Magazine Advertisement Research

For the second ancillary task we have chosen to create a magazine advertisement for the release of the music video. We understand that the advertisement must relate to the music video and possibly show images from the music video on the advertisement. This would ensure that it follows some sort of house style and the music video becomes a kind of brand.

Looking at the advertisments below, they tend to include the singer or the characters in the video and have the details of the release under the photo at the bottom of the page. The artist name and title of the singer is usually in a bigger font than the rest of the text on the page.

All of the images above both have a similar layout to eachother, there is a main image that very much relates to the video, brand and overall style of the single. This seems to be the most common design of a single release advertisement with the main image and then the information at the bottom of the page.

I think that it is important that the artist's name is easily visible so that it is more recognisable to people if they see the advert. It is also important that the text showing the release date and any other information such as star ratings should be visible. This is why I like the 'Plan B' poster because the stars really stand out and contrast with the black background making the advertisement eye-catching and making it more likely that people will see it as they flick through the magazine.

This advertisement is a bit different to the other advertisments as the layout is different. I think that the text is quite eye-catching on the page as it is quite big but I think that it looks less professional than the other advertisments.

It also shows the digipak on the poster. I do not really think that this is needed on the advertisement as the advertisment and the digipak should relate to eachother so I do not think that the digipak really needs to be shown as the audience should be able to recognise the digipak anyway from the design of the advertisement.

If the advertisements follow a 'house style' then the 'brand' of the single will become more recognisable and its target audience are more likely to immediately recognise it if they see the advertisement.

Out of all of the advertisements in the research, I think that we would want ours to be most similar to the 'Plan B' advertisement. This is because we liked the black background and white writing which would follow in the digipak also. I also like the fact that the image does not take up the whole page of the advertisement and there is plenty of black space which I think does actually make the advertisement more eye-catching as the white writing is clearer and contrasts with the black background.

Digipak Research

For the first ancillary task, Jess and I decided that we would make a digipak cover for the song. This will relate to the music video and the cover will visually link to the theme of the music video.

We both share the same opinion of what kind of look the digipak cover will have because we both have the same vision of our music video and we know that the digipak must convey the same image as the music video. We decided that we wanted the cover to be quite dark and reflect the mood of the characters in the video.

From the digipak examples that we found during our research, we decided that we liked the idea of having a black background with white writing as it is easy to read and also gives a 'dark' and serious feel to the single. I do not think that we would use a black and white image on the front cover of the digipak as I think that this looks too serious and would not fit totally with the single.

We liked the idea of having the main characters on the front cover so that it would follow the house style of the rest of the products in relation to the single. We also like the transparent look that this image has; however we would want the image to be more transparent and also have the other main character kind of 'looking' over the other characters.

After more research, I managed to find a couple of better examples of what we wanted with the 'transparent' effect of the digipak front cover.

I think that the idea of having a transparent effect on the images and making them 'overlap' each other. The Jimi Hendrix cover (below) shows this idea well; we could use this idea for having his girlfriend looking over them.

To create the effect of the 'overlaying' images, we would have to take a few different photos for the digipak and the put them onto different layers and change the opacity of the images to create the transparent effect that we are aiming for.

I also think that this digipak cover is very effective as you can see a couple of people with a transparent effect and then also the image of the eye in the background gives the impression that someone is watching over them. This would be a better example of what our digipak cover would look like because there are lots of different layers and also the colours used on the cover are quite dark which is definitely the look that we wanted for our digipak.

I also researched covers which will have two different people on the front so that I could see what kind of pictures were on the front of these digipaks and so I could get inspiration for my own digipak cover.

Animatic

Once we had decided the story for the music video, we made the story board which showed us the idea of the music video. This will help us film the actual video as we will have a better idea of what to film and also what order each cut goes in when we are editing.

Characters/Actors

We chose our characters quite a while ago but we had many problems with trying to get all of the actors together at the same time due to other commitments. This resulted in a few problems and therefore a delay in filming which put us back quite a few days.

In the end we decided to find some new characters that could all come on the same days and we could start filming.

The main two characters are Rich and Annabel and then the last actor who will only be in one/two of the shots will be Rishan.

Annabel

Copyright Permission

We needed to write a letter to the copyright holder of our chosen song for the video so that they could give us permission to use the song for the video aswell as the digipak cover and magazine advertisement for the ancillary tasks. When I was for which company to send the letter to I found that Snow Patrol were signed by Polydor but also were linked with a sub-company of Polydor called Fiction. I was not sure which company to send the letter to so I sent it to both record labels. The record labels did not supply an email address so we wrote a message in the 'contact us' box' on the website.

The full content of the letter is below:

The company did not reply to our letter, therefore we decided that we are going to use the music anyway. If the company did have any strong objections then they probably would have replied.

Mood Board

I have made a mood board which shows the general ideas of our video and what will be shown in the video. We thought this would make our ideas as it is a visual way to express our ideas. It includes the main ideas and also locations that we may use in the video.