Research and Planning: Generic conventions and analysing adverts

An advert is a form of print medium that is used to sell and market a product. in the case in which we are focusing it is a music single or album.
Purpose:

• A marketing tool that accompanies a singles/albums release.
• Provides visuel information about the artist and the album.
• Display key information such as main song,after songs, where its available.
• Creates, adopts or feeds into the represntation of the 'star image'
• Appeals to the intended target audience.
• Buy into artist lifestyle and ideas.

Impact:

• To attract the target audience into purchasing the product.
• Attracts a wider audience.
• Reveals key information about the artist
• Audience to feel a stronger relationship with the artist.

Conventions: An advert carries various conventions including:

• Main image
• Title of album
• Artist name
• Features of the song such as the song list
• Audience infprmation if neccesary e.g. parental advisery
• Key dates
• Availibility ( E.g. itunes

What I will include:
-Album title -Artist Name -Conventional typography -Use of dark colours to relate to similar artists -Urban locations that connote hip hop genre -Key singles on the album   -Downloadable content links -Official website

Conclusion

I will use the conventions when creating an advert for my artist as I now the powerful implications in can have on my artist such as: colour schemes, graphics, limited texts, release etc. This will help to gain my artist the recognition from their fans as well as other future fans. My artist will be able to release their up and coming album 'Belong To The City'. I will use materialistic colours such as red, gold and black in my advert as I feel they help to describe and illustrate my artists' persona in an effective and cool way. I will make sure to include additional information so that location by fans will be easy.

Research and Planning: Advert information

Planning the information that will be used on my advert is essential as it enables the viewers to be aware of the information that would be on in the Digipak. Also the audience will have a better knowledge of what to expect on the album such as key singles, the theme of the album, wheather its a collab or solo and most importantly, the album name.

Artist name:

-Frankie Felone

Album name:
-Felone Season
Key Singles:
-The game's mine
-oh well (Most important)

Album release date:
-4th Febuary 2016

Parental advisory:
-Yes

Typography:
-Sketchy, urban look

Available for download:
-Spotify
-Itunes
-Amazon 

 Conclusion
Overall the fundamental factors are to be included when producing an advert for an album. These are factors that I will later take into consideration when creating the advert. I now know how to appeal to the given audience in a conventional and professional manner.

Research and Planning - Generic conventions and analysing digipaks

What is a digipak?
Print material that a company uses for promotional purposes such as a new album.
The purpose of a digipak?

• Helps promote an artists new album
• Allows the audience to gain an understanding of the artist and their product.
• What genre they are expecting
•  It is used to create a relationship between the artist and the audience. 
• If done well, the album can become a collectors item.

What elements does a digipak contain?

•  Barcode
• Song list
• Artists name
• Album name
• Production company name
• parental advisory (if needed)

Common conventions within the Digipaks analysed were:

-black and white or dull colours
-image of star
-either materialistic or artistic
-headshot
-classic typography

From analysing the existing Digipaks I will now include:
-Dark colours to promote a Hip hop vibe
-Headshot of our star image
-Include a messy typography to connote the mianstream conventions the artist possesses
-Have the star image of on the front cover of the Digipak where his face is clearly shown in order for the audience to identify with him.

Research and Planning: Creative brief for digipak

Oasis Academy Hadley 

5 South Street

EN3 4PX

Date: 11/12/2015     
Album Title/artist: ‘What if its Felone season' by Frankie Felone
Project Manager: Lara Lawal
Release Date: 4th Febaury 2016

Product Overview:
Frankie Felone is an American rapper who launched his career from performing in local rap battles and making mix tapes in his home made studio. As his reputation grew, he started being hired to perform at urban   festivals and soon headlining shows Eventually he was known for creating a new sound, experimental Hip hop, which created a new audience for him leading him to get signed to a major label company Esoteric records due to the co founder witnessing his raw talent several years ago. From here, he started to play more of a dominant role for the company where he would write, produce and direct videos for other artist's music. This then enabled him to expand his reputation and name on the Hip hop scene. As he went from performing in small clubs to arenas, it enabled people to know what his music was about and even though his videos were rather commercial, his lyrics were quite niche at the same time resulting in international fame on the Hip hop scene, there is definitely a demand for his 3rd album release.

The Album concept:
What is it?
We want to create an album cover that best represents  star image in order to pull in a variety of different audiences from the international hip hop scene. We want to create something that will appeal to our audience and also that will reflect the genre we are making our music video for, ‘oh well’. The album will be a very informative about his fame and whats going on at the present time rather than his past or what he wants to to work towards. now that he has a strong and large fan base, this album is specifically to appeal to them as they can feel more closer towards our artist. We are creating this album as we want to maintain his star image: this in turn will boost our chances of having a music video on the top 10 charts.

Why are we doing it?
Felone's 3rd studio album will  bring success to an international audience and the digipak creation will help in order to do this. The art work on the album cover will be crucial in our success. The consumers should be able to understand the values and ideologies as well as the themes the artist is trying to portray. The pictures, typography and backgrounds will allow us to communicate visually to our audience. The theme of the album which is ‘about his fame’ will allow the consumers to understand the Hip-hop genre, without even having to listen to the music.

Comparable products

A$AP ROCKY - Long. Live. A$AP : 

sale figures: 520.000 sold

RICK ROSS - Mastermind : 

sale figures: 420,000

What is the reaction we want?
We want the audience and the consumers to feel like they can understand the artist and enjoy his music to live their lives and get over their problems. The target audience should be able to build and develop a relationship that is different from other artist as this one is about getting to know your true self.

How will we know it worked?
We will know if our album was successful from the sales. We will compare these alongside our sales figures to enable us to see if our album was a hit. Following on, we will be hosting a focus group to allow fans and consumers to look at our first drafts and give us there feedback on our album designs. From there criticism we will know ways in which we can improve.

Felones campaign dates:
Press campaign: 29th January 2016
TV Launch: 4th february 2016
Album Release: 4th February 2016

Research and Planning:Digipak information

Artist name: Frankie Felone

Theme of the album: About his fame

Album name: "Felone season"

Tracklist:
- Intro
- Revival
- Insomnia
- The game's mine
- Oh well
- I'm so blessed
- Young Frankie
- This is hip hop
- No bystanders
- Stop that freestyle
- Bonus track : Felone season
- Outro

Music Institution: RCA records

Production Company: Esoteric Records

Parental Advisory: Yes

This has been beneficial so we know as a group what information we need to include in our digipak. We must make sure that we include all this. The tracklist also gave us an idea of the theme of the album.

Planning: Pre production paperwork

It is important to create a pre-production paperwork before filming for our music video in order to avoid any filming infringement when filming in public. It also allows us to create and follow a detailed schedule which will make sure that we don't waste any possible filming time.

Location Recce

This was for initially to make sure that any actors or members of the production team would know where to go, howto get there and what time etc. This is done so that no one gets lost or late.

Location Release Agreement 

The location release form was to confirm on the agreement of using and filming in the room. As most of the music video was being filmed in my own school in different location i had to ask the headteacher personally for permission to use the rooms, allocating that i will take full responsibility for being in charge of the rooms.

Production schedule 

when filming its important to be organised therefore we created a production schedule. this will allows the production team and the actors to be more organised and time effiecient when it come to the actual day of filming.

 Risk assessment form

The purpose of the risk assessment form is so that all casting crew have an outline of the hazard and risk. Ths is beneficial so that if any problems do arise, we know what actions to take when it does happen

Client Release and consent agreement 

The client release and consent form is too make sure the artist knows that we will be using him for educational purposes and the music video will be uploaded onto you tube therefore he must sign the form to clarify that we have his consent.

Planning: Editing

Slow motion editing:

Slow motion editing will be used at the beginning when the camera focuses on the male artist's upper body walking of him in the lift and also in each different location to show iconography before the artist entering the room. I have chosen this to do this in the lift because it almost creates a sense of tension as we want to know who is in the lift. This allows the audience to have an idea of the male artist being confused and discombobulated as a stimulus before the actual narrative within the music video starts. Showing the iconography in slow motion also allows the audience to identify what kind of setting there is before actually seeing the artist there.

Cloning:
cloning will be used in our video to help emphasis the hard working aesthetics male character artist provides to his fans. This editing technique also helps to represent our theme in the music video which is creativity. The music video that influenced us to make this choice was the music video of 'Frozen' by Madonna . The reason is because the video is only 3 minutes and it will take up time to show him doing different things in one shot therefore it would be more time efficient to clone were used to enhance the energy he was showing in the video.

Text flicker:

This is another editing technique that we plan to use in our music video. The reason being is to present the name of the song in a more fancy way in order to catch the audiences eye. It's also mainly used to build hype on the song before actually hearing the lyrics whilst we only hear the instrumental. The video that influenced our decision was school boy q featuring kendrick lamar 'collard greens'. we see the letters 'JDDC' flicker at the beginning however it wont be as quick the flicker will last much longer.

Magazine styling:

A magazine style will be utilised when we use our artist at the end to pose for a magazine with the female models with a fade to black edit around him to make it look more professional. As the instrumental of the beat slowly fades away so will the image of the artist, turning into a black screen. the purpose of this editing technique is to prove to the audience that there is a string presence around him.

Overlay:

The overlay editing technique will be used when the artist is in the car being driven to the next location. This will show the multi-talent of my artist so the audience will admire him and this will enhance his star image. We also realised that by using this technique it make the visuals flow and change in a relaxed manner. 

planning: Location

The location of a music video is a essential part of the production, and the final product itself. A conventional location relating to the Hip-hop genre would enhance the interest shown to the music video and would appeal to the target audience even more. We have done this by looking at our audience feedback and coming out with 5 main locations that our music video would take place at. We also went into deep analysis of each location and what would be happening at each location.

Conclusion

All the locations were equally important as each other so the emphasis on planning each location was the same. The planning of my location helped me understand and evaluate the relevance of each location and also the advantages and disadvantages. With these locations the advantages had over-weighed the disadvantages as this was also a significant factor in determining which location to use and not to use. 

Planning: Characters

In this section of our planning we had to decide on who our characters are going to be in our music video. We had to think of suitable characters that would fit in our music video and be able to portray the storyline in the best way possible. Characters would play a significant role in determining the success of our music video as they would have to appeal to the target audience and stick to conveying the generic convention.

Most of our characters consist of having shorts cameo roles assisting the main artist within the music industry as we want to show that its not just him as an individual having all this success. Instead we want to show all the people who contribute behind the scenes and what it is, they actually do.

Office workers - our first set of characters will be introduced at the start of the msuic video where we will see them mimingand deciding what to do with the digipak. this will be whilst the song is playing and the artist enters the room. an example from where this is seen, is Chris Brown's official music video for 'Till I Die' ft. Big Sean & Wiz Khalifa. The idea of these characters is inspired from this music video however the difference in this is that the office worker's in Brown's video dont expect him to be there and are rather annoyed with his presense.

Producer - the purpose of having the producer within the visuals is to show he's the man behind the artists sound. As the artist enter the room we will see the producer greet the artist and tell him what to do by miming instructions towards him. This is an example as well as an inspiration from The Game's music video 'dreams' where we see the notorious producer, Dr dre at work with the artist.

Dancers - The use of the dancers in the music visuals will be back ups for him creating a music video. they will enable my artist to look more appealing and entertain aswell as knowing he can rap, the artist will discover he has more traits and skills. Justin Beiber's msuic video 'confident' is an example we will use as its a perfect represention of the kind of dancers we want, we dont them too have much of a personaltility, they're mainly there to show their skill.

Female models - Lastly we plan to have 2-4 young women to play as the young female models in the final scene where the artist will be seen at a photography shoot. a sense of mulveys theory of male gaze in music video inspired us as by having attractive girls we will attract a more mature male audience. An example of where this is seen is Action bronsons video 'Acting crazy'