Research: Creative brief for digipak

Research: Creative brief for digipak

During this lesson we learned about the importance of the digipak in terms of it's visual interpretation to not only the album but the entire promotional campaign, for this reason we needed to give send a message of the themes of the album which best captures the main vibe of the entire album. When creating our main ideas for the drafts of our digipak we decided to play off of dyer's theory of star image due to the fact that our artists are two different but both equally well know and established within the industry and are collaborating for the purpose to merge their fan base with this album. 


 

Album Name: Ying & Yang

Artist name(s):

SWEENEY - (Amani)

MD - (Michael)

Track List:

1. Differences. (INTRO)
2. You Are.
3. Squad Only.
4. Like Me.
5. (MD)MA.
6. P.H.A.T.
7. Trilla.
8. Spectre.
9. Lost Tape.
10. The Equilibrium.
11. C.R.E.A.M.
12. Paypa Chase.
13. LEGO City.
14. My Fung Shway. (Feng Shui)
15. The Mirror's Edge. (OUTRO)

Music Institution: DefJam Records.

Production Company: KAJE Records.

Parental Advisory Symbol: Present

Product Overview: My two artists are two already well known and established Hip-Hop artists that have decided to merge their talent and fanbase together to create a cross over album.

The Album Concept: The crossover album will be known as Ying & Yang. The overall concept that we are looking for is to play off of the idea that these are indeed to different artists with their own style MD (Jeremih cover artist on Like Me) sings and SWEENEY (Durks cover artist on Like Me) raps, hence the reason why we have come up with the Ying and Yang concept as these are two different elements and energy types of Music coming together to create one product. 

Comparable products

A comparable product to this could be be the new project in the UK titled as 'Young Fire Old Flame' by both Wretch 32 and Avelino which is a newly released mix tape that's concept is about Young Fire (rapper Avelino) as he is a new, upcoming artist that has been gaining a lot of attention more recently in the rap industry and Old Flame (Wretch 32) who is an already established rapper within the music and rap industry a like and is very well respected. My reason for this being a comparable project is because not only is this a collaboration project, but it is also heavily advertised by both artists as Avelino's twitter name has been changed to 'YOUNG FIRE' and Wretch 32's 'OLD FLAME'.

For that reason the digipak that we create will be heavily influenced by this theme and the music video will also have the same influences and themes. Our second comparable product is an album titled 'What a Time to be Alive' by famous and established american artists Drake and Future. 

Because we have two different artists collaborating together for this project they will also be merging fanbases together which means this product will be aimed at R&B, Pop (because MD) as well as Rap and american drill (because of SWEENEY) meaning that the reaction we want from this will come from multiple genres and produce multiple sales from a wide range of people.

The launch date of the Albums release will be shortly after the release of the music video as we need to create hype around the album by releasing the top hit 'Like Me' before hand.

Planning: Characters

Planning: Characters within narrative

 

In this post I will be looking into the characters within my music video, this is important because to make our music video believable as the correct image has to be captured by all of the characters within the music video otherwise when people watch our music video the characters won’t look like how they sound on the sound which could make them lose interest as they aren’t seeing the visual representation of what they are hearing on the soundtrack. Both of the characters that are being shown within this post are also the characters that are the 2 main artists within the music video.

 

Completed by Amani

 

Character 1:

Name: Amani Sweeney-Fenton (SWEENEY)

Age: 18.

Ethnicity: Black, other.

Physique: Tall Slim. 

 

Genre stereotypes of artist:

• Money orientated

• Self-obsessed.

• Womanising.

• Confident.

• Intimidating.

• Controlling.  

 

Costume:

 

The overall appearance that we are looking to achieve with our artist is that we want him to look successful, trendy in the area of fashion and his image must be quite evident that he is money orientated in terms of the use of jewellery and designer brands. 

The all-white look gives our artist a sense of purity and cleanliness as although this genre of music is more directed at Rap, this soundtrack in particular abandons the ideology of gangs which is conventional to the genre and exploits the idea of having fun with your friends and having a sense of swagger about what you do. This helps us to capture an image that maintains all the positives about rappers and people associated with the genre and leave out/ down play direct illegal activity which some people do not like to see which make the music video a better-rounded music video for various people to enjoy. 

 

Our artist playing as the character SWEENY:

• Straight cut white jeans – (designer).

• T-shirt -white

• Bomber Jacket - white

• Gold watch - (designer)

Hair and makeup: Our artist will have a high-top temp fade haircut (as shown in the image) and won’t be wearing any makeup as we need to portray the realism of the music video through the visuals. 

Body language and facial expressions: This artist/character will have a very relaxed and confident body language to display how he is having fun whilst he feels ‘Wavey’ with his friend. We will show him as having fun and feeling youthful as the lyrics of how the characters behave in the song compliment this.

Representation within your video: Due to the all of these characteristics SWEENEY will be an extremely relaxed character, meaning that he will come across as having a good time. Often UK rap presents this idea which is why we have planned for this too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Completed by Josh

Character 2:

Name: Michael Okafor (MD).

Age: 18.

Ethnicity:  Black African.

Physique: Tall Slim.

 

Gender stereotype of role:

• Fun
• Charming.
• Confident.
• Relaxed.

Costume: Because of the overall theme of binary opposites within our narrative we have decided to dress MD in the opposite colours. He will wear causal clothing which will be all black, he will not be wearing designer brands as he is not interested in material items such as brands and designers, however he does have a desire to look good and fit the social stereotypes associated with him.

 

Hair and makeup: Make up will not be used on our male characters MD will also have a high top haircut as it is a popular hairstyle people have in modern day that grow up in these areas, they have the same haircuts as it shows that these are two characters that have grown up around the same environment but follow completely different lifestyles, which means they are expected to do certain things similarly. As we are trying to represent the UK rap scene, this is a conventional look.

 

Body language and facial expression: The body language of the artist will also be portrayed the same as the first which is confident in order to represent the artist as possessing SWAGGER and a 'star' in his own right. The facial expressions of this artist will also be quite cheeky so the artist will be smirking and smiling a lot which he enjoys the company of his fellow artist/character as they party together.

 

Representation within music video: MD will be similar to SWEENEY, however the only difference is that he will be in all black. It was important that we had a similar representation of our characters as it must reflect the UK rap genre and both characters must complement each other in terms of how they interact to create a believable friendship on screen. 

 

Similar characters that have influenced our music video characters:

These artists are also often used as the character/only performers in their music videos to enhance their star appeal to their loyal fans.

Similar findings:

·         Black in origin

·         Young in age

·         Wear white and black

·         Urban clothing

·         Enhance a confident persona

·         Use lots of close-ups and medium close ups on them

These are all ideas we hope to implement in our video.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To conclude I believe that this will best way to capture the characteristics of the characters as close up shots will help to capture the best possible image of our characters within the music video and best display the type of people that they are, this will also help our idea to remain conventional as with many UK artists and camera shots this is a most favourable camera angle and shot size which means that if we remain to certain classical conventions it will be easier for the consumers/viewers to engage with the video.

  

Planning: Story Board

Planning: Story Board

This is the story board that me and my group have made to best capture the information on our narrative of the music video. We also added in important information such as the; camera shot, Location, Props to be used, Lighting, Actors used in specific scene, Sound, dialogue, editing and the narrative description in each scene to make it clear to the camera crew what is happening within each scene to make it easier when filming.

PAGE:1

PAGE:2

PAGE:3

PAGE:4

However as we had gone over the story board that we had created we decided to slightly change the narrative due to the fact that we have too many characters in the narrative and this could be troublesome for the group when filming if they wasn't to turn up to the video shoot. For this reason the new narrative is as follows. This will not affect the current story board we have as the majority of the scenes will remain the same and just the narrative scenes will be changed to best suit the storyboard.

Planning: Copy Right Letter

Planning: Copy Right Letter

To give ourselves legal protection against copyright, me and my group had to create a letter to send off the the production company behind the original soundtrack and music video of the soundtrack that we have chosen. As we are using this soundtrack and re filming the music video and also posting the film on YouTube we had to email the recording label/ institution, notifying them that this is solely for educational uses and purposes. As we did not hear back from the company, we considered this as consent to do so as they have not told us otherwise. 

  
 This will prevent legal action being taken against our group as we are using a pre-made product from another institution, hence the reason why this is such a crucial pre-production document that has to be created. 

Planning: Location

Planning: Location

To shoot our music video me and my group had to find suitable locations for us to record. To deem it as suitable it had to be considered as:

• Safe to record easily accessed.
• Relevant to the themes and content of the music video. 
• We also needed a reasonable amount of advantages tat out weigh that of our disadvantages which makes the location worth recording.

Here are the three locations that we have know come up with and the following reasons as to why they have been chosen. 

To conclude I believe that this has helped the group in terms of location as we have found ones that are the most sensible for our group as we have assessed and evaluated them. Now when are filming in these locations we will know exactly what we are doing and why we are doing it in this location, we will also be able to deal with potential problems if they manage to happen during recording as we have come up with effective methods of preventing these problems. 

Planning: Questionnaire & Graphs

Planning: Questionnaire & Graphs 

In order to give the audience the best possible music video that they want to see me and my group had to conduct a questionnaire that asks multiple questions about their views on common conventions in music videos. With the data we received back, we then made a graph out of our results in order to make it clear what the answers where.

This questionnaire was beneficial as it helped me and my group to stick with the more favored conventions in the music video that they want to see and it also helped us to rid the ones that weren't so favored  by our audience.

We also learned about the demographics of our audience such as age etc. so we know what is appropriate for viewing.