R&P Post 63: Finishing our Products!

Hi there! Me and my group have now officially finished all of our three products including our digipak, website and music video.

This is our digipak:

Click on the image below to access our website:

This is our music video:



All of these individual products are connected through different features. One of the most important features that connects them all together is the colour scheme. Throughout our products we have used the same colour scheme of red and blue lighting. In our music video, we used red and blue lighting after the fourth 'level' of our music video when the couple are celebrating their victory of stealing the money from the 'Mafia' group. We also made effective use of lighting during the first scene of our music video which shows the couple in the taxi. Here we used purple and blue lighting in order to give it a more appealing aesthetic for our audience and to make it look more exciting, keeping our audience interested in our music video. We also used this red and blue lighting in the photographs of Kati in our website and our digipak, demonstrating how we have used the same colour scheme throughout our products in order to emphasise our marketing process. We also learnt that by using the same/ a similar colour scheme constantly to market an artist, as they become increasingly popular, their audience(s) come to associate these particular colours with the artist, making them more memorable to their audience.

Another feature that connects all of our products together is the use of costume. In our music video we used a variety of different outfits for our artist, Kati. This primarily included crop tops, off-the-shoulder tops and skirts, as well as a silver-coloured sparkly jumpsuit  and red velvet dress, both of which represented our artist's more fun and more party-like side which relates to the partying hobby of our mainly teenage audience. We also used these outfits in the photoshoot that we did for our digipak and website. For example, on the front page of our website Kati is wearing the same outfit as she is wearing on the front panel of our digipak, consisting of a striped black and white crop top and a denim jacket. By using these same outfits we have heavily emphasised the appearance of our artist across to our audience, as well as enhancing our artist's representation of being a feminine and party-loving person who our audience can personally relate to.

In order to really reinforce our artist's representation to our audience, we also used social media (see my previous post 'Creating Social Media Accounts for our Artist'). We created an Instagram and Twitter account for our artist where we followed other musicians who are in the same genre as our artist, such as Katy Perry, Selena Gomez and Dua Lipa. On these social media platforms we also followed brands and different stores, including Topshop, New Look and The Body Shop, all of which are mainstream and popular stores which our audience regularly shop at, demonstrating the extent to which we have considered our audience and ensured that they can find a personal connection with our artist. 

From this you can see the various ways in which we have connected all of our different products together. By completing these tasks, in particular we have learnt the importance of colour schemes in marketing and just how important the audience is in this process. By making our artist's appearance memorable to our audience as well as providing personal links between our artist and our audience, this is how we have linked our digipak, website and music video together.

R&P Post 62: Opinions of our Actors

Hi and welcome back to another research and planning post! Below you are able to watch a short video whereby Kati talks about how it was to work with us:

Working with Kati has been brilliant fun and we have found that she has been very easy to work with and has helped us much in the process of filming. 

Dexter has been slightly challenging to work with at times as he enjoys improvising a lot, meaning that he has sometimes struggled to follow our ideas and directions. 

Overall, it has been a very positive experience working with aspiring actors and we wish them the best for the future!

R&P Post 61: Website Updates!

Hey there and welcome back to extra updates on the creation of our website! We have now added a 'News', 'Gallery', 'Merch' and 'Contact' page to our website.

On our News page we added feed from the Twitter and Instagram accounts that we created for our artist, meaning that our audience will be able to access our artist's activity on social media. We also added a pretend 'prize draw' whereby by entering their details into the website, members of our audience can win a signed copy of our artist's debut album 'Love Like This'. This is a way of drawing more people in to our website and attracting them to our artist. Another thing that we have included on this part of our website is a short video of Kati speaking about her debut single 'You Are The Solution' which you can watch below:



This is what the News page of our website looks like:

We also created a Gallery page for our website. On this page we have uploaded images of Kati from the photoshoot that we did for our digipak as well as other images found from the internet that relate to the interests of our audience, such as pictures of festivals, sunsets and beaches and we have also uploaded images of neon signs to represent the colour scheme that we are using throughout . This is what the Gallery page of our website looks like:

From this you are also able to see how we have added links to Kati's Twitter, Instagram and YouTube account and also a pretend Facebook account. As well as this, we have put copyright marks at the bottom and the 'Terms and Conditions' and 'Privacy' policy which you can see below:

In my previous blog post, I explained how i created different merchandise for the Merch page of our website. This is what our Merch page looks like:

In the image above you can see the different range of products that we are offering our audience as merchandise for our artist, which includes:

• Kati's debut album 'Love Like This'
• Kati's 2018 UK tour poster
• Poster showing a photo of Kati with her name and 'You Are The Solution' written onto it.
• White and black T-shirt with the picture that we are planning to use for the front panel of our digipak with 'Kati' and 'Love Like This' written onto it. 
• phone case with 'Kati' written onto it.
• Grey, black and pink 2018 UK tour hoodie
• Grey hoodie with 'Kati' and 'You Are The Solution' written onto it. 

On this front page of the Merch page, some of the different colours of merchandise clothing cannot actually be seen because we have decided that when we have different versions of the same product, when our audience clicks on one product they will then be able to see the different versions available.

For example:

In our merchandise, we have aimed our products at both boys and girls in order to make our audience wider. We have appealed to both genders through using black, grey and pink colours of the clothing items. 

The last page we have on our website is the Contact page in which we have added contact details for our artist's management, booking, PR and record label. For each of these individual sections we have provided a email address and telephone number so that our audience would be able to contact our audience's higher management if they wanted to. Alongside this, we have added a map of where the headquarters for Colombia Records UK (the record label we have chosen for our artist) is located and have also provided a section where our audience can subscribe to a newsletter for updates on our artist. Here is an image of the creation of this page:

This is what our Contact page now looks like:

So we have now finished the vast majority of our website! There are still a few changes that we are going to make, for instance we are planning to add a front page to our website which further advertises our artist's debut single before the audience can actually enter the website itself. Although Lesley has been the one responsible for creating our website, we have all learnt things from the process of making it, such as learning which aesthetic looks best for which page and learning about different website tools which enable us to edit text and images. 

Come back again soon for more updates!

R&P 60: Editing Update Number 2!

Hey there! Welcome to another update on our editing process of our music video!

We have now began to add certain special effects to our music video in order to portray the video game aspect of our music video more clearly to our audience. 

For example, during the third 'level' of our music video whereby the couple are attacked by two thugs, we have added animated cartoon hearts that look as though they belong in a video game:



These hearts represent the number of 'lives' that the character of the boy has during our music video. In this scene, he is actually shot, causing him to lose a life as is shown in these animated hearts. These hearts were downloaded from giphy.com which then enabled us to easily import them into Final Cut Pro. 

After we had added them to our library in Final Cut Pro, we then selected a section of them to use. We then used the transform tool to shrink them in order to position them into the correct size for this part of our music video:



After this, we then had to get rid of the white background surrounding the hearts. In order to do this we used the Keying effect:



This effect then made the background of the hearts transparent, making the white colour disappear. This image shows how we then ensured that these hearts showed in other clips during this scene:

 After this, we then moved the hearts to the top right-hand corner of the screen, meaning that this is where it would always appear throughout this scene. 

Another special effect that we used for this scene was for the moment when the boy is shot. For this we added the shape of an arrow into this exact shot:



This arrow essentially represents the bullet shooting out of the gun as it fires. After this we then used the transform tool to shrink the arrow in order to position it into the correct size:



This then positioned the arrow in line with the gun itself. Once we did this, we then changed the shape of the arrow in order to make it rounder:



This made the arrow appear more like the shape of a bullet. Unfortunately, this effect was actually unsuccessful and did not work with this shot so instead we tried something new. 

This involved using the masking effect for when one of the thugs hits the boy in our music video, which would hopefully give the effect of a glitch which is very common in video games, thus portraying this aspect more clearly across to our audience.





The above images show we drew a mask around the thugs that were attacking the boy and the girl in our music video. Unfortunately, this special effect also didn't work so we were unable to use it. However, we had to ensure that we had at least one effect within our music video that represented the video game aspect so we tried one last effect. 

This was using the 'Bad TV' effect which is commonly seen in televisions when they glitch. We used this effect for the very first shot of our music video:

By using this effect right at the start of our music video, this immediately hints the video game narrative across to our audience, signifying that this is all actually just a fake. 

The last part of editing our music video involved adding the titles of the video game. We are using this effect for the last part of our music video in which previous footage is replayed, which is a convention of video games, with the text 'Crime 'N' Love Story Mode Complete' is shown, alongside options saying 'Replay' and 'Menu'. At this point in our music video, our narrative of everything being set in a video game is revealed to our audience. 

The first step for this was to add the text that we wanted:

We then changed the size of the font in order to make it appear larger on screen:



As well as this, in order to use more of the conventions of video games we used 3D text which is more bold and prominent and commonly seen in video games:



After this, we then added a glitch effect to this text just before it appears on screen. The image below shows how we opened the video animation section of Final Cut Pro and then made the font opacity increase and then decrease. This then makes the font fade and then show again but it only does this for a split second, giving the effect of a glitch:



We also changed the colours of our font to pink and blue which relate to the colour scheme that we used for the filming of our music video. 

Overall, from this we have learnt many different editing techniques and the different ways in which we can use special effects. In our group, Destinie has been responsible for editing but we have all kept updated on the editing process as she has edited our music video more and more. As a group we have learnt about different tools available on Final Cut Pro, such as the transform tool, with Destinie talking us through these different tools and special effects. 

R&P Post 59: Digipak Updates!

Hello and welcome back! We have now finished creating our digipak!

Previously we had only finished the front panel of our digipak which looks like this:

However, we have now completed the whole of our digipak! So after we created the front panel, we moved on to the back panel. 

For this panel we decided to use this photograph of Kati:

We chose to use another photograph of Kati in the same red and blue lighting in order to make her appearance to our audience more memorable. This will be achieved by repeating the use of these colours for the lighting, and by constantly using these colours in our marketing processes, our audience will come to associate these colours with our artist. 

So once we had chosen this photograph, we had to decide where we were going to position the names of Kati's songs on to the image. We have decided to add our artist's on to the back panel of our digipak because this is what the back panels of digipaks are always used for. It also allows our audience to easily see what songs are available on this album, making it easily accessible. 

Firstly we decided to edit out the chair in this image:

We chose to crop the chair out because it meant that we would have more space to work with when it came to adding the songs of the album. Once we had cropped out the chair by using the 'polygonal' tool which allows you to select specific areas of an image and then change them to how you want them to appear. Once we had edited the chair out of the picture, we changed the canvas size in order to size it to the correct measurements of our template. Then when this was completed, we used the 'polygonal' tool again to select the image of Kati herself, and we then copied and pasted it onto the correct canvas with a black background. When we had positioned the image of Kati correctly onto the new canvas we then blurred the outline of Kati's figure using the 'blur' tool to blend the image of her more into the black background so that it looked more natural. 

Once we had finished editing the photograph, we then had to add our artist's songs onto it. These are the names of the songs that we have included on Kati's debut album:

• You Are The Solution
• Girls Girls Girls 
• Electric Love
• The Boy
• T-Shirt
• Delete
• Advantage 
• Dream Of Me 
• Hold Me Close
• Love Like This

The names of each of these songs were inspired by our audience's interests and hobbies, and what our artist could represent to them, enabling them to connect on a more personal level with our artist. For example, Girls Girls Girls relates to our audience as the vast majority of our artist's audience will be young girls, thus this song title will stir their interest. This is similar to the song The Boy which implies a certain level of romance which is a key feature in our audience's lives. This demonstrates how we really considered the marketing of our artist and ensured that there is a constant connection between our audience and our artist. 

After this we had nearly finished completing our back panel. However, a few more details were still needed. When researching the back panels of digipaks we found that they always included a barcode, the name of the production company, the logo of the record label and copyright legalities. So we added all of these and this is now what our back panel looks like:

So once we had completed the back panel of our digipak, we moved on to the disc panel where we would place the physical CD for Kati's debut album. For this panel we chose to use another photograph of Kati:

The next step was to then change the canvas size in order to scale it to the correct measurements of the template. We then also decided to add a circle over the top of this image in order to show exactly where we would position the disc. When we first imported this circle into Photoshop it blocked out some of the photograph of Kati so we then selected it, using the 'magic wand' tool which automatically selects parts of an image that you click on, and once this was selected we decreased its opacity. This meant that all of the photograph of Kati was now visible. This is now what our disc panel looks like:

So once we had completed this panel of our digipak, all we had left to do was to complete one more panel. For this we decided to use a different image found from the internet. We decided that we wanted to use an image of graphically-designed roses. We researched what images we could possibly use for this on the internet and found picture such as these:

After we had discussed this as a group, we decided that our favourite image was the one in the bottom left-hand corner. We decided to use this image because not only do roses connote themes of femininity (a key theme for our female part of our audience who make up the majority), but this image also makes use of neon lights which makes it a much more exciting image for our audience. We also included images of neon lights and signs in our Pinterest moodboard that we created to represent who our audience would be and what interests they would have (accessible in one of my previous blog posts). This demonstrates how our audience would further be able to connect with our artist through including an image which includes neon lights. 

Once we had decided on which image to use for the last panel of our digipak we then imported it into Photoshop in order to edit its background. We wanted to change the colour of this background to a simple black in order to suit the rest of our colour scheme which predominantly consists of red and blue. Once we had changed the background to black, we then blurred the outline of the flowers by using the 'blur' tool in order to make it look more natural. As well as this, we used the 'paintbrush' tool on Photoshop to change the colour of the stem to green. In the original image it looks brown rather than green and we wanted to change this. So by selecting a green colour and using the 'paintbrush' tool, we painted over the stem but we also ensured that we decreased the opacity down to 20% in order to make it less obvious that this stem had been edited, once again giving the picture a more natural look. After this we added the name of Kati's album with a hashtag for the purpose of generating social media activity regarding our debut artist, enhancing the marketing side of things, and also added the link to Kati's website. We decided to add this text in order to ensure that this last panel did not look too empty compared to the others and whilst it was still relatively simplistic, it still had details within it.

So once this was finished we had completed the last panel of our digipak. We then put all the different panels together and positioned them in the correct order. This is what our digipak now looks like:

So we have now officially completed our digipak! We created our digipak entirely by using Photoshop which has significantly enhanced our skills with using this software programme, teaching us more about the different tools within Photoshop and how to use them and what to use them for. This has been very beneficial for us as a group as before creating our digipak, we had minimal experience with Photoshop but this task has taught us much more advanced skills with using this programme. For instance, we have learnt how to use different selection tools, including the 'magic wand', 'magnetic' and 'polygonal' tools, which have been very useful for us when we have wanted to take one part of an image and import it into a new document or another separate image. 

Thanks for reading!

R&P Post 58: Survey for the Rough Edit of our Music Video

Hey there! Now we have started to edit our music video we have created a rough edit so that we an show people and get their opinions on it. We want to show the rough cut to people in order to see that they understand our narrative and that the conventions we have used are clear.

Below you can watch the video for our rough edit:



This video only shows half of our music video and this is what we have edited so far. Once we had completed a rough edit, we completed a survey for this on Survey Monkey.

These are the questions that we asked for this questionnaire:

1. What is your age?
2. What is your sex?
3. From watching the music video, what do you think the narrative was?
4. How clear was it that it was set in a video game? 
5. If the concept of the video game was clear, how?
6. If the concept was not clear, why not?
7. What genre do you think the music video matches and why?
8. What suggestions do you have to improve the music video?

Answers for question 1:

From this you can see that the majority of people who answered our questionnaire where aged 17-18 years which is a key part of our target audience. 

Question 2:

From this you can see that the majority of the people who answered our survey were female who are the main part of our target audience. 

Question 3:

Here we have the answers for our third question. When we read through these answers we discovered that most people understand our narrative. Their answers showed us that they understand that our music video is focused upon the romantic relationship between a boy and a girl and that they have a 'Bonnie-and-Clyde'-type relationship. What this tells us is that our narrative so far is very clear to our audience. 

Question 4:

Whilst from the answers from question 3 we saw that the vast majority of our audience understand that our narrative is centred upon a romantic relationship between a boy and a girl, they did not understand that it was actually a video game. Our fourth question asked people how clear they thought the video game aspect of our music video is, and from the answers (above) you can see that much of our audience did not think this was clear at all. However, this is understandable because we have only created a rough cut of our music video, and in this no aspects of the video game narrative are actually revealed. So although this does tell us that we need to work more on this side of our music video in order to make this part of our narrative clearer for our audience, we do realise that because we have not included this part of our narrative in our rough cut, meaning that we do not expect people to understand this. Below you can see the reasons why some people thought that the video game aspect was clear, and why others thought that is was not clear:

Question 5: If the concept of the video game was clear, how? -

Question 6: If the concept was not clear, why not?

Question 7:

This question asked people what music genre they thought our music video falls in to and in the images above, you can see that the vast majority of our respondents thought that it belongs to the pop genre. The song we have chosen does indeed fall into the pop category and in pop music videos, mainstream themes are often used, such as romance and dance. In particular, romance is a key theme throughout the narrative of our music video, demonstrating how we have used the themes of pop music in our pop video. When we looked though the answers for this question, we also found that some people thought that our music video belongs to the dance as well as the pop genre, which we also believe. Whilst we have chosen a rather mainstream pop song, it also has undertones of dance and festival music to it, meaning that it also reaches out into other genres rather than just being a simple, generic pop song. We have also slightly subverted some of the key themes seen in  pop music videos through our video game narrative, as it turns out that the romantic relationship represented in our music video is actually all a fake, and is simply just the boy playing a video game. 

Question 8

In our last question we asked people if they had any recommendations for ways in which we can improve our music video. When we looked through these answers we found that many people thought that we should improve the video game aspect of our music video by making it a more obvious part of our narrative. One person (the last answer) suggested that we could make this clearer by including titles in a video game type of style which we are now considering. Whilst this was how the majority of our respondents answered this question, one person recommended that we improved the lighting of our night-time shots (specifically the shots of the couple in the taxi) through colour correction which we are also planning to do through editing. 

Overall, from this survey we have learnt that we need to make the video game aspect of our narrative much more clearer, which is understandable as we have not specifically included this part of our narrative in our rough cut. However, the vast majority of our audience do understand that our narrative is focused upon the romantic relationship between a boy and a girl, as well as that our music video falls into the pop genre which is the genre of our song. 

Thanks for reading and see you soon!

R&P Post 57: Creating Merchandise for our Website!

Hello! Welcome back to my research and planning post! We have now started to create merchandise for the 'Merch' page of our website which I am responsible for creating. For this we have included a range of different products, including T-shirts, hoddies, posters and phone cases.

One of the products that we have created is a white T-shirt with a photo of Kati (we are planning to use this same photo for the front panel of our digipak) and her name alongside 'Love Like This' printed onto it:                                                                 

This product was created through Photoshop and below you can see screenshots taken from this process, demonstrating how it was created:

However, in the end we decided that we preferred just having 'Kati' written onto the phone case rather than 'Kati' and 'You Are The Solution', as it gave it a more simplistic and stylish aesthetic. This is what our final product now looks like:

After I had began to photoshop multiple different merchandise products, I came to realise that I was using the same basic process for all of them, meaning that I became more and more efficient with the different products that I created. Photoshop also became easier for me to use as I used it more and more, and I found that this was the main process I used for creating merchandise products through Photoshop:

• Step 1: Find an image of the product that you want to use via the internet.
• Step 2: Import this image into Photoshop and position it correctly (e.g. rotate or crop if necessary).
• Step 3: Write the text you want to use onto it and position it in the correct place.
• Step 4: Make sure that the text you have added appears to be part of the product by using any necessary opacity effects (e.g. darken, colour burn etc.) 
• Step 5: Add any of your own images you would like, e.g. the album cover for your artist. 
• Step 6: Repeat steps 3 and 4 for this new image. 
• Step 7: When you are satisfied that your product is finished, save it as a JPEG and then you are done!

Here are all of the merchandise products that we are going to use for the website:

Posters:

Music (Kati's debut album):

Phone cases:

T-shirts:

Hoodies:

From this wide range of merchandise, what you can see is how we have catered for different members of our target audience. Whilst we are aware that the majority of our target audience will be made up of young girls, we are also aiming our artist at teenage boys as well and we have done this by using a range of colours through our merchandise. For example, with the clothing we have used black and grey colours to appeal to the male part of our audience as well as our the female part of our audience, as grey and black are usually viewed as gender-neutral colours. However, in order to emphasise the marketing of our artist across to the female part of our audience, we have also included a pink hoodie in our merchandise, as the colour pink is often aimed at girls in the marketing world. 

From this task I have come to grips with some of the more technical aspects of Photoshop, such as using different tools including the eye dropper tool and the opacity tool. Creating this merchandise has taught me how to use Photoshop more effectively and as I have begun to familiarise myself with its various different tools, I have become more and more efficient in using this software.  

Come back again soon to hear more about how our website is coming along!