Digipak Inspiration // Ben Wakeford

This is the album cover for the pet shop boys, actually. I believe the simplistic layout of the cover is a good idea to have because it shows the two members of the band. The only over thing on the cover is the name of the band and the album name. I am going to use this style but also have a different idea for the name.

This is the album cover for the Beatles album, Meet the Beatles! I believe this is a good album cover because It features all of the members of the band and at different sizes and distances away from the audience looking at the album cover. I would take inspiration for my album cover by taking the idea of having the different members of the band in the shot but cut out with a background behind it. Each member of the band would look like they are standing a different distance from each other away from the camera. 

I like this weezer album cover because of the simplicity of it. It is very basic with just the members of the band and the band name in the top right hand corner. I would take the idea to have the band members in front of a bright background. This makes the pictures stand out and shows that they are important. 

Digipak Ideas

I like the idea of having this kind of picture of a desolate and relaxed area of forest as the front cover for the Digipak. This is because if the band is a relaxed and chilled out kind of music vibe then this would be more realistic and better for the representation of the band Digipak.

I like this picture because it shows a different vibe of the band because Indie/ alternative music could be associated towards smoking and this represented in the photo. The butterfly flying out of the pipe shows that it is chilled out and represents peace and a chilled group of people. People would like this picture and would draw them in.  

This photo is intersting and is trippy. It would be good because it would draw people into the digipak and they would read the band cover and who the band are. 

I like this image because it shows the countryside and the peaceful nature of it. It is nice and colourful and this would draw people into the Digipak and this would make it more likely to get sales.

Music Video Analysis - Shake It Off

Artist: Taylor Swift
Song name: Shake it off


Genre Characteristics: As this is a pop song the audience automatically expect to see things they associate with pop songs. E.g. Bright colors, fast tempo video. The video features various dance routines for different genres of dance. In each routine we see the dancers wearing the appropriate costume for each genre. For example, 'Snapback' hats and gold chains in the hip-hop element.

Relationship Between Lyrics and Visuals: All the dancers start dancing and 'shaking' to match the lyrics in the chorus 'shake shake shake'.

Relationship Between Music and Visuals: The upbeat nature we expect to see in a pop video is matched with the dancers moving in time with the beat and helps to amplify the fast nature of the video.

Demands of the Record label: The frequent close-up shots we see of Taylor Swift are needed to present her as the main star of the video. Her image as one of the biggest music stars in the world has to be reinforced in her music and is done so by using the camera shots to show her off.

Frequent Reference to Notion of Looking: Due to the audience of this music video it isn't sexualised very much, yet we still see examples of the 'male gaze' for example when the dancers are twerking. Taylor also makes direct eye contact with the camera and also to the other dancers. This gives the impression that she is addressing the viewer directly with the video and lyrics.

Artist Developing Motifs: This pop style is not Taylor Swifts usual style of music as she first burst onto the scene as a country music singer.

Intertextual References: The main reference that I noticed was that of 'High school music'. This is seen when they all jump into the air in unison whilst dressed as cheerleaders. The varous dances routines can also be seen to make reference to the dance films 'Step-Up'.

Music Video Analysis - Blank Space

Song Name: Blank Space

Artist: Taylor Swift 

Genre Characteristics: At the beginning the audience are shown and establishing shot of a luxury mansion with an expensive sports car outside, this sets the tone of the video.

Relationship Between Lyrics And Visuals: As the lyrics "incredible things" are heard, the viewer is shown a ridiculous room full of expensive things with two horses. It shows the outrageous wealth the character possesses and also links in to the lyric "take this too far" because the viewer is shocked by what they're seeing.

Relationship Between Music And Visuals: The viewer is shown a close up of a handsome man as the lyric "look at that face" is sung. This ties in with the story of the video and is the girl trying to justify to the audience why she fell for him.

Are There Any Close-ups Of The Artist: As Taylor Swift is the main character in the video it creates a star image motif. Numerous close ups are shown of both characters to the viewer throughout the video. This could be done to create intimacy between audience and character or to emphasise meaning into the characters actions and/or words.

Is There Reference To The Notion Of Looking: At one point if the video, Taylor is stood at the top of a staircase looking out towards the audience. The audience are in the same level as Taylor and so suffers she is trying to pursuades them to believe her and not him.

Are There Any Intertextual References: The two horses at the beginning of the video could be making reference to the death of Emily Davison, the suffragette trampled to death by the Kings horse at the 1913 Derby. A week earlier before releasing the video Taylor had withdrew from Spotify, arguing that major corporations are taking advantage of artists and that Artists feel powerless over what happens to their music. Throughout the video the man is constantly on his phone. He does it while having a picnic with Taylor, he dies it whilst in the garden with her and she is clearly unhappy about it. This is clearly a message to Spotify that streaming is killing Songwriters' careers and she wants no part of it. Taylor then later drops the phone into water. This symbolises her cutting all ties with Spotify and her clear statement that she will not be exploited like other artists.  

Music video analysis - Mountain at my Gates

Name of Track: Mountain At My Gates

Artist: Foals 

Genre Characteristics: Grey, Dark, gloomy, Mountainous town.

Relationship between lyrics and visuals: When the lead singer says "I see a mountain at my gates" the band appear in front of a mountain range. 

Relationship between music and visuals: When the song 'kicks in' a cluster of birds appear to come out from the mountain, just as the song becomes more upbeat the mountain appears to show life from it. 

Are there any close-ups of the artist and star image motifs: As the video is shot using a go pro and the visuals are in 360 degrees, there are a number of close ups of the band and lead singer as he walks around the periferal of the viewer. 

Is there reference to the notion of 'looking'? There aren't any obvious signs of anyone looking in the video. The band are just performing the sing although you could suggest that the video is centred around 'looking' as the 360 degree visuals allow the viewer to see everything in the video. 

Are there any intertextual references: Mountains are often used as a metaphor for extremely difficult situations that seem impossible to overcome. In this case, the mountain is forming at the gates signifying that the issues are stopping him from even starting his journey.

Digipak - Initial Ideas And Inspiration // Nathan Beard

This is the powerpoint presentation with my initial ideas and inspiration for my digipak cover art.

Digipack Ideas - Moodboard

Styling for the video

These are some images that I have found which represent the style that we want to represent in our video.
These are styles that I think accurately represent what the target audience wear themselves and what they want to see in their favorite bands. It also fits in with the image of modern and simple that we are trying to portray with our band.

Video Inspiration - Let's Dance To Joy Division

We have took inspiration from this video. Their use of the plain background and minimal setting shows us that a successful video can be created in our same music genre and with the mise en scene we're aiming for.

Story Board

We have now drawn and decided on all of the shots for our video, however the story board is not final and may change.

 Animatic:

*UPDATE: ANIMATIC RE-UPLOADED DUE TO COPYRIGHT ISSUES*

Original Video:

Apply relevant narrative theorists to your music video

Illustration – the visual form of the music video. This can be seen by the visual singing of a certain song that they were singing. These videos are often called the performance videos because you can actually see the act performing the song. This is what we are doing in our music video as the ideas we all have are to have the band playing the song but we would have lots of different shots.

Amplification- Amplification would be a music video which has both narrative and performance of showing the story in the music video but also has the connotations of the meanings. They are designed to be creative and artistic which is made to look like a story or an artistic statement.

Disjuncture- The videos initially ignore the music video completely and the genre of the music and tries to create a whole new meaning to the lyrics. The videos don’t normally make sense and most of the time use abstract imagery that viewers would find very interesting. They usually have some kind of performance from the artist but do not have any links to the lyrics or to what the band is performing. This is not what

Tzvetdan Todorov narrative has 5 main stages but with 3 key points:

1) Beginning, a stage of equilibrium- this is like our music video because it starts off with just shots of the band in standing positions but then slowly changing the way they are looking in the video.

 2) Middle, Disruption to the equilibrium- This is like our music video because this is where the video     will go a bit crazy with the UV light and the music becoming more up-tempo and more disruptive.

 3) End, restraining the equilibrium- this is when the video is going towards the end so in our music video it would be exactly like the outro.

Vladimir Propp 6 main stages to it, he analysed the stories of Russian fairy tales and wrote his theory about any kind of story:

 1) Preparation, where the scene is set for the people watching it to see what is happening. This is    linked to our music video slightly, because the people that are in the video are set as the three in the band showing where the scene starts and showing when the story of the video actually begins.

 2)  Complication is where a problem or an evil occurs. This doesn’t apply to our video; there is no problem that the actors occur in the video.

 3)  Transference is where a hero goes on to lead the quest against the problem or the evil that occurs. This again doesn’t happen in our music video or isn’t going to happen at the moment.

 4) Struggle is where the audience see a significant fight between a hero and a villain. This definitely does not happen in our music video.

 5)  Return is where the hero return with the quest fulfilled, this doesn’t happen in our music video and does not apply to our video in any way.

 6) Recognition is where the victim is punished and the hero is rewarded for his duties that he carried out. This has no part in our music video as we have no hero or a villain.

Claude Levi-Strauss- he observed that all narratives are organised around the conflict between oppositions. This theory goes against what we are doing in our music video because we don’t really have a story in our video it is just a representation of the group performing the song and doesn’t have a story. 

Plan of Action (28/09/15 - 04/10/15)

This week we are researching the different types of digipak and magazine adverts, this is going to aid us in creating our own. This work is largely individual  and therefore requires us to gather our own ideas. This weeks tasks are therefore mostly the same.

This weeks tasks for the group members are:

Nathan Beard

• Post the final storyboard. (including the original video embedded).
• Research digipaks and post the findings on the blog.

Joe Ford

• Research digipaks and post the findings on the blog.
• Find and post some inspiration in terms of the video.

Ben Wakeford

• Research digipaks and post the findings on the blog.
• Research and apply narrative theorists to the video.

Weekly Summary (21/09/15 - 27/09/15)

During this past week we have have been refining the video ideas we had. We had some ideas that when we evaluated we decided that they weren't good enough to make the video.
These changes where then implemented into our story board, which is now nearing completion.

Joe also did the audience biography post, analysing two TMG members and finding out about their interests likes and pastimes. This is hugely useful as it enables us to further develop the video and our band's image to the tastes of our target audience.

We also updated the blog and the band's twitter page with some new cover images I made, this was in order to give a unified design across all of our platforms, it also aids the professionality of our work as a whole. I believe the new images accurately represent the direction we are taking the band and video: 'simple yet memorable'.

We also looked into some potential camera shots we could use in our video, this will help us when it comes to filming and will cut down the time it takes as we also have a rough idea of what works and what doesn't.

Camera Shot Ideas

Camera Shot Ideas

Update of Story-boarding

Today, we finished our 24th shot of our music video and are up to 1:26 seconds. We have all had equal input into the completion of this task. Deciding on the type of shot we are going to use for each shot is very time consuming and have used shots such as: high angle, low angle, mid-shot, close-ups and others. These shots range from 1 second right up to 10 seconds.

*Due to the change in creative direction the storyboard will need changing to match the new ideas*

Audience Biographies

Name:   Louis Hopkins
Age:     17
Occupation: College Student

Interests:  Louis loves to spend time with his friends. he is always on the look out for that new and upcoming band that he can brag to his friends about finding first. He spends a lot of time on Soundcloud. Looking for new mixes and independent artists that are using its services in order to promote their music. he never leaves the house without making sure he is looking his best, with his favorite brands being: Farrah, Supreme, Norse Projects and Thrasher. Louis has known SmallRuin since day 1. He was one of the first 10 people to re-post their debut single on Soundcloud which now boasts of 65,000 plays.



Name: Millie Drew
Age: 19
Occupation: Independent Writer

Interests:  Millie lives and dies by her Tumblr account. She obsesses with her camera and is always looking for that next snap that with capture her followers. The latest trends are a must-have and can't help but spend her latest pay cheque on some new accessories or clothes. Music is special to her too. She doesn't like to move onto new bands often but stays loyal to her favorites, whatever their fan base. Her favorites always make it into her writing somehow, whether that be a harsh review of a new LP or spreading the word about an upcoming gig.

Blog Design Update

I have updated the Blog design theme to be more in line with the SmallRuin image, this includes a cover image that matches the twitter photo and a colour theme. I have also chosen a new easy to read font that matches the style.

Update of the Twitter page

Plan of Action (21/09/15 - 27/09/15)

This week, as a group we have mainly been focused on drawing and planning out our story board, this is going to give us an idea of how the shots will look via an animatic, which will consist of a video of each shot on the story board for the time that they are due to be on for. This takes careful planning the shots have to match up with points in the original video in order for the editing to be successful. It is for this reason that we don't have many scheduled tasks on this action plan. This weeks research tasks have been mainly allocated to Joe.

This weeks tasks for the group members are:

Nathan Beard

• Write up and publish a post about the updated blog look. (to be carried out in the week).
• Create the animatic

Joe Ford

• Post an update on the storyboard (including photos of all of the group drawing). 
• Conduct some individual research detailing two audience members.
• Research and write up and publish some camera shot ideas to be used in the video.

Ben Wakeford

• Write up and publish a post about the updated Twitter page look. (to be carried out in the week).

Weekly Summary (14/09/15 - 20/09/15)

This week was primarily about deciding upon when, where and how to film our video, this involved a lot of discussion between our group members as we were weighing up the advantages and of course disadvantages of all the locations that we thought about.

We also took a more in depth look at our chosen song and what all the lyrics meant as it is important to know this when deciding on the style and location for the video.

Another task we carried out during this past week was to take pictures of our band members and introduce them as well as look at how they compare to the existing band and, from that make a decision on the roles of our band members.

We also evaluated all the feedback we gathered from our peers from when we did our pitch presentation, this is an invaluable task as it has highlighted several issues that we previously hadn't clearly evaluated and explained, an example of this is the location of our video.

Our band:

Risk Assessment

Representation in Music videos

Different genders are represented differently in music videos. For example males are normally represented in a way sometimes that they are strippers or need to show off their bodies. This gives an attracting look to the music video for males. For artists like Beyoncé who are fine with the way their bodies look then they are more likely to get their bodies out for a music video. If this means they will get more hits and therefore more money they are more likely to be willing to do this.

It is different for males because they are seen as more aggressive and more dominant in behaviour which means that males would be used differently in a music video than females would be used. Men are represented as more adventurous and independent where as women are viewed as more reliant on men and this shows in some music videos where the male is shown to be in command. Women represent sexual objects in media and males in music videos seem to be the people in command that try and get these sexual objects. Women are portrayed as decorative objects in music videos and are used as dancers and are not very regularly seen as the band members who actually play the instruments, this is normally left to the males because they are seen as more dominant and more designed for these types of jobs.

Different ages are represented in music videos for example the elderly would not be very likely to be seen in music videos as they are one of the groups of people who are not wanted to be seen in music videos. This is the same with small children but they are seen on the odd occasion, normally the artists are the ones in the music videos and they are normally not elderly or really young they are normally around the 20’s or 30’s because these are the people who are going to be appealed too. These people are stereotypically the most likely to do popular things for the people who are supposed to watch the music videos for example teenagers who want to see dancers and people either smoking or doing things that are cool like skateboarding or doing daring things.

Mood Board Album Art

Giving Feedback

All of the members in our group have given feedback to our peers' blogs, this will enable them to evaluate the issue that people have raised and like us correct aspects that need to be fixed.

Examples of our feedback are below:

Nathan ~ "I like how you have considered who your target market is and feel that you should consider where you will film the video."

Ben ~ "The styling matches the song choice it is very laid back and fits in to the 'indie' theme"

Joe ~ "have you thought about a location for your video? The short and memerable band name also fits well"

Location Desicion

Based on the research we did and the mood boards I compiled, we have come to a decision where our video will be filmed. The video will be filmed across both an urban environment, for example city streets or an underground or multi story car park and a studio.
We feel that this delivers the best of both worlds as certain parts of the song can be filmed in the studio like the chorus, in order to put maximum focus on the band and have no distractions, and other solo type parts can be filmed in the urban environment, this will allow us more creative freedom and give the ability to present the song in a new way. It will also counter the blankness of the studio and vice versa.

Mood Board - Studio (Potential Location)

I have compiled some images into a mood board, the studio is a place that we feel would give a chance to really put the focus on the band members and the instruments which would give the video the 'stripped back' anti mainstream feel that indie music fans appreciate. This therefore makes the studio a good location to film our video. The disadvantages to using a studio is that it can sometimes come across as 'clinical' and blank or lacking in creativity, which is not the message we want to put across.

Mood board - Urban street (Potential Location)

I have made a mood board of an urban environment as I feel that this would be a good place to film our video. It fits in the the indie genre well as it is different and creative. It also has the added bonus of being cheap and easy to access. It offers plenty of opportunities to do some 'Cinematic style shots of the main singer and the other band members, as well as adding depth to the video.
A disadvantage to filming on the streets or in other such urban environments is that it can be difficult to get the right shot as there is always going to be people and other things in the way. It will therefore low down filming relatively significantly.

Band Members Alongside Two Door Cinema Club

Song Meaning (Undercover Martyn)

The meaning for the song Undercover Martyn, is that the lead singer is trying to convince his reclusive friend to stop being alone in his house (basement) and to come out into the outside world and discover new things.

This will help us plan our story line for the video, with a parallel video (the band and the friend)

Song Lyrics - Undercover Martyn

Undercover Martyn

And she spoke words that would melt in your hands

And she spoke words of wisdom

To the basement people, to the basement, many surprises await you

In the basement, people, in the basement

You hid there last time, you know we're gonna find you

Sick in the carseat, cause you're not up to going

Out on the main streets, completing your mission

You hid there last time, you know we're gonna find you

Sick in the carseat, cause you're not up to going

Out on the main streets, completing your mission

And she spoke words that would melt in your hands

And she spoke words of wisdom

To the basement people, to the basement, many surprises await you

In the basement, people, in the basement

You hid there last time, you know we're gonna find you

Sick in the carseat, cause you're not up to going

Out on the main streets, completing your mission

You hid there last time, you know we're gonna find you

Sick in the carseat, cause you're not up to going

Out on the main streets, completing your mission

You hid there last time, you know we're gonna find you

Sick in the carseat, cause you're not up to going

Out on the main streets, completing your mission

You hid there last time, you know we're gonna find you

Sick in the carseat, cause you're not up to going

Out on the main streets, completing your mission

Evaluation of Class Feedback

Individual band members biography with photos

Andy Walters- 22 year old professional musician from Leeds who started playing the guitar at the age of 6. Now he is one of the rhythm premier guitarists in England, featuring on songs with the Wombats and the Kooks. Now one of the leading front men in the country after developing his singing skills after critic from Artic Monkeys lead singer Alex Turner.

Ben Smith- 21 year old musician who is originally from Newcastle who was late into playing a musical instrument and self-taught himself the guitar and the keyboard and is now one of the most upcoming lead guitarists in the country.   

Max Wilson- 22 year old musician who is also from leeds and has been best friends with Andy Walters another band member for all their lives. Aggressive bass player with quick fingers and brilliant ability to adapt. 

Whole band photo