamy flooring and walls as the make up room and then all the little girly props (balloons, flowers and lights) we will be able to easily buy ourselves. 

Café:

Before I left we discussed the idea of having a window as the back of the café to make it look like they are inside but don’t actually being able to see what’s behind the window. To hide that its not actually a window to outside it was decided that there would be curtains hiding most of the glass. There was also talk of using the green screen for this but we need to look into that to see weather it would actually look any good.

Second photo shoot:

They presented the psychedelic set idea and decided it would be best to either paint the back round or project it. After disusing this they felt that we should add in another shoot to make sure its interesting enough. For this we had wanted to do a beach photo shoot like it was in the Dior advert, but it got cut out so we are bringing it back in.

Bar:

It was agreed that using a bistro set would work much better and will fit the mise en scene. They asked for stalls but this is something we might be able to get from the theatre department. The set designer will provide a bar that is great, and we are also getting a checkered floor, which I think will look really good as it was common in cafes. 

Beach photo shoot:

To get changed into a bikini Layla thought it would be a good idea to use some sort of a dressing screen where you could see her silhouette of her taking her clothes of and throwing them over. The set designer has sand for us to use we just need to source a few props like a chair/sun lounger.

There was also talk of dropping the psychedelic shoot which im not too sad about, instead we could try and incorporate the silhouette idea in the between bit of the shoots. The set designer suggested we use a projector, the backdrop from the photo shoot, and we can have a ‘behind the scenes’ look as we will be seeing her body shape from behind the projector. This idea still needs more research and discussing but I think it has potential.

From the sounds of it everyone was happy with how the meeting went, there seems to have been no drastic problems we just need to organize our other photo shoot sets more. A mistake, something we had forgotten to focus on was what Emma would be doing in the bar and café scenes, so we need to go through the choreography for these bits. We will have a screen testing with all the cast to see if it works.

before talking to set designer

Unfortunately for personal reason i wasn't in school for the week, i discussed as much as i could with the group before I left. Here's the work i missed :

luckily Layla and I got the set design done before i left and i had already done the story board so they just mounted them onto one big sheet.

There was still the issue about the second photo shoot when i left but we knew it couldn't really be the burlesque idea as that doesn't fit with the rest of the sixties theme, so we were still thinking what sixties photo shoot could we do?
The girls came up with the idea of a psychedelic/hippy/flower power theme as this was very popular back in the 60s. Layla's idea was inspired by a photo she found on the internet, she wanted to have a large psychedelic back round with some white steps that are made to look like they are coming out of the back round, these would be good for Emma to use as a prop while on the shoot. When i was told about this, i wasn't sure if it fit with the type of 60s theme we were using but thought it was a great idea so the group started looking into how we would create the back drop. there were a few different options of either a green screen, painting the back round ourselves or we could print it, they left it to discus with the set designer.

Layla and sarah went through and organised all the different props that we are going to need for each individual set, which ones we would be able to source and which ones they needed to talk to the set designer about getting hold of, luckily i think there are few different props that we will already have.

Other than sourcing props from ourselves Layla and Sarah went to the school theatre department to see if they had any of the props we needed as a way of reducing costs and using what the school already has, they said they can provide the group with bistro set of table and chairs which is great!

While Layla and I finished our set design, Sarah filmed the storyboard for our animatic and Mina worked on a list of ancillary products. we also decided in a production meeting that we have at the beginning and end of every lesson that we will use the studio for all our filming and we will use the photo shoot for our other media products that go with the music video (website, digipak etc)

 this is the work Mina did on our ancillary products scanned onto the computer.