Digipak Cover Research- Ke$ha

As a group this week we went into music stores such as HMV to research into exisiting CD covers and take pictures of the front/back/inserts and analyse them. We chose artists relevant to our genre and even an exising cover of our artist.

Ke$ha- Animal

                                                        

This is the front and back cover of Ke$ha's album 'Animal', both are highly appropriate and relevant to the pop genre. This can be seen in many ways, for example the close up of the artist on the front cover of the album (left), as the pop genre usually values an artist's image and look as the main focus opposed to CD covers of genres such as Indie or Rock. This can be seen on album covers such as 'The Killers - Day and Age', which simply contains a mosaic based image of a landscape with no focus on the band themselves.

The mise-en-scene is also appropriate to the genre on both the front and back covers of the CD. The plain black backgrounds helps the accompanying font and image of the artist to stand out. The font on the front is edgy looking with sharp edges, colourful and glittery to reflect the artist and genre. Although, on the back cover of the CD, a variety of fonts are used to great effect and to reflect the variety and fun nature of the album. To emphasise this image of glamour, glittery images are also used on the back cover aswell as a zebra print pattern with connotations of being wild, this also reflects the albums title, 'Animal'.

The layout on the front cover is pretty simple, whilst quite erratic looking on the back cover. The front cover simply has the artist name at the top of the CD, artist picture in the middle, and album name slightly tilted at the bottom of the cover. The layout of the song list on the back however is different from the generic vertical numbered list. The songs are presented horizontally along the back cover and in a variety of fonts, boldness and italics etc however they are all in a gold font to represent once again the idea of glamour and superiority.

The image and style presented of Ke$ha on the front and back covers of the Digipak is that of a simple style glamour and fun. The artist image dominates the front cover showing she is the main focus, her dark eye makeup and orange glitter lipstick also represent the dominant ideology of a 'party girl' and her serious expression is almost like she is not to be messed with and fiesty. And the erratic and inconsistant layout of the back cover sell her as an unconventional artist, and in the addition the glittery image of waves and the glittery fonts and colours portray her as fun and kooky.

This is the inside of the digipak, showing the CD and the cover of the insert. Once more both are appropriate to the pop genre and consitant to the rest of the digipak. Both the CD and front cover of the insert have both a simple style and layout and also has the black background and stand out glittery bold font representing the youthful fun vibe of the genre. The text on the the insert states, 'It's party time', this furthur emphasises the dominant themes of good times and partying consistant to the genre and artist. All the font is in capital letters and in the same edgy font, this reflects the idea of being loud and youthful. Once more these aspects of the digipak sell Ke$ha as a glamourous, young party girl.

The image above is the inside of the insert within the digipak. It is appropriate to the genre as it is full of random images with minimal font and a dominant image of the artist. It is also full of lots of action and fun to reflect the artist and once again masses of glitter; almost like Ke$ha's indivual signature. Ke$ha's costume and outfit within this image portrays her as a variety of a red indian with the headress and red face makeup, this furthermore pushes and promotes Ke$ha's image and style as being random and kooky from different generic pop artists. A toy dinosaur is also shown in the insert reflecting a song from her album; the song which we are planning our video on. On a personal group note we find this inspiring to what could be included in our own Digipak as we intend to include an image of a toy dinosaur on our CD.

The layout of the two middle pages in the insert blend  together to make one big page and landscape which is visually pleasing and interesting to see all the different images going on.


Our draft for our CD cover

Reflecting from these examples of Digipaks by artists similar to ours, we planned our own Digipak for Ke$ha which is shown above. Within our Digipak we wanted to include similar connotations recognized within the pop genre within albums such as Lady Gaga's such as glitter, bright colours and bold fonts. In our drawn draft we heavily included glitter on the Digipak, and we hope to incorporate the title and artist in a unique, way to reflect our artists personality and attract an audience. We want to include a large picture of our artist on the back of our cover to reflect the importance of our artist, we also hope to create our own font similar to the font seen in the draft. We will do this by drawing it on paper and scanning it in to photoshop. We also want to create a collage of pictures on the inside cover to create our artists fun, young personality. In addition to this we are using black backgrounds throughout our Digipak so our bold, glittery colours will stand out and be eye-catching. We want to include an image of a dinosaur on our actual CD to reflect the song title, we also intend to create an effect of dinosaur prints around the CD to make it appear fun. In the future when we make our Digipak we hope to use Photoshop to our advantage by using effects to beautify and improve our cover as we learn them along the way.

27th October Group Meeting Continued

Within this group meeting we also got inspiration for our CD design and also created the idea for our own CD design. We found inspiration from town from existing CD covers such as this once by Ke$ha herself;

We will also investigate other CD designs of relevant artists in our Digipak homework in much more detail but here is just an example of a CD cover that we could seek inspiration from. The plain black background is something we would like to include in our own CD cover with the use of glitter or bright font to stand out from the CD. But in our CD cover rather than have a generic close up of the artists face like on this cover, we would like to include two hands reaching for each other, with an explosion of bright powder/glitter coming from each hand, signifying a deep connection and the colours connotate the fun and glamourous image of our artist.

Inspiration comes in the strangest places; this zebra costumed man in Nottingham Town thought that we ourselves could include some kind of zebra/animal print within our artist's costume or even on our CD cover, this could portray the 'animalish' and wild side of our artist aswell as the animal print being right on trend, this is relevant as we want our artist to be highly stylish to appeal to our target audience of young teenage females.

This nail polish pictured above we found in Nottingham is highly relevant because we are planning to use it on the front cover of our CD design. This nail polish is a black base which allows bold, funky designs such as thunderbolts to be placed over the background. As our front cover will mainly include two hands, we would want this type of nail art of the hands to connotate the representations of the artists such as fun and youthful.

Leading on from this, we are going to blog about our CD design research in much closer detail and also post the sheet of our proposed CD design for our own CD so you can see our ideas much more precisely.

We also sat in Debenhams during our visit to Nottingham. During this stay we worked out from the new pitch idea we came up with, the new step outline for our song. This is just a rough outline of what we want the video to look like and our first initial idea for it. 

27th October - Group Meeting

On the 27th, this Wednesday, our group went to Nottingham Town to continue with our planning folder, share new ideas or problems, find inspirations and obtain pictures of CD's for our half term Digipak design homework. As a group we finished off and helped each other with pieces of work within the planning folder such as the CD design sheet and shot list. Here are some pictures we took of things we found in shops such as River Island that inspired the costume and makeup design of our music video to reflect the image of our song/artist with ideologies such as glamour, edginess and glitter;

A few props

Here are some props we were thinking of including in our music video:

- Toy Dinosaurs (we had the idea of using toy dinosaurs for shots in the wood scene, as the word 'd-i-n-o-s-a-u-r' is used often in the song, therefore the visuals will relate to the lyrics. To use them in our video, we thought about panning across them, as this will show the different dinosaurs. We think the wood scene would be best for us to shoot this part because dinosaurs are more likely to be based outside in an arboraceous/sylvan environment, rather than inside.)

-glitter/sequins (we are planning on using glitter or sequins for the white room scenes. This will be when the 'old man' drops a cup on the floor, it will then transition into the white room, where a slow-motion performance will take place involving a lot of sparkly glitter.)

-Walking stick (this is a key aspect for our music video and relates so much towards the 'old man'. He will use this obviously to show his age, and we plan to show this by using close-up shots.)

evaluations and analysis

                                      Evaluation of previous student work

This is a sheet to help us plan our music video. we evaluated previous A2 students work. We discovered many types of techniques that could be used in music videos, Such as green screen work, different scene transitions used with edits and good camera work. With seeing and discussing others work, it has made us realise the difference in genres and how fast or slow the cut in editing needs to be. It has also made us keen to use confident actors/performers in our video, as this is a key aspect to make sure the 'singer' interacts with the audience by looking straight into the camera.
We found that quite a lot of the previous work had a bit of out of time lip syncing at places. To get this correct in our video, we will have to make sure the song is playing in the background and to allow a couple of extra seconds onto each end of a shot. 
Overall we thought that the past videos were to say average, and we believe we have the potential to include some of the good technicalities those had, into a complete music video of our own.  

Textual Analysis Grids

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mB0tP1I-14
This is a textual analysis grid, which enabled us to annotate and analyse  certain music videos that relate to our genre. In our case this genre is of course pop/dance. Therefore we automatically thought of Lady Gaga. Her videos are interesting and unusual and involve mostly dance performances. Whilst studying Lady Gaga's video 'love game' it was obvious that the use of light and the urban surroundings created an atmosphere in which maybe the teenage audience can relate to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEbgBKV4_Mk
This is the second textual analysis grid. Analysing Ke$has music video 'Tik Tok'. We chose to look at other music videos done by Ke$ha, as she is the artist we are using and also because it will help us to establish what kind of content she uses in her other videos. Other content being things like, mise en scene, lighting, editing and camera work. Seeing and concentrating on what her videos consists of, puts a mark onto what her audience expect of her and the kind of music the video has with it, to make the genre compatible with the performance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57P9C4SAW4

This is the 3rd textual analysis. This is analysising Katy Perrys music video "California Gurls'. We chose to look at Katy Perry because she is in the same category as Ke$ha in the music industry. Her music videos are also has crazy and wacky as Ke$ha's so therefore its a good comparison. The way in which she portrays the songs messages in the video through stuff like narrative and visuals is something in which we want to do within ours.

PITCH

New Idea

Back again.

From todays pitch, constructive feedback and on going location issues, we brainstormed some ideas and here is our modifed idea.

We are going to still use the old idea of an old man and a young girl. However, this time the young girl is a carer for an old man rather than being a tea lady surrounded by lots of old people. We have obviously dropped the scale of the cast in this because we found it seemed more achieveable. We will still include scenes of nature and woods (to do with the lyrics 'D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R') and the sterotypical image of kesha (with glitter in a plain white room in which she is shown singing to camera and dancing/jumping around). We are hoping to get into the glitter scene through the shot transitions of editing and disolving. This will start off by the young girl giving the old man a cup, he knocks it out her hand and it's full of glitter, this will then go into the dream squence where the old man is dreaming about the young girl dancing around sexily with her throwing glitter in the air etc. The old man will then wake up to the real situation of her handing him a normal cup of tea.
We are still having narrative in this storyline since the old man keeps deliberately doing things just to get the young girls attention and so he can perv on her. We are also including the young girl singing the song in a different room (maybe the kitchen?) and still intend to play around with our backing track by using sound distortion by the old man playing with his hearing aid.
We are also aiming to get a stop-start animation spelling out the lyrics 'D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R' and 'O-L-D-M-A-N'.

We are really looking forward to starting this project.

Bizzle
Jordan, Adele, Abi.


Brainstorms:

Music Video Idea

Hi guys.

We originally came up with this idea for our song:

Our main idea for the song is very narrative based. The idea is to revolve it around the lyrics of the song. Since the song lyrics include ‘D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R’ and ‘O-L-D-M-A-N’ we automatically thought of the idea of basing it in an old person’s home. The main storyline would be of a young girl coming into the old person’s home and flirtatiously dancing around the old people. Through this we was hoping at the end of the song we would get all the old people up and dancing as well. However, since we didn’t think this was going to fill up the whole of the 3 minutes, we also came up with the idea of also including a performance bit.

Since this takes a lot of planning, we have all-ready started contacting old-peoples homes in the area and are currently waiting for responses.

We have pitched this idea to the class, they gave us constructive feedback. From this is we have come up with a new idea, which we are going to post separately now.

Peace Out.

Jordan, Adele, Abi.




THE GENRE

When we picked our music video, we had to think about the type of genre its under and what that genre uses to be identified and attract the audience. Therefore we drew a spider diagram with all the possible stereotypes of the pop genre. This then helped us in planning out what to include in our music video. 

OUR CONCEPTION IDEAS