Putting pen to paper

Below are some rough sketches of ideas for the design I will use for my digipack. (If you click on them they are easier to see, I promise. And if that doesn't work then tilt your screen and that will definitely do the trick)

Ancillary Task: The Magazine Advert

I have already done some research into the magazine advert, feel free to take a look if you need to, it's here.

Now that I have looked at other music magazine adverts I have found that they come in two main varieties; lots of little ad's on a page or a full page ad. The little ad's tend to be more focused on the bands tour dates etc, where as the album adverts are given the full page.

As the criteria for my ancillary task is to create an advert for the digipack I make, I am going to use a full page rather than a smaller box on a page.

The template for this is obviously a lot simpler than the digipack as all I need to do is keep inside the lines of an A4 piece of paper.

Ancillary Task: The Digipack

I have already done some research into the digipack, feel free to take a look if you need to refresh your memory.

Now I need to make one, or at least design it. My first step is to find a good template from which I can work. This site provided a great variety of templates and I found it extremely useful.

After trawling through all the templates the site had to offer, I picked my favorite 3. I found it really hard to visualise what these packs would look like in real life so I printed them out and had a play around with the different designs.

In the end I decided that this template was my favourite and I am going to edit it a bit to better suit my use of it.

This is the final version of the template I plan on using when creating my digipack. However, I will be moving the DVD/CD to the the middle rather than the far right as labeled.

The last piece of the jigsaw

After weeks of conflicting schedules, I was finally able to film the final scene needed to finish my music video.
This scene was one of the most difficult as, unlike the others, I had to create the setting.
To show what I did I have created a video.

Its not all about the main task

Right now I have to wait a while before I can do anymore work on the main task as I need to film and have to wait for the day when all my actors are free. Instead of doing nothing I have decided to do some research into the two ancillary tasks. I haven't done any work on them yet as my focus has been on the main task.

So, what are my ancillary tasks again?? I have chosen to create a Digipack front cover for the music video as well as a magazine advertisement. If I am honest, right now I have no idea what those sorts of things look like, so a little research into current products would be of great help to me.

Digipack front cover:
Admittedly, I have little personal experience with Digipacks, or even music DVD's so when it comes to researching this product I'm not really sure what to look for. Google naturally popped straight into my head, so I googled 'music DVD covers' to start with and got 16,900,000 responses from images. I definitely need to narrow that down. I've decided to find out what bands that are similar to Lisa Mitchell have done for their own music DVD, rather than researching any sort of musician; 'Michael Jackson Number Ones' is probably not aimed at the same sort of audience as the Australian Idol contestant.

Below is a music DVD front cover that I have analysed. Both were found within the March 2009 issue of Q magazine.

But, as I said before, I need to do a Digipack, not a DVD, but looking at DVD's was useful as it gave me a chance to look at different ways music is physically distributed, not just CD's. Now I am going to look more specifically at Digipacks, and see how the information is transferred from CD or DVD format to these.

Looking up what a Digipack is has helped me a lot, and I'm relieved that they are not as complicated as they sound.

Magazine advertisement:

A magazine advertisement is something that I know a bit more about, but it is useful to see how things like digipacks are advertised. Unfortunately, google failed me when I tried to find images to show this, so I am relying on good old fashioned hard copy magazines.

I flipped through a couple of copies of music magazines and found that most of the music orientated advertising is about the gigs an artist is playing, rather than a digipack they are releasing. However, there are still advertisements for the latest albums being released, and it is these advertisements that I am interested in.

I picked two adverts from the March 2009 issue of Q magazine. I looked at an advert for "Fleet Foxes" new album at the time and "The Killers" new album at the time "human".

Straight away I noticed that both magazine adverts use images that link with their album covers in the advert, rather than a random image. They both also had a release date and a snippet from a good review. They also featured a website address for the band.

This was useful research and will be taken into consideration during the planning and design of the magazine advertisement.

Creating a character

To create the right overall mise-en scene, I have to take into account the scenery, props, costume and lighting of the music video.

I have already taken into into account the scenery by location spotting, and I took props into account when I wrote my treatment and storyboard: for example the use of a giant flower, the red balloons in the tree and paper sail boats which all add to the happy vivace tone of music. The lighting is going to be natural with a little glow.

So, what am I going to do for costume?

I decided to schedule a photoshoot with my female protagonist to try and find a outfit that I thought would be most fitting for the music video.

Below are all the out fits she tried on:

In most music video's, the protagonist wears more than one costume, so I decided on the following two:

And for the magazine article and Digipack cover I decided to use this one:

Location location location

I went out and about to find the perfect place and these photos are what I came back with.

I am very pleased and think that the places in the photo will be perfect for my music video. Fingers crossed the weather doesnt get too bad too quickly.

This location was brilliant but as you can see the river is not in perfect condition as far as litter is concerned.

Sophie (my actress) and I tried to make sure that all the litter in the scene was not visible, you would be surprised by how much rubbish there is in a river. We also cleared all the fallen leaves from the bridge so that Sophie could easily walk through with out being dragged down by them. Unfortunately I couldn't make it as picturesque as I might have hoped as i can't legally move road signs and stop traffic. But I tried my best.

Once Upon a Time

There was a storyboard: