G324- Advanced Portfolio
A2 Media Studies
Felicity Challender
Candidate Number: 8441 Centre Number: 18503
Downham Market Academy Sixth Form
In the second hour we alternated so that myself and Lucy contributed to ideas for the digipak and Kathryn and Annabelle took part in some editing of the video. As a group we decided that we wanted both the artist and the guitar featured on the album cover so that we could put an emphais on the artist and his pure talent but also wanted to ensure that not all sides were necessarily just of the artist as we wanted to display our artist to be unique and not superficial. We also took some of the pictures in the same places as the magazine advert and locations featured in the music video which allows our target demographic to make a clear intertextual link with all our media texts. Seeing as Kathryn and Annabelle had started the ideas when it came to myself and Lucy contributing there was only two more panels in terms of ideas which is why I then thought of creating a mock up of our digipak as I felt this allowed me and the team an insight in to seeing a basic representation of what our digipak could potentially look like; however, at this point we hadn't taken the photos for our digipak yet which is why I decided to find similar photos online to use when it came to our mock-up which I copied and pasted on to a template of a 6 sided digipak I had got off Google. I started the mock-up for the digipak and Kathryn and Annabelle completed this in the next lesson on the 16th January where they added extra images as well as the necessary legal information that we required, our record label logo and a barcode etc. We wanted our digipak to be a true representation of our genre which I felt is shown via our ideas as we wanted to highlight his talent as well as the emotion behind a lot of the songs so some of the shots indicate lonliness and isolation such as long shots and an empty bench etc. Below you can view Kathryn and Annabelle's ideas as well as mine and Lucy's as well as the mock-up for our digipak that I thought of creating using pre-exisiting images.
Digipak Ideas and Construction
Initial Ideas- 14th Janurary 2015
In this lesson we started the design and construction of our digipak by opting to create a list of ideas that all of us had. However, we had decided to split the group so we could maximise our productivity so myself and Lucy in the first hour of the lesson edited our video whilst Kathryn and Annabelle began to think about some ideas in terms of the digipak such as locations for photos, what Ryan (Christian) will be doing in them and costumes etc. However, firstly we all researched pre-existing digipaks and magazine adverts which can be viewed below.
Kathryn and Annabelle's Ideas
Mine (Felicity) and Lucy's Ideas
On this day I carried on with the editing of our video and like previously mentioned Kathryn and Annabelle finished off completing our mock up by adding the additonal images, adding the legal information, logo, bar code and also the name of the album and the artist. We had already decided on font in terms of the album name and artist as it's the same fonts we are using in our music video and magazine advert as we wanted to create a signature font for our artist that allows him to be recognisable throughout all his media texts. We decided on the name of the album in this lesson as well which took some time as we wanted a name that was suitable for the artist, genre and a good representation of the songs on the album finally deciding on the name Broken Strings which we reinforced during the photoshoot by using a guitar with missing strings to give it a literal representation which would be particualrly evident in the close-ups of the guitar etc. Annabelle and Kathryn also came up with the names of 11 additional songs in addition to Bruises with contribution from myself and Lucy as I edited and they wrote these down ready to put on the mock-ups when we had carried out the photoshoot. We wanted all the songs to be similar and suit the genre of music so opted to choose names of tracks that suited the overall feel of the album which mainly looks at romance/love, the past and isolation and lonliness. The tracks on our album are as follow: Teaching an Old Dog New Love, Pack of Cards, Bruises, Find a Way Through, Another Day Another Way, Picture Perfect, Rock'n'Roll Girl, How to Fly, Welcome to my Life, Corrupted Fairy Tale, Every Day Another Lie and Stay. However, six of these tracks are existing songs from the artist Christian Smith himself however, we felt our digipak should contain more than six tracks. After ensuring we had organised everything in terms of images and other information we were then ready to carry out our photo shoot knowing precisely what we wanted and how we wanted to do it which we felt would allow us to be more efficient and effective.
Development of Digipak- 16th January 2015
On this day myself, Annabelle and Kathryn with the use of Kathryn's camera went out to capture the desired shots for our digipak with our artist Ryan (Christian); however, due to our limited time frame it meant we could only go near such as the Howdale and the Church. Once out on the photoshoot although we wanted to get the shots we organised we also felt that we should get additional shots just in case during the editing process we found these to work better in terms of the general layout and in line with the theme and genre. We were unable to get the town shots at this time but did spend a lot of time taking pictures in the location we went to. I felt I took an active role in the directing of the photoshoot and providing ideas of how we could do certain things. We got close-ups of Ryan's shoes which are a running theme throughout the magazine advert, digipak and music video and took this shot in a very similar style to George Ezra which links to intertextual references. We also got mid-shots and long shots of Ryan sitting on a brick wall as well as Ryan on the curb, sitting on a bench, a lonely bench and in front of the gates at the graveyard. Kathryn took a lot of the pictures initally as it was her camera but when we got to the gates and pictures of the close-up of the guitar on the grass I took the majority of these and Annabelle took a few at the gates and the door but by this point my team were beginning to lose motivation which is why I took the gate photos and close-ups of the guitar in which one of the pictures I took at the gate is now going to replace one of the planned images and may even be a contender for the front image. A lot of the pictures taken on this day we may not necessarily use but I felt the photoshoot went well and we were able to obtain a variety of photos including ones we had specified as well as extra shots some of which I felt looked professional and suitable for our genre. Please view some of the photos we took on this day below.
Digipak Photoshoot- 19th January 2015
During the lesson today Annabelle and Kathryn went off to take the town shots we needed whilst I produced various versions of the photos we wanted to use in different editing styles although as a team we decided we wanted it to be in a black and white or sepia effect which we felt represented our artist well and the emotions involved within the album; I edited the photos using an online editing site called PicMonkey. Annabelle and Kathryn while in town took some different shots of Ryan sitting on the curb and also with Ryan and the guitar down an alley with brickwork which is a theme we have maintained throughout all our media texts. As I believe Kathryn took a lead role in terms of taking the pictures and Annabelle was the main director. While in town they also took shots of Ryan by the clock which is what me and Lucy thougt of however, they found it difficult to do being in an open public space with cars driving past in the background which meant it would be important to take additional shots during this extra photoshoot as well as review the additional shots we took in our main photoshoot previously. While out filming Annabelle spotted the stairs and said how she thought this could be a good shot for some images to be taken in terms of Ryan sitting on the steps with his guitar and once there went on to obtain some good shots of Ryan under equal direction of both Annabelle and Kathryn. On the way back Kathryn also got pictures of Ryan by a road and pictures of the guitar and a bench. I produced various edits of pictures for our digipak during this time which can be viewed below. When editing I felt the black and whit effect was dreary and didn't promote our album well so mainly opted to use different editing styles after finding this out and getting feedback from my team. I received good feedback on my edits in particuarly the edits that we then used for all our photos on the digipak. Please view my edited photos below as well as the photos that Kathryn and Annabelle took on this day.
Editing and Additional Photoshoot- 28th January 2015
My Edited Photos
Once we had completed all the photo taking and looking at various editing we finally decided on an effect we liked which I had applied to a lot of my edits and with this we then applied it to all the photos we wanted to use and spent a lot of time when it came to our real mock-up for our digipak. We ended up changing some of the pictures either due to the initial picture not looking as good or other photos looking moe suited to our genre. We applied our chosen effect to the digipak and Annabelle and Kathryn copied all the legal information, bar code and record label logo from our practice mock up on to the real thing as well as added the font for his name and album title and added the song list. We spent the most time on this digipak but then felt we should create other versions and gather some qualitative and quantitative data from others in the sixth form via a questionnaire; the photos for other versions of the digipak had already been done but it was Annabelle that went on to create two other versions of a digipak so that we could then gather some results from our audience in regards to what they preferred and what they felt best represented our genre and artist. The three versions of our digipak can be viewed below.
Once we had devised the multiple versions of our digipak i went on to create the questionnaire to be used to gather our audience feedback; I ensured our questionnaire contained both qualitative and quantitative questions as we needed to know for example how many people choose which digipak but needed to know their opinions and feedback in terms of why they thought this and what could be improved etc. The questionnaire which I created asked for the name and gender of the person answering followed by the images of our 3 digipak versions asking them which one they liked the best out of A, B or C. The questions that followed asked our respondents why they liked this digipak in particular and what made it appealing to them followed by what would you change and why and also a closed question of what genre they felt this belonged to followed by asking if it would catch their attention (yes or no) and how much would they be willing to pay for it.
We then went round with the questionnaires handing out 20 in total and I made an effort to ask a variety of people of different genders and ages although kept mainly to our target demographic but did also ask teachers for their opinions. We felt that with respondents feedback we would be able to alter our digipak if necessary with the comments they provide and establish a professional and genre suiting digipak for our acoustic singer songwriter. Below you can view the filled in questionnaires from our 20 respondents that we asked which included Year 12s, Year 13s and some teachers including our media teacher.
Source: Kathryn Marshall
 wallreal.jpg |  wall4.jpg |  wall2.jpg |
|---|---|---|
 wall.jpg |  underdoor2.jpg |  underdoor.jpg |
 stairs.jpg |  shooesreal.jpg |  shoes1.jpg |
 Shoes.jpg |  P1000937.jpg |  P1000930fg.png |
 P1000930.png |  P1000878.jpg |  legsguitarrrrr.jpg |
 guitarrr2.jpg |  guitarrr.jpg |  guitarreal.jpg |
 guitarclose2.jpg |  gatesss.jpg |  gate.jpg |
 curb.jpg |  closeupguitar.jpg |  closeupalleyguitar3.jpg |
 closeupalley1.jpg |  clock2.jpg |  clock.jpg |
 christwall.jpg |  benchh.jpg |  bench1.jpg |
 bench.jpg |  b&wcloseupguitar.jpg |  alleyguitar3.jpg |
 alleyguitar2.jpg |  alleyguitar.jpg |  alley2.jpg |
 alley.jpg |  11.jpg |
When it came to analysing our results, we found that on the questionnaire digipak C won by a landslide of 12 votes out of 20 and 17 out of the 20 people asked were able to identify that the digipaks we created belonged to the acoustic folk rock genre which we were pleased about as it meant the image we wanted to create for our artist was clearly apparent to our target demographic and over 50% of those asked picked the digipak that as a group we felt was the best in terms of professionalism and representation of our artist. Another question asked in which 17 out of the 20 asked responded with yes is would this digipak catch your attention which again we were pleased with as it meant that those asked were the right people for our target demographic and via their postitive response means that our album and genre was something our respondents listened to. When it came to why do you like this digipak some of the feedback we received from digipak C which won included:
- Quality Picture
- Professional Looking
- Genre suiting filters, colours and font which makes it look appealing and professional
- The front cover looks like an effective CD cover
- Clear Images
- Emphasises the instruments and artist
-Like the lyrics
- Think the different camera shots and angles are effective and professional
-Like the contrast of the colours
-Good colour scheme and 'fancy' writing
We also asked another qualitative question of if there was one thing you could improve about this digipak what would it be and why and because we could see that digipak C was winning the feedback for this digipak when carrying out our audience feedback can be viewed below:
- The CD circle
- The clarity and clearness of the font on the back cover needs improving
- Perhaps change the colour of the font on the back cover to white rather than black to make it more seen
- Font is hard to read so perhaps similar style but clearer and not bold
- Change the picture on the back cover to something more interesting and less plain
Below you can view some tables and charts I done to show some of the results for our digipak research as well as an analysis.
I created the digipak questionnaire which includes both qualitative and qualitative questions. I found which can be seen via the tables and charts I created on Excel that Digipak C won by a tremendous amount of 12 votes out of the 20 people asked. I tried to ask a variety of ages but was limited to Year 12 and Year 13 and a few teachers; I tried to ask a similar amount of both males and females to avoid gender bias but we were happy that Digipak won the audience feedback vote as we felt as a team this was the most professional looking digipak that suited our artist, conventions and genre. One of the questions asked was what people liked about Digipak C which included comments such as it looks the most professional and suitable to the genre; people also liked the filter used on the images and the different shots used to show variety. Furthermore, people also liked the layout of the digipak in terms of what images we put where and thought the colour scheme was professional looking and liked the lyrics written on two of the images. We asked people what they would change about this digipak in order to make it better and found that the top constructive criticism factor was changing the font as it is difficult to read and can distort the consumer.
Since receiving the feedback I gathered from these questionnaires I then changed the font myself to a font called Lucinda Calligraphy which I felt still maintained professionalism and style we had wanted but was much clearer but still eye catching, attractive and similar to the one previously; I asked my team members if they were happy with this and received positive feedback in return. I changed the name of the title to this font as well as the lyrics on the two panels. By looking at the charts and tables I created you can view that we have achieved our desired result to an extent as it’s clear to consumers what the genre of our digipak and artist is with 17 people out of the 20 choosing acoustic folk rock as to what they perceived the digipak to be. 17 people out of the 20 asked said that this digipak would catch their eye and they would be willing to buy it and that the main price range was between £5-£10 with the lowest price as feedback being £2.99, £3.50 and £4.99 and the highest being willing to pay £10. Our digipak feedback was extremely helpful as it was mainly positive and the improvements were something we were initially worried about so the feedback was extremely beneficial to us and the construction of our digipak.
You can see our finalised chosen digipak with the font changed below.
However, alongisde the final alterations to our digipak we had already carried out the audience feedback on the magazine adverts we had created and chosen a finalised option and Kathryn then noticed that in order to maintain continuity throughout we should at least change the name of the title 'Broken Strings' back to the font it was before I changed it to make it clearer as this was used in the actual video and the magazine advert so to maintain synergy between the two texts that we should change this back but make it clearer by making it bigger and keeping the font I changed it to for the lyrics so this maintained clear. Kathryn also choose to change the tracklists which I had changed to a clearer font in to a different format by being all on one line and centralised to make it easier for our target demographic to read. Our final digipak after all the alterations etc can be viewed finally below.
