CD cover analysis

This is my analysis of another artists digipack. I chose Florence and the Machine as she is a successful artist in the soft/alternative rock genre.


Florence

Song title

As we have to come up with a new name for the track we are using in our music video, our group started to brain storm various possibilities. As I have mentioned in a previous post, we have noticed that the majority of Kings of Leon song titles involve only one or two words and are quite mysterious, not giving away a lot about the song content. As the song is originally called "Charmer" we have interpreted this as a female fan/ex-girlfriend who is obsessive or in love with one of the band members, trying to charm them. For this reason we have come up with words that reflect this interpretation and came up with either "Femme" or "She". We decided that "She" would probably be the best option as it is a simple, catchy song title that we think sounds effective for a song title. It will look effective on our digipacks that we are creating and will hopefully stick in people's heads as well as reflect our song choice.

Track list

Our group have been considering different track names and once again used the manual random word generator as we thought this was a fun, effective way to come up with names. As most of the sentences were very random and didn't really make sense, we decided to break down and mix up the sentences to make effective track names. After researching into other rock genre track names, we found that they were mainly one or two words rather than whole sentences so this is another reason why we broke it down.
These are some examples of Kings of Leon track lists on the backs of their cd's:








Looking at these names we saw that some of the names are very strange and random and some involve peoples names and some involve names of places. Baring this in mind we came up possible band names from our random generator including:

Mag
Geilz
To Somebody
Cactus
Holy Leggings
Idiosyncracy
Proclaimation
Atonomy
Damaged
Magnolia
She
Magnetism
Check It Out
Molly's Mullet
and
Femme!

These are some photos of the process of how we came up with these ideas and song titles:

Meeting log update

Filming day 2

Last week we filmed for the second day where we used our school hall stage for the performance element of our music video.
Unfortunately at last minute, our 4th band member could not make it so we had to quickly think of a solution. As we could not find anyone else who was available we contemplated making one of us part of the band but as we are all girls we decided it would not work and just make the video look strange. Instead we just carried on with the 3 band members who came, Tom, Josh and Ben, and made the lead singer also play bass. Tom was our lead singer and bassist, Josh played drums and Ben played guitar.
We set up the stage to look professional by borrowing amps and microphones from the school and also had jackets and guitar cases around the stage to make it look like a casual band practice. I was really happy with the mise en scene of the shots and although you can tell it is a school stage and it looks quite dull, we are going to put it into black and white and play with the settings to make it look more effective. At first, the boys were quite shy when performing and it didn't look very good so to try and overcome this we set up the shots and made sure they looked good and then turned around or left the hall to let them perform the song without us watching, this worked surprisingly well and we managed to get some really good shots. After running through the song twice the whole way through with the camera on all of the band members, we moved the camera and started to experiment with shots. We got close ups of the lead singer's mouth lip syncing to the song and also of each instrument. One of my favourite shots was of the bass drum as it was vibrating when it was hit and will look really good if we get it to the exact beat of the song. Some of the other shots we got were in fact inspired by the original video for the Kings of Leon song Charmer, because as we were watching it we really liked the shot where the camera is positioned so you can see the lead singer and the drummer over his shoulder. We also experimented with shadows and got a really good shot of the drummer with the lead singers shadow on the curtain behind him dancing around.

Overall I was really pleased with how the filming went and how professional the band looked and co operated. As we were using the school hall we were unfortunately limited with timing so when we start editing our video we may find that we are missing a few shots that we will have to film again at a later date but hopefully it won't be too much and will be easy to put together.

Album name

We have finally decided that we are going to have a self titled album as we cannot find a suitable album name that we can all agree on and think represents our genre. This will look quite effective on our digipack as digipacks from the rock genre are generally quite plain with minimal writing on the front. It is not uncommon to see self titled albums from the rock genre and these are some examples that I found:

Band name

We have now decided on a band name of "The Mags" this is due to our research of other alternative rock bands who have "The" followed by another short word. Examples of these bands are:


The Killers




















The Charlatans













The Cribs



























The Cure












The Kooks





















Mag is also a word that is used among our group so it adds a personal feel throughout our work and makes it closer to us. We did not feel that our random generators or internet word generators were working for our band name as we did not feel like any of them were good enough or we could relate to them. Now we have finalised our band name we can start to properly work on our digipack designs.

Digipack research continued

This example of a digipack folds out to show the 6 sides and the CD in the plastic case however digipacks can also fold out to 4, 8 or more sides. They sometimes have a small sleeve on one of the sides that hold bits and pieces such as competition entries, free ringtone voucher codes, posters of the band or sometimes a DVD with the music video on it. Other things that CD digipacks often have are:
- Parental advisory logo, if necessary
- Thankyou's from the band
- Production companies
- Record labels
- Track list
- Official band website/twitter/facebook
- Bonus track material
- Copyright conditions

The majority of digipacks have a particular colour theme that run through all of the sides or there is a repetitive use of a certain image or photograph to make it look professional and all link together.

Typical dimensions of a digipack are:
- 139.5mm x 6mm x 125.5mm

There are also some advantages and disadvantages to digipacks which should be considered when thinking about digipacks vs jewel cases.
Some of the advantages of a digipack are that they are practically shatter proof as they are made out of cardboard and this also means that they are recyclable making them more ecologically friendly. Due to the folding out sides it allows the artist to have more graphics and images on the CD cover and they can also include more things such as competitions and advertisements.
Disadvantages of the digipacks are that as they are made out of cardboard they may become easily damaged by tearing and they do not offer maximum protection to the actual CD inside like the jewel cases do. Digipacks are also slightly more expensive than the jewel cases but overall despite the disadvantages, digipacks are becoming more popular than jewel cases and may soon replace all of them.

First day of filming

This is a small introduction to the days filming:



Yesterday, unfortunately I could not attend the filming because I was in a lesson but Molly and Charlotte started to film at Molly's house. They filmed the shots of Charlotte getting ready and also her lip syncing to some of the song whilst laying in cut out magazines. Our inspiration for these shots is from Paramores video "The only exception" where she is laying in love letters. We took this idea but rather than using love letters we chose people from magazines to show our theme of obsession. They also filmed shots of Charlotte doing her make up into the camera as if she is using the camera as a mirror. We did this sort of filming last year in our film opening and decided that by using it too much was quite boring so we will only use little snips of the make up scenes.



Charlotte's costume was dark eye make up with pale skin with a tight black dress on to show her femininity. She also wore red lipstick which symbolised her seductive nature towards the band.


With the cut out magazine pictures, they also decided to have a go at stop animation with the bits of magazine piling up and something moving across the screen. They did it by taking photos and moving the pieces a little bit in between each photo. They then also tried the same thing with a bass guitar and lip stick marks. Charlotte kissed the guitar with her lipstick and each time took a photo of the bass with an extra kiss to make it look effective. This shot of the bass is essential in our music video because on the line of the song "She stole my karma" we are going to show Charlotte stealing the bass guitar off of the band member, so this will be the bass that is used in the performance element of our video as well. We can use these parts of stop animation just in parts throughout our video as the editing has to be very quick.
These are the examples of stop animation after we edited it together:

Band name, album name and track list

In our groups we need to come up with some ideas for a band name, album name and track names to put on our digipack. We have previously looked at random name generators on the internet to try and come up with a band name and put our ideas into a wordle but we never really decided on a name that we all liked. In another attempt to get some ideas we use another type of generator. As a group we had one piece of paper and took it in turns to write a word down. As the first group member, I wrote "The" followed by an adjective and then folded the paper over to hide the word. Next, Charlotte wrote a noun and folded her piece of paper over as well. Molly went next a wrote a verb and then the paper went round again and we all did the same thing again. We then unfolded the paper to see what we had come up with to see if it made sense and if we could use it. The sentence we came up with was:
The crazy crows sleeps in the magenta theatre.

Although we did not like this for our album name or band name, we thought that we could break it up to use certain parts, for example maybe calling our band "The crows" or even just "Crows" and then naming our album "Magenta theatre". These are just rough ideas and we are going to do more of these generators to come up with more ideas and also ideas for our track list.

Narrative

What is narrative?
A narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format (as a work of writing, speech, poetry, prose, pictures, song, motion pictures, video games, theatre or dance) that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events.

The narrative behind our AS coursework
For our AS media coursework we had to make an opening of a film of our chosen genre. Our group decided to choose the genre independent/psychological as this is the type of genre that interested our group the most. Our film was called "Leyla" as this was the name of the young girl who starred in our film. "Leyla" was actually our second attempt at making a film opening because the narrative of our first attempt did not work as well as we had hoped and was very difficult to film. The narrative of "Leyla" was a teenage girl waking up in the middle of the woods who was having flash backs of her previous night that helped her figure out why she was in the woods. In our film opening the narrative may not be very clear, as it is usually not at the very beginning of films but if we had made the rest of the film, it would have become clear to the viewer about why she ended up there and how the flashbacks tie in with her situation. We involved camera angles and content in the flashbacks that would appear confusing to the viewer until the rest of the film revealed the relevance. We also had a voice over in the opening of our film of a police officer talking to Leyla's mother. At first from just watching the opening of the film, the voice over may seem strange and not make sense, but if we had made the rest of the film it would have become relevant because we would have involved the mother in Leyla's disappearance.

Questionnaire results

A while ago we handed out questionnaires to our friends about music videos and types of music, I posted the questions on my blog in a previous post but these are the results we received. We decided to send our questionnaire over facebook as well as hand it out in a physical form to people to use different types of media. These are some of the results that we gained through messaging people through Molly's facebook:







From these results and all of our other ones, we found that most people watch music videos on the Internet and some on the TV but they are rarely downloaded to watch. People watch music videos very frequently, mostly every day or at least weekly. The majority of people's expectations of rock music videos we found are that they should be mainly performance where the band are shown with their instruments. Also the colours that they associate with the rock genre are mainly dark colours such as black and white and grey.

These results have made us more confident in our idea to have a black and white video and to also have a lot of performance element because hopefully this is what will appeal to our audience the most.