R+P Post 24: Planning my digipak panels

Here is a photo of our rough digipak panels flat plan and the inspiration behind each panel. We wanted a synergistic theme of abstract multi-coloured shapes running across each panel, as you will see below, because it links to the theme of our music video where we play with lights- the colours and shapes of them.

R+P Post 23: Planning my web pages

The pages we want to create for our website:

1)Home page
2)Meet the girls page
3)Merchandise page which links with another state (in order to create a bit of sympathy)
4)Where to buy tickets
5)Music Page, with all our latest songs and videos for them
6)Gallery
7)News page

One of our reference points were Neon Jungle's website as they were also a girl group similar to the urban/ street genre we wanted our girl group to represent. Their genre is clearly demonstrated through the graffiti typeface for their logo in the top left corner. There is also a focal image of the group on the center of the page, which immediately grabs the audience's attention.

Many of the websites we looked at for inspiration have a very visual concept to them where there is minimal, (about 30%) text and the rest is images and a distinct colour scheme. Beyonce's website is no exception as it has a strong, consistent black and white colour scheme, large but minimal text and is visually entertaining.

Fifth Jungle another girl groups website reminded us to not forget putting in interactive features and purchasing opportunities for our audience. 

After researching several websites that inspired us, we decided to draw out a flat plan initially to help us visualize a basic layout for our site. Our first draft flat plan can be found below.

Our Initial Flat Plan 

After drawing out just a few website pages, we realized that it wasn't really helping us get a visual view of what we wanted, so we decided to create the flat plan on a computer using Publisher and from that it was easier to decide and create a basic layout for each page. Below is just a short selection of a few of the pages for the D4MES website we drew a flat plan for.

Webpage 1

Webpage 2

Webpage 3

Webpage 4

R+P Post 22: Planning my promo shots

Selection of the album cover/promo shots
examples we looked at

By looking at a selection of already existing promo shots from other similar girl groups, especially toward our genre, we found that all the promo shots had several things in common when it comes to positioning and costume choice:

•    All outfits, however much they may differ between the members in the group, had a similar theme running across them (e.g. fifth harmony had all white blazers/shirts/ dress and black heels and the Saturdays all wore midi dresses each a different colour)
•    The way each group stands, whether the framing is a mid-shot/ long shot (although predominantly long shots), they all have direct address to the camera with not only their face but body position too

We decided from this research that we wanted to have three setups for our promo shots shoot:

  1) Black background- denim themed outfits

  2) Industrial background- individual (street/urban style) themed outfits

  3) Coloured/Dynamic bright background- All black dressy (party style) outfits

Makeup trial test- Gift

All the backdrops for these setups can easily be photo- shopped into the photo, meaning we can take all our photos in a studio, which is convenient for us. 

Makeup test day session

Makeup trial test- Angela

R+P Post 21: My key shots storyboard

After a timeline, the next step is making a storyboard. This is in order to visualize the layout of our opening sequence and the specifics of how each shot will be filmed (e.g. detail on camera movement' framing is done here).

Key Shots:

1) Silhouette 

 The opening of our music video, the silhouettes of the band would fade to blackouts in time with the music and then come back up but this time the band would have changed positions. This is meant to create an enigma for the audience by making the girl group look mysterious.
2) Group dance shots

The camera movement during the dance shots will be very static and inter-cut with random CU's of someone's hand/arm in the motion of a dance move as shown in the GIF on the right.



3) Individual guy shots

In order to connote the upper-hand of the females in a relationship, which we wanted to highlight throughout the video.

R+P Post 20: My Music Video Timeline

Before producing a storyboard we decided to create a timeline in order to plan the timing of our shots before visualizing them. It was a very basic timeline with just a short description of each scene shown below the relevant timing where we want that shot to occur. Making a timeline made the production of  a storyboard easier. Below is a 1 minute extract of our timeline and the music up to 1 minute that goes with it.

Our Timeline (extract)

R+P Post 19: My Influences and vision for the project

Below is a visual, moving image 'pitch' of our music video idea. It demonstrates our focus on playing and manipulating different lighting effects, to create silhouettes and dynamic images that seem "surreal" enough to connote the "out of this world" theme the lyrics of the song contain. The idea of a female dominating kind of relationship that's passionate is also demonstrated through the use of male actors acting as props for the girls to lean on while singing etc. 

Producing this "steal-o" made it very easy to visualize our concept for our music video and thus map out the basis of our timeline and storyboard.

References in our steal-o (in chronological order of first appearance) and why we chose them:

1) F(x)- Red Light their use of red references, such as red lighting, would be good symbolism for our music video which has many conotations in the lyrics to do with 'red'
2) Beyonce- Naughty Girl It uses silhouette effects, which we thought would be good to add a sense of mystery to our girl group in the beginning of the video
3) Little Mix-Move Their use of male actors to highlight the theme of romantic relationships playing throughout the song is what we would like to implement
4) Calvin Harris- How deep is your love Fast-paced, visually entertaining editing effects
5) Fifth Harmony- Worth It Their use of male actors to highlight the theme of romantic relationships playing throughout the song is what we would like to implement
6) Zara Larsson- Lush Love Fast-paced, visually entertaining editing effects
7) Rihanna- What Now Fast-paced, visually entertaining editing effects
8) Pia Mia- Do it Again Fast-paced, visually entertaining editing effects
9) Neon Jungle- Trouble The yellow spotlight we would like to use at some point in our video, however with red lighting to make the colour scheme in our video consistent
10) Aj & Aly- Potential Breakup Song
11) Emeli Sande- Heaven

R+P Post 18: Analysis of my track's lyrics and instrumentation

Immediately coming up with a concept/idea for our music video using the track "Red Planet" was actually really hard. We learnt that it was conventional for directors to first read the lyrics of the song and analyse what they mean line by line in order to decide any ideas for its music video. We decided to try this too (an extract of some of the analysis we did can be found below) and we realized it actually helped us pinpoint our ideas.

Extract of our lyrics analysis

After the analysis we found that there was repetition of the theme "outer-space" running throughout the song, as well as the main concept of love, We also found that the song wasn't talking about the typical romantic kind of love you'd find in most pop songs, but that it had ideas such as female domination, which we thought would be a really interesting thing to play up more on in our music video.

R+P Post 17: My Chosen Track

"Red Planet"

Artist: Little Mix 

Featured Artist: Tionne Watkins (T-boz)

Album: DNA

Released: 2012

Written by: Jon Levine, Autumn Rowe, T-Boz

Producer(s): Jon Levine

Label: Syco, Columbia  

We had to consider any copyright issues that may come about when we eventually have to post our music video (which uses this song) on YouTube. Therefore we decided it would be best if we asked the label 'Syco', who held copyright to the song, permission to be able to use it for non-profit, educational use. Below is a copy of the email we sent.

R+P Post 16: My Band or Artist

Name: D4MES

Identity: -British RnB/Pop music Girl group
               -contains 4 members
               -Formed in 2015
               -Since all the members come from and                   grew up the streets of north london,
                their 'look' will be based on their urban background

"We're street but we're prestige street. We're classy but it's 2015, we're fresh-breaking negative stereotypes of these north London streets" (Monigal)


Inspiration:

M.O 

M.O. is inspiration for the dance aspect behind most of D4MES's music videos

Neon Jungle

Neon Jungle is the inspiration behind D4MES's street/urban look

Fifth Harmony

Fifth Harmony has the female empowerment attitude we want D4MES to emulate





Minus "Fifth Harmony", the inspiration behind our British urban pop girl group our other British urban girl groups. Modern girl groups tend to be ethnically diverse and we thought this would be a good idea to replicate. This is because we'd be able to widen the audience that our group can relate/appeal to and Britain, especially London is known as a huge multi-cultural society. Our band is likely to do really well in Britain, as well as globally, due to the diversity in ethnicity, but also because the urban/street culture is more prevalent in Britain than in other countries.

R+P Post 15: My Record Label

Name: Soho Records

• Subsidiary of Universal Music Group (UMG)
• Based in Soho, London
• Formed in 2012
• We sign upcoming young British artists from the mainstream music scene (genres such as pop, R&B and EDM) but are still willing to work with talent that branches from those genres
• Although small, with only 12 artists signed to us, we are like one big happy family with our artists doing really well in UK charts. We keep the amount of artists signed to us at one time small in order to focus on each individuals success and create a friendly and relaxed atmosphere for out artist's to work in 
• Our current success demonstrates that we know our market and we know what they like to hear, so we aim to continue finding new artists and bringing out their music to the world
• D4MES, our only girl band and latest signing, is doing very well at the moment and we hope that the UK audience will love them as much as we do when their debut single is released soon.

Logo: 

R+P Post 14: My Target Audience

Our audience is....

1)Skewed towards females

This is because our band, itself, aim to have a brand of female empowerment. Current research shows a trend of women dominating the singles chart and leading conversations when it comes to pop music, which Universal Music Publishing Group President of North America, Adam Lamberg, says "reflects today's culture of women being more outwardly confident and more self-empowering". 

www.billboard.com

Therefore we can be certain that the female audience, now, rather than in the past, will respond positively to our music due to not only the fact that our music is about female empowerment but also because we are an all female band and recently female bands like "Little Mix", "Neon Jungle" and "M.O" have been selling well.

2)RnB/Pop/Street music fans...

Pop music has always been known to be relatable to all types of people, whether old/young/male/female, this graph exemplifies this by showing pop music isn't an age specific preference. This was done using a study that looked at data from several million listeners.

Our proposed girl group, whose music is mainly pop but with an Rnb/Street sound to it, will be able to cater to all types of people. However seems that it will mainly be skewed towards the younger demographics according to a quote from Newsweek.com

R+P Post 13: Influences and inspiration from art, fashion and culture

When thinking about what style I would like to go for when creating our album covers, I was inspired by the post-war art movement, abstract expressionism.

abstract expressionism- Kadinsky (1910)

example painting of 
abstract expressionism

example painting of 

abstract expressionism

This lead me to look at a modern form of this postwar movement, called graffiti art and how it has already been used in past album covers in order to create a synergistic theme across the 4 panels that albums have. 

For example, below, Ed Sheeran and Neon Jungle have used the graffiti art style as the concepts for their album covers. However this only stays true for their front panel and not their other panels.

Ed Sheeran "You need me EP" album

Neon Jungle "Louder" Album- they also focused
their font style on the urban nature of graffiti

Graffiti remains one of the four hip-hop elements that is not considered "performance art"despite the image of "the singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. I thought this type of art would be good in portraying the dance genre of my artist, if my group was to create an artist based on dance music like I proposed I wanted to do earlier. 

The fashion of the romantic era (Romanticism), a movement in art, literature and music that valued freedom of expression where the ideal woman was seen as "an angel of the household"- virtuous, wholesome and genteel. This concept of "angel", which was replicated in the dressing back then is one which I envisioned a female artist wearing while singing one of my song choices, "W.A.Y.S" by Jhene Aiko, which  I mentioned earlier. This is because it would bring an ethereal feel to the song, similar to Avril Lavigne's "When you're gone"

Avril Lavigne- "When you're gone"

Street culture also influenced me, in reference to if my group was to decide to do a dance/pop song and artist. K-pop culture, has a strong street fashion look and so most of my influences on outfit styles came from K-pop groups such as "2NE1" and "Girls Generation".