Audience Feedback and Research

As well as looking into genre conventions, looking into audience research and target audiences has influenced how I have planned and produced my video and ancillary texts. Within audience research I have relied on both primary (research, surveys, feedback, and focus groups, and secondary sources (statistics, surveys held by other people).

I looked at the genres and similar bands through websites such as last.fm and the Facebook statistics of liked pages to find that a large proportion of both the fans are artists are males usually 21+, for this reason I chose my actor who is mid twenties and suited to the part, rather than a person from sixthform to be my artist.

To ensure my ancillary tasks suit my target audience I have constructed a survey on SurveyMonkey of which have 39 responses as of yet; I'm still waiting on more results, then taking their feedback will attempt to edit my texts slightly if I need to, and hopefully make and inforgraphic on my responses.

In responses many have expressed their interest in buying/listening to the music I portrayed through my advertisement and digipak. Some feedback so far has been helpful regarding if the texts match and other ideas:

 

In response to " Is there anything you dislike about the two images? " (some peopole didn't answer or just answered 'no'; I've mainly just included the feedback I got otherwise.)

 Fill in my survey here!
 

 

Digipak Research II

Stuck on where to start for the planning of my digipak, I looked at apparently the only one I own - I don't buy music :( -The Horrors, We Are The Horrors EP.

 

         

Also, in better detail, the legal/extra information. This includes the record label names/logos, both the band and label's websites, the certification mark of the company which formatted the CD and the copyright and anti-piracy information.

I'm now starting on planning my digipak properly now. :)

"The Fall" by Gary Numan

The scenery for this video is really cool, though I haven't been quite that lucky in location, I was thinking if I could some similar camera angles and techniques as this when filming more on Sunday, it would be good. :)

 

But obviously mine would be mixing that kind of scenery with scenes in crowds and in the streets like I've filmed, too.
 

Moodboard

I collected images to help me map out ideas about my work, including locations, costume, adverts, album covers, actors and logos, I also added some general imagery for how I'd like aesthetics of my work to be:

(Click to enlarge)

Magazine Adverts II

I found some adverts in magazines in class I could use, mainly Q, Uncut and The Guide: 

 

 

Other than the Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan advert, each has at least one bright colour making it eye catching for the reader of the magazine and use a memorable font, if not the band's actual logo i.e Muse. Some, with any marketing, might use inter textual references to interest a wider audience, for example Massive Attack's Heligoland looks reaaally related to A Clockwork Orange.

 

Again, with each of the magazine adverts, the title of the band, album art (or similar artwork) underneath, and nearby the title of the the album. Underneath each is the further information such as the reviews, record label and where to buy it, such as HMV, Amazon, etc.

Costumes/Make up in Videos

From what I've seen in similar music videos so far, the costumes aren't anything extravagant, but really simple: in most of these videos the vocalist, or any other character, is wearing dull colours, greys, blues, whites or darker shades. Usually just a long sleeve shirt or plain t shirt and straight legged jeans or trousers and maybe a leather jacket, shoes don't seem to be filmed all that much. 

(printscreens)

Depending on what the actors (sorting it out this week) will already own, I think I will keep it pretty simple in recreating that, no visible make up or maybe just natural if any blemishes or anything upon filming.  

Magazine Adverts

For my ancillary task, I will have to make a magazine advert for my bands album/single. So I'll need to research how it can be marketed to suit the genre; I was struggling to find some in magazines I had at home/sixthform so I've found some online that might be of use.

 

The advert for Tricky's 2001 album Blowblack uses a simple type face, and colour scheme: black grey and white, with the part saying 'back' reversed to link to the ideo of it being backwards. It gives detail on the release date so fans know when they can buy it, what looks to be different test shots of the album cover as the background and all the necessary publishing information near the bottom with the ANTI- record label logo and reviews.

In this second advert, the design looks reasonably simplistic; contact and publisher information at the bottom and reviews nearer the top. The main focus is the artwork, the same as their album so people will recognise it from the advert.

 

With both, and most magazine adverts for albums, the name of the artist or band is at the top, and the name of whatever release they are advertising. The album art, or something similar is usually included. I will bear in mind this conventions when making mine, but before I do so, I will try to look out for more magazine advertisments to help me a little more.

Research into Band Logos

Not sure on what I had to research within band logos, I tried to look at them overall, then went in to focus on some similar to my genre/to what I want to create. 

Band Logos from Ashleighhh-x

I don't know what I will name "my" band yet so I don't know how much further I can go with looking into logos at the moment. Right now I'm thinking a colon in it would look cool, I think influenced by Global Communication's album 76:14, though I know that's not very related..

Lighting In Music Videos

Now I have a slightly better idea about my video I need to think in more depth about how I want each scene to look. From looking at some videos I've noticed that if the focus of the video is on the vocalist, they may be alone in a room, like what I've planned for mine, the idea of darkened rooms, shadows and silhouettes has interested me as I think it looks kind of personal and feel it kind of mirrors how the music feels in parts, dark and mysterious.

 

 

This particularly seems to be the case in the first forty seconds in the video for Massve Attack's Risingson and the first forty seconds of We're In This Together by NIN.  In fact the lighting in a lot of Massive Attack videos is pretty interesting, I'd like my video to be quite inspired by theirs as the sound really appears to be. :)

 

The effect of this is both done by outside lighting shining in, or high contrast and dark clothes. Also, keeping the room dark and only using the light to shine of certain parks might be hard to do subtly but I willl try to create this effect. Also, in looking at the first forty seconds or so of the NIN video is a good example of how I would like the intro for mine to be, with lots of close up images of parts of the face/hands etc.

 

 

Nine Inch Nails: We're In This Together (1999) from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.

Marketing and Distribution

Usually, both marketing and distribution aspects are left to the record label rather than the direct members of the band. Wikipedia says "marketing" is a business term referring to the promotion of products, advertising, pricing, distribution channels, and branding. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in shopping, or going to a market to sell goods or services.

With music it can essentially be seen as an extension of the artist/band's work; it can portray them as certain image/brand to make sure the right audience are finding out about them; this includes things such as their advertising,online presence, press etc.

For this they could contact companies such as Drowned in Sound, NME or Pitchfork for music news, and album and gig reviews, and of course create profiles for themselves on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr (and maybe Myspace?) possibly linking fans to free downloads at Soundcloud.

To make sure they are getting listened to it is important that at they are distrubuted correctly; a huge portion of the music industry is solely on the internet now so it would be important for any emerging band to try get on internet radio stations, adding an album to spotify for the public, etc.  To get online sales they could go with a lot of different distribution plans with their record label.





Source: David Byrne at wired.com

I think "my" band could if first starting up would try go for a profit sharing and self-distribution model, as at first it might be easier to allow the label to help distribution  though it would be more independent if they could sell their own music, on websites such as bandcamp, letting the fans pay as much as they want, like what Radiohead did to sell In Rainbows.

http://www.unsignedbandpromotion.com/resources-marketing-music/

Digipaks

In my previous post, I briefly looked at the aesthetics of album covers in the genres my song falls into, of course with this I will have to create the rest of my digipak so I decided to get a bit of information about them.

A basic digipak

A digipak is a style of packaging for a CD or DVD, they usually consist of a book-style fold and often used for singles and Special Edition copies. Digipaks can vary in how many sides they have (usually depending on the amount of discs included) , sometimes forming cross shapes or simply opening out as a line.  

The general conventions of a digipak are similar to any music packaging: album cover, track listing, band information such as website, thanks to anyone else involved, lyrics (maybe), music publisher and information, the record label and other legal information. A digipak may consist of more album art, and more than one CD. 

Looking at some similar band's digipaks may help me think about what images as well as information I will need to include in mine.

Album Covers

Looking into album covers in preparation for the creation of one of my ancillary tasks: to make a digipak for the given artist. It looks like it will be quite hard to create my own being inspired by others because unlike some music videos fitting genres, a lot of album art within the same genre still varies lots! However, so far I've looked at the likes of Radiohead, Massive Attack, Tricky, Tool, Placebo, Portishead, Sneaker Pimps etc.

An example of a pop/rnb cover

I've already noticed I naturally pick pictures with a colder temperature and darker rather than warm ones, so that might give me a place to start, if I look at ones like that.  :)

In comparision pop or r'n'b albums seem to hold a lot less focus on selling the idea of the artist's face/body, and rather on matching artwork to the music. The images are be darker, blurry and seemingly unrelated to the title of the album.

From looking at these, I think I'd like my album cover for my digipak to remain quite dark, and perhaps take a still from my video or something similar and mess with it on photoshop to look blurry, alternatively I could look into making the album cover just the band's logo and simplistic design like Burial's albums and the single for Stupid Girl by Garbage.

Record Labels I

In preparation for creating the brand that will be "my band", how I would plan to market or distribute them I needed to look into record labels that my band would be signed to. First, I'll look at popular record labels spanning the alternative or indie music, and genres the song fits into, then research smaller, independent kind of labels that would sign my band. 

Brief look at 'The Big Three' and labels such as Warp, 4AD, Rough Trade, Nothing Records and Mute:

Record labels from Ashleighhh-x

The use of screens, TV static and CCTV images




From Sonic Youth's Little Trouble Girl

I started to look at genre conventions in the videos, though it seems like a wide genre the videos usually had similar themes, I'll start looking into the idea of screens, TV static and CCTV-like footage because it seems to be a strangely prominant feature within a lot of the videos and possibly something I could do myself.

This could link to Goodwin's theory in music videos as it is a notion of looking and/or intra-intra diagetic gaze which gives an apparent sense of voyeurism and creepiness. This can be seen in Inertia Creeps by Massive Attack dir. "The Wiz", a person watching and rewatching a footage of a woman, and a few other people previously in what looks to be the same room as him. The idea of being watched and screens (also the male viewers smoking cigarettes cigarettes?) reminded me of the video to The Space Inbetween by How To Destroy Angels which made me think it might actually be a kind of prominant feature in these kind of music videos.

The video for Inertia Creeps uses this effect a lot

 

The of most the effects in this video I feel I could recreate quite easily, using televisions or computers to screen old film for someone to be watching -if I used an old, glass screen I could also get that flickery effect which might work well too-; if I could get some of my film on VHS or something that looks similar and TV static I could also get a similar effect. (Also, I found a website called DIYmusicvideo which looks as though it might be really helpful later on in the production of my final product with offering tutorials, ideas etc.)
 

The Get Out Clause promoted themselves through the novelty of their video Paper in which they actually performed in the streets, and using the Data Protection Act, requested copies of the CCTV tapes.

Mark Romanek

As well as looking closer to my given genre, I decided to look at the works of some famous music video directors though the songs perhaps steer a little bit away from the kind of music I'm looking at however. I decided to focus on Mark Romanek, though I also looked at works by the likes of Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, Anton Corbijn and Jonathan Glazer. 

Mark Romenek

Mark Romenek is an American filmmaker whose directing work includes music videos, feature films and commercials. Some of his most notable music videos include "Hurt" by Johnny Cash, "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails, "Jump They Say" by David Bowie and "99 Problems" by Jay-Z. These videos have received numerous awards, including over 20 MTV VMAs, three Grammys, a Country Music Association award, and three Billboard Music Awards.

A compilation of Mark Romanek’s work, edited by Nino Del Padre – which I found on YouTube.

After watching lots of his music videos, and a few documentaries about the way he works I'm getting pretty excited, actually, to make my own video (though I know obviously I won't have the budget or skills he does) whether I liked the artist/song or not I could tell he completely creates a distinct image of the musician and creates a complete moment within the video; I really like him. :)

Also, in a documentary about him, he says he doesn't always know exactly how the video will be, or what order he'll edit things into, just to film a lot, and see how it fits when editing. Which is a little relieving to hear.

I made a small presentation on Prezi to look briefly at some of his work:

Mark Romanek on Prezi

Doppelherz by Marilyn Manson

I've been looking at lots of music videos this week but whilst I look to find specific bands (by going through different genre tags and 'similar artists' pages on last.fm) and videos to more closely analyse, I've been thinking about the colours and imagery which would suit this kind of sound. I'm not sure if I'm trying to make this more industrial than it is but I recently came across the short film Doppelherz by Marilyn Manson and the imagery is just really amazingly dark and interesting, I think that -along with David Lynch films- could be a lot of inspiration for my video, if that's possible. :)

Doppelherz from Marilyn Manson on Vimeo.

What I really like about this video is the repetitiveness of it: the instrumental track Thaeter is repeated as he talks a bizarre drone-like thought track which is both funny and actually quite thought provoking. More importantly, aesthetically I think that it kind of suits the music scene which I'm looking at with things like the colour scheme and idea of blues and cold colours mixed with dirty, grungy faded coloured imagery. The art director was hyper-realist artist Gottfried Helnwein.

When closer to making my music video, if still going in this kind of direction, I'll look at in more depth.

Beginning of Research

Okay, I've at long last decided on which song to use: track 19. I think it might be slightly easier to make and bit darker, which might be cool. :)

 

I'm trying to find bands with a similar soud to this before looking a videos that don't exactly match; I'm thinking at looking into Nine Inch Nails, Massive Attack, Radiohead and Tool videos, I'm not too sure yet. So far I've seen a lot of  concept based videos with CCTV/static on televisions, a little bit creepy/dirty imagery. The colour schemes seem pretty high contrast; ususally a lot of cold and stony kind of colours as of yet.