Another digipak idea

It recently occurred to me to go back to the start of my light trails idea used in my video for my digipak, when I did some work into how it can be photographed. I never mentioned this in the first ideas post, and a lot of research could easily be done into the project, with a higher element of convergence between the media promoting the single if I chose to use this effect.

The light trails effect is mainly restricted to photography, although the effect is being used noteably more frequently in film over the past few months, as in this recent advert.

In photography, the effect is normally used when photographing traffic, mainly due to how easy this is to do, and the interesting trails they can create, as seen below.

The effect is often recreated using photo manipulation software such as Photoshop, and there are thousands of examples of the effect being used in advertising, where the effect is still very fashionable.

A good example of an artist who often uses this them is Chuck Anderson, whos site can be viewed from here. He makes bold use of light on dark, using the light trails to add a dynamic, exciting tone to his work. Here are some examples of his more relevant works for my purposes.

I find this work particularly relevant due to the feeling of movement and power his works radiate. Replacing the snowboarding or BMXing images with those of parkour would still make the images as effective as they are now, and so I see no reason why I could not use this effect with my work.

I spent 5 minutes in Photoshop creating a rough to see how the effect could look. This is a very bare, simple example, but I think that the idea fits very well. However, I would like the image to look less dynamic, and more flowing, giving the image a more sober feel to better suit the music.

I combined the light trails with smoke, influenced by previous research, which I feel does work, and in this case is not used very effectively.

Disney's new CEO

Everyone loves Disney. People of all ages flock to see the latest Disney/Pixar film, and the term "Lion King" brings childhood memories to nearly anyone you could ask. So when asked to elect a new Disney CEO from a selection of their cartoon characters, I ask, why bother? But then it occured to me, not everyone loves Disney. There are some, the extremists who read needlessly deep and say "Disney films promote violence, sexism, racism". These needless claims are as unjust as Christianity's take on Harry Potter, and they seek to do nothing but violate the family favorites. So then, maybe a new leader is a good idea; one, I thought, that would annihilate the protesters without a thought, reducing them to mere dust, floating on a mushroom cloud of hatred. A few villains jumped to mind; Captain Hook, Scar, those sharks from Finding Nemo; but Hook's hopeless ploys, Scars inevitable betrayal, and the peacefulness of the sharks makes them dirt beneath the heel of Syndrome, great new ruler of Disney. May his mighty chin cast fear and terror in all of our hearts. What problem could not be solved by his masterful brain, lurking underneath that fiery hairdo? Global warming? No matter with Tactical Nukes aimed at smoggy L.A. Korea being worryingly secretive? Worry no more, the crater that was Korea is now WMD free. People blaming gang culture on the Disney corperation? WE WILL DESTROY YOU.

My music video

Since last writing about my music video, I have finished filming according to plan and started editing, finishing my 3rd draft a few days ago.

My first edit was the hardest part, as besides a rough plan and storyboard, I had very little to work from due to the complexity of storyboarding action scenes. I first separated each shot using the cut tool, and deleted some I thought I would never use, moving the most important shots to the front of the workspace to be ordered first. Following my rough storyboards and more accurate mental picture, I started putting the first shots together, starting with the introductions of the man and woman characters (although I later decided to cancel the opening shot of the woman as it made the intro too long). After fitting all the shots in a very rough order I loaded the song into the composition, which mainly dismissed my worries about not having enough footage, as there was plenty of footage to cut down on to get it to song length. After

Stabilised footage

Played with brightness contrast and colour

added slow mo

added light

Audience profile

The following pictures were taken by photographer James Mollison for his book "The Disciples"

George Michael

Iggy Pop

Klaxons

Madonna

Marilyn Manson

McFly

Missy Elliot

Oasis

Missy Elliot

Radiohead

Rod Stewart

Snoop Dogg

P Diddy

U2

Willie Nelson

These photos, taken at the concert of the artist in the footnote show the sort of person that is interested in certain types of music, making it clear that audiences are influenced by the music they like to a large degree. I have done a similar thing for Temple Scene by creating a fictional person and discussing their interests and beliefs.

Name/Nickname - James

Appearance -

Gender - Male

Age - 26

Relationship - Casual relationship with his girlfriend

Favourite music - Enjoys a wide range of music, but is particularly into Coldplay, Radiohead, Keane, Bloc Party, Muse and a range of late 80's artists. Also played piano up to when he was 22, but has mostly given up since.

Religious - Atheist. Does not believe in God, but believes in some of the ideologies behind religion.

Education - Went to a fairly peaceful city state school and passed GCSE's and A Levels with a B average. Attended art school for a year before dropping out and taking 3 years on a graphic design course in a reputable university.

Clothing preferences - Almost always dresses casually, loosely following trends. Recently is mostly seen wearing tight jeans and a simple (t-)shirt. Shops in a variety of high-street chains for clothing, choosing by what appeals to him and price. Tries to avoid spending large amounts on clothing.

Sports - Socially plays sports, and is also a keen runner. Enjoys the health and fashion benefits less than he enjoys occasionally choosing different directions for the adventuring aspect of the sport. Has tried a large range of sports over his life, including surfing and snowboarding, but never took them very far.

Occupation - Freelance graphic designer with plans of setting up a studio. Currently works from home using a special room converted for work, which, detached from the rest of his recently acquired house he claims makes distraction harder.

Internet uses - Heavy internet user work social, work and play purposes. Uses Twitter, Facebook, and a range of design sites frequently. Also hosts his own site and helps others set up theirs.

Spare time - Makes the most of his many high tech technologies such as his expensive TV and sound system plugged into games consoles or HD DVD player(bought instead of Blu-Ray due to the much smaller price tag of the kit and the films). He casually plays sport and is often seen in cafés with friends, and his flexible work hours allows him to do this regually.

Research methods

Before deciding on a questionnaire as my preferred method of extracting information from my sample, I considered some alternatives, which are in the short list below.

Interviews: One-on-one interviews with a random sample. This is similar to a questionnaire, but allows me to gauge responses based on thoughts and opinions as well as just facts about a person. However, this would have taken much too long and I could easily get the intentions of the interviewee wrong, leaving me with inaccurate results. My questions are also far too fact based for this method to be effective and worthwhile.

Vox Pops/Focus group: These two similar terms refer to interviewing several people at once, and judging the results of the whole. However, I cannot see this working for my purposes, as they rely on individual observation.

Observation: This refers to waiting in a location and observing habits. For example, I could wait around a music shop and count the amount of people who watched music videos. However, this would not be effective for my purposes as the places where people watch videos would mainly be homes, which would not allow for group surveillance. Also, it would be really creepy.

I chose to create a questionnaire because they are best suited for my purposes. A small survey of mostly fact-based questions is easily answered quickly, and using closed format question types would make them easy to tally and therefore draw results from. This also allows me to create individual conclusions based on age, gender, or other variables depending on what I ask, where this would have to be guessed with many other types of research methods. Questionnaires are also well suited as they can be filled out on-the-spot, online, handed out or spoken, meaning I can get results quickly and easily, and if necessary, privately/anonymously.

Questionnaire Results

Using my questionnaire discussed over a couple of fairly recent posts, 50 copies were passed out to people, 10 from each age group, with those 10 split 50/50 by gender. This means even though I might not have enough results for a really wide set of results, there is an equal amount of clearly defined sets of people which will show me exactly who to aim my product at, and those people's interests.

First, I analysed all the results, and divided them into two groups. One for “failed” and one for “passed”, deciding to only analyse the samples which fall in “passed” as people who fall into my definition of “target audience”. I did this by selecting all the results which scored 5+ points, using the points system discussed in an earlier post on the topic. I thought that the results from this could be proved accurate if they tied in with the findings from the band, who claimed that “We seem to have a lot of people in the 25-35 age range, with 15-25 and 35-45 probably coming joint second.” I chose slightly different age classes, which means that any conclusions drawn are likely to be slightly inaccurate. My results revealed this:

This shows that my results are similar, but differ slightly from Temple Scene's, although bear in mind that my questionnaire is designed to find those interested in the music video, not just the music, and that this is a graph only showing pass marks. When I plot the total amount of marks (corresponding to interest in the music video, which involves the song) against age groups, I get results much more similar to those of the band. This proves the validity of my results, and so I can safely use them to find out how to roughly target my audience.
This also provides me with the first part of my audience profile.

Finding out the most interested gender from my samples is one of the most important things to do, as gender targeting is very well established in today's advertising, and many of the most prevalent stereotypes often prove true. This is something I will look at in detail when planning how to advertise my Digipak.

This graph clearly shows that males are the most interested from my sample, and so I will aim primarily at them. However, females make up a large enough chunk of the graph; far too large to ignore them forever, so aiming just at males would be a mistake. This means that the CD cover should be aimed at both genders, but advertising should be different based on where it is placed. I will make sure to create at least one advert for a womens magazine or similar.

I created my questionnaire to find out how people consume music videos, which is the purpose of the following two questions. The following are from all the results which passed selection.

First I wanted to know where to display my video for maximum effect, and the results below make it very clear that online streaming sites are the most popular way for my sample to consume music videos, which makes it my first choice of place to post the finished video. This graph shows the decline of music TV very clearly, quite possibly as a result of Youtube's creation in 2005, although the rise of new, active forms of media are also likely culprits. This quote from Wikipedia backs me up “While music videos were featured on MTV up to eight hours per day in 2000, the year 2008 saw an average of just three hours of music videos per day on MTV.” Given the trends, it is likely that live TV music video channels will continue to decrease in popularity, possibly falling out of existence, while newer, more active forms of consumption are likely to rise. Based on this theory, “on demand” TV is likely to directly replace live music TV until the inevitable elimination/merging of the TV for favour of computer technology. Of course the band will host the video on their webpage as a form of media more than one of advertising(only fans are likely to spend time on their website). If there had been more results for “other” I might have looked into what these could be – at a guess, I'd say DVDs and Spotify (its easy-to-use, built-in video player is likely to get more attention given the clever advertising used by the program). I can easily work a DVD into the Digipak (in fact, I've been planning to), but Spotify might be aiming a little bit high for the band and the video.

Lastly, I wanted to find out why my target audience consumes music, which is a vital factor when planning advertising and distribution. The results were not as useful as I had hoped, showing me exactly what I would have assumed without having carried out the question. The most popular answers were “Recommended by a friend”, “Interest in the song” and “Interest in the artist”. I'm sure that if the band use the video that many fans will see the video, which will be great, but doesn't encourage people unaware of the band to listen them. As this shows that people interested in the song or video (I should have asked the sample whether they recommend the video or the song to people, although I suppose this is context sensitive. Besides making a good video, there isn't much I can do to push this along. Same goes for “Hype around it”. This really shows the power of the viral effect – if the video gets popular, then all of these become useful factors, but in the more likely case of it not, there isn't much more I can draw from this.

There are a few unmentioned regrets I have with this questionnaire that I only now come to realise which ideally would have been noticed before handing out the questionnaire. This is why professionals will hand out a trial questionnaire to find out how people are answering before distributing to the masses.
The first is that the age range should have matched that of Temple Scene's, to make comparison easier between my set of results and theirs. Although mine make a rough estimate clear, they can not be directly compared. It is possible that if my results used the same aging system that they would be the same as or completely different to theirs. Still, as they seem similar enough, this is not a major problem.

Something I realised while tallying results was my phrasing of the question "6.How interested are you in extreme sports?". Although this is fine, what I am really interested in was whether the subject enjoys WATCHING extreme sports. I should have included this key word to make my results more relevant.

Although there is not much I could do about this, the questions about passive and active consumption were not very well clear and could be confusing. As the boundary between the two is not a solid line, there is no way to make it clear to the audience exactly what I mean, especially without much more text. A small issue is also whether passive consumption was also active (I wanted them to be separate), and therefore people might have ticked in both boxes by error. This could have been more easily fixed now I am aware of it, but is not a major issue.

Another problem was that three of the results put more than 3 answers for the "4. Why do you most commonly watch music videos? (Tick up to 3)". To make this fair, I chose a random responses to be deleted to make them only answer 3. There is not much I could have done to make this clearer, although I should have make the results fairer by deleting those ones and replacing them with others.

Music video DVDs – if Im creating a DVD, I should have added it to the list "3. How do you most commonly watch music videos?".

methodology needs to be uploaded.