the cd cover is here!

I was delegated the task of creating a CD cover to go with the track that we chose to make a music video of. As a group we decided that we wanted to create the cover so that it would fit in with our theme. Some initial ideas were to Incorporated some kind of optical illusion to tie in with the 'trippy' feel that we wanted to create within the film itself.
I therefore began by doing some research into optical illusions on the Internet. what i found was that a lot of the more effective illusions seemed to use two similar geometric shapes or patterns that were layered on top of one another to give the optical illusion effect.

This is an example of such an image, by simply changing the pattern from horizontal to vertical the image creates a strange effect.
To create my own optical illusion for the CD cover i started by finding an image of many dots set out in horizontal and vertical lines:

I then imported this image into photoshop, enlarged the dots and colored them red. after i had done that i put a copy of the original image onto a new layer and put this on top. to create the title of our fictional album i then erased the layer on top to reveal the layer below, giving the effect of an optical illusion:

The next thing we discussed as a group was what should make up the rest of the CD cover. in the end we settled on the idea of making a representation of a sheet of LSD tabs. We felt that this would fit in nicely with what we wanted our end movie to be about, and it would also hint to the narrative.
To create this effect i went onto a website that provides free, non-copyright, stencils for public use and i put them above the title on the CD cover, i then added dots between the images to give the effects of perforations on the sheet of tabs... then it was done!!!

 During the time time i created this CD cover i encountered quite a few problems. Firstly trying to create the title of the CD as an optical illusion whilst also making it legible posed a slight issue, to solve this i made use of colouring the dots and making them larger to make them stand out.

Initially the idea was to have the word 'pirana' between the images rather than just dots, however this made the cover as a whole look too crowded and once i had tried using dots instead i found the more simple cover to be more effective and essentially 'easier on the eye'.

Animatic

After our descussion about our plot we set about creating an animatic to show our plot in a more coherent and cinematic way. Sam started the process off by doing some artwork that would represent how we hoped the film would look in the end. I then used a Dslr camera to take photos of the drawings and imported them into Adobe Premier Pro.

(screen shot)


Next I edited the photos together in the right order to allow the animatic to effectively show the narrative of our film. After I finnished this we had another group meeting and i showed the group what i come up with so far. We decided that the animatic should be as close to what we wanted our finnished product to look like so i started to look at other music films in a similar Genre to ours to get ideas of how to edit the animatic together:

Firstly, as i had already looked at Aphex Twin's Come to Daddy i decided that this would also be a good place to start when looking for inspiration on editing effects and ideas. I noticed that aswell as having a strang narrative as i already discussed on my blog it also used alot of quick, hard cuts throughout the editing. This helped the film to have a good pace and a sense of urgency that we as a group had already decided that we would like to include in our production.
Next i looked at the music video for Square Pusher's "Come On My Selector":

I found this video really inspiring as it is so well edited that it almost seems that the music was written around the video rather than the video being made for the music. Between 4:01 and 4:10 there is an especially good peice of rythmic editing that i thought was exactly the type of visual effect that would go really well with our genre of music.
After this research we had another meeting as a group and discussed how we would like our animatic to look. We decided that we liked the idea of using fast cuts and hard cuts so i started the animatic with these themes in mind. This is what i got:

Although the finnished animatic may not be true to exactly what our finnished peice will look like i think that my animatic gives a good idea of both the general look of our film idea as well as the pace.

The Plot

After we did some research into other music film productions in a similar area as our own (namely The Prodigy's "fire starter"  

video and Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy"

) we decided that there were a few critical things that we needed to include in our plot to help us to create an effective music film. We noticed that in both of these music videos the narrative, although sometimes obscure and often confused in terms of not being chronological, were integral parts of these music videos. We therefore decided to spend quite a lot of time on working on a good plot for our production. This is what we got:

Scene 1:
Opens with an establishing shot of our main character (played by Ben Carey) passed out on the floor of a poole room/ garage. The mise en scene of this scene shows the audience that he is waking up after a night of drinking and possibly drug taking. He gets up and leaves the room slightly dazed.

Scenes 2, 3 and 4:
Throughout the rest of the film the narrative follows the character as he moves through his house and out to the neighbourhood. His world becomes more and more fragmented as seemingly ordinary things like looking in the mirror or walking down the street become more and more twisted and reality becomes completely warped. A clone of the main character chases him throughout this section of the film heightening the tension and pace of our film. An enigma will be built into our film as there will be a sense of the narrative being detatced from reality so the audience will never be sure of weather the main protagonist is imagining things or if what he is experiencing is real. The film will climax in a direct confrontation between the main character and his stalker and the apparent death of both of them. However, the end of the film shows the main prtagonist waking up in nearly the exact position he was in at the start of the film, implying that he was merely hallusinating.

the audience

Our target audience for this track is young adults aged 16-25 years of age. Who are the most influential and outgoing people. They are already engorged in music and make up 90% of the people at gigs and festivals. So therefore by targeting this age group we can maximise our publicity and sales of our albums.

Our product is similar to many products made by other bands such as 'Chase & Status', 'Pendulum', 'Enter Shikari' and 'Hadouken'. They all have a similar target audience, with similar interests which consists mostly of white boys in their late teens from middle class backgrounds. This is the audience we would be aiming to please if we released the album. 

We researched the average statistics for the age of people within the UK to get a better understanding of how large the age range we are targeting was. The graph shows that our target audience rages from about 300,000 to about 425,000, meaning that we have a large potential market to attract. 

How Will Reach Our Target Audience

To reach our target audience we will use media methods such as Internet advertising, TV promotion an posters at gigs and festivals. We would use websites such as facebook and myspace as they have millions of members and a large number of the people that use these websites fit into our target range. Also placing ads on websites such as kerrang, as shown below.

Then we will attempt to get our video on music channels such as MTV base, Kerrang, NME, Starz TV and 4 music to try and maximise our track. Plus these channels are regularly viewed by our target range and can be shown to thousands of people at a time. These channels are typically viewed by our target market, they play them at parties and when at home with mates so this is why we chose these channels.

Also we would produce a poster to post round festivals and gigs and any other venues such as the Guildhall and The B.I.C. Here are some examples: