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.