Marketing Research

When an artist or band release a new album, they also create a range of different materials to accompany it. These may be things such as promo videos, posters, magazines etc. This is because a artist needs to be able to market their product and advertise it through marketing packages such as these.
I have been asked to look at the ways an artists use marketing packages to promote and market their album. I have chosen the album "AM" by the Arctic Monkeys.
AM is the 5th studio album by the Arctic Monkeys and was released in September 2013 by their record label Domino Records. The album topped the charts in several countries and was also recognised as the highest selling vinyl CD.
A digipak is used to hold CD's,
and the digipak styled cases became popular in the earl 2000's. Here is the digipak for the album AM.

The front cover of the album shows a symbol of which is supposedly meant to represent the beat of a heart, but in the middle where the lines meet is spells out "AM" hence the name of the album. It is in solid white font which stands out even more since it is on a plain black background and the bands logo is placed in the top left corner to show who the album was created by. Although it is very simplistic, it is also very effective as it will stay in your mind and you can relate the band and its music to that album cover every time you see it. So it is a very well made and thought out marketing package.
The back of the album cover is also very simplistic and follows the same colour scheme. It has the bands name in a very bold white font in the centre of the cover and then lists of all of the albums songs and includes singles such as "Do I Wanna Know", "R U Mine" and "Snap Out of it".
The digipak for this album is very effective as its simplistic but recognizable and because of this you may look at it and then want to look further into the band and find new albums by them.


Posters for the album followed a very similar scheme as the album does. The plain black background contrasts with the bold white logos and text. Again, like the album it is very simple but effective as it recognizable shapes and fonts that you can only associate with this band and this album. This is good advertising as the band have created their own image using the digipak and these posters.

Prelim task

For our preliminary task we had to copy an already existing video, shot by shot. We decided to do Little Things by One Direction. I wokred with Dan, Millie and Chloe. This is the original video that One Direction made and we copied.


                                                 
Planning - For planning we seperatley made shot by shot story boards of different sections of the video so when it came to filming we could easily follow it shot by shot. I was given the section 0.30 - 0.45 seconds. The story board, as well as everybody elses is on another blog post.

Filming - We had planned to film all the shots on one 2 hour time slot so we could easily just get it all done and then come back to it and edit it all another time. However due to timings and the availability of rooms we only managed to film certain shots so we probably manged to film up to 30 seconds. So the next lesson we finished it off. Although we did go over our inital time limit it did also allow us to take our time and film good quailty shots, however this meant we had to spend less time on editing. But overall I thought it was a rather easy and fast proccess and we could easily follow and copy the video shot by shot and take our time with it.

Editing -  Although we did have less time to edit, the editing process actually came out quite well and the video as a whole ran rather smoothly and fitted exactly with the real One Direction video. It took about an hour to edit and render and embed the whole 1 minute clip. It was easier than I thought it would be as it was just a matter of chopping and shortening scenes and then putting a black and white affect on it but since there was a quite a lot of scenes it took longer than expected.
This is a screen shot of the editing process.

Final Product

Prelim task - Final Product

Research into Other Students Work - Jake Maud

Research + Planning
Strengths: There are many posts that outlay exactly what he wants his final product to be like and it is clear that he has taken ideas from multiple different sources that he has researched into.
A lot of time and effort has been put into his research and planning blogposts and you can that he has put massive though into what he wants the end products to look like. He has selected and researched into one specific genre which is clear to see after looking at his blog.

Weaknesses: Although he has focussed very heavily on one type of genre and goes into a lot of detail and has put in a lot of effort when researching this genre, but one thing he could improve on is maybe looking into different genres so he has a lot more diversity on his blog. Also further thought and preparation could have been put into individual posts, but other than that he has clearly put a lot of thought and time into his research and planning.

Digipak
Strengths: The digipak that he has created looks very clean, sleek and professional, it could potentially pass off as an actual store product. He uses a very interesting blur effect and uses a good location.

Weaknesses: Could be seen as quite a simple design with only one actor and only one location, although it is done very well, it could also be a bit basic. Also the black and white filter could also be looked as quite generic and unadventurous, but he does do it very well and is very aesthetically pleasing.

Magazine Advert 
Strengths: Ties in very well with the digipak, has a very similar look and vibe. Again done very well and looks extremely professional and could be passed off as a store product. The mise on scene is utilised beautifully in his advert with very interesting and creative costume choices.

Weaknesses: Even though this ancil text has been done very cleverly and to high quality, he could maybe add something else, potentially a magazine review to variety and make it more eye catching.

Evaluation
Strengths: He covers all areas in his blog and right from the first post he makes it very clear on what kind of out come he wants and you can clearly see what he's going for and his vision is very clear and straight forward. Everything he did looked very sleek and professional and up to market standard and he has obviously spent a lot of time and thought everything through.

Weaknesses: I feel like maybe he could have put a slight more detail into some of his individual blogs to make his vision more clear but other than that it is a very good and well thought through blog that contains a lot of quality content.

Shot Count Analysis - Arctic Monleys

From the process of analysing this Arctic Monkeys music video I have learnt that these kind of videos tend to have several establishing shots that introduce the characters/band members of the video, these kind of shots also show you what kind of setting/environment they are in. Something else I have realised is that to keep the video interesting and up beat you need to have plenty of jump cuts and a lot of shots, this is so it keeps the video catchy and keeps the pace up. These are all conventions I will bare in mind whilst making my own music video.

Preliminary Task - Storyboard

Today we were given the task of recreating the first minute of the song and video for One Directions, "Little Things". I am working in a group of 4 with Dan, Millie and Izzy. First of we needed to analyse the first minute of the video so we gave each other separate sections of the song so we could make a storyboard each and then put them together at the end to make one big storyboard.

I based my separate storyboard of the video between seconds 0.30 - 045, this is what it looked like.