One Republic - Digipak Logo's and Styles

Elliot began looking at the existing One Republic digipaks and whether they had any similarities. Each of the albums have a different font used on the front covers, as you can see from the image on the left. The albums also do not display a band logo allowing us a freedom when designing our own digipak. Despite this, there are many similarities between the fonts, as they all use black, white and browns as a distinct colour scheme. The fonts are all formal which reflects the band as a whole, as throughout their music videos they are seen wearing formal clothing. This style further promotes the band's image. In some cases, the same fonts are used for both the name of the band and the album title, but the difference is indicated by a change of colour.

The album artwork is generally abstract as you can see in the image on the right. 'Waking Up' uses paint splatters as an album artwork, and 'Dreaming Out Loud' uses a silhouette of a tree on a blue starry background. This album cover is the only one that appears to have some relevance to the title of the album, as dreaming is commonly associated with stars and night.

'Apologize' is one album cover that shows the band as a whole, where you can see they are dressed formally and the structure of the image gives an indication of the members of the band. The lead singer is presented at the front, and the remaining band members are situated behind him, showing his importance and role in the band. If we use an image of our band as a whole we would need to pay attention to how we set up the image like this.

Adding a Logo

After learning how to key frame and layering our video we decided to add the MTV Rocks logo to our video. We first had to decide where the logo would be positioned on our video. After looking at these images, we decided that the picture would need to be in the top left corner of the video.

We then needed to import the image of the logo. We saved an MTV Rocks logo as a PNG file as this meant that certain areas of white background wold become transparent, which is what we wanted. We dragged the image into Final Cut and then on to the video track above our original footage. This allowed the two tracks to overlap each other. When we first put the image into the video track it came to fill the whole screen, so we had to check the option for Image and Wire frame, so we could adjust the size and position of the logo on the screen. After we had done this we simply stretched the image across the entire song and then added fade in and outs for the logo. This gave the video a more professional look about it.

Audience Research

An interesting and authentic music video and promotion package can seriously affect the success of a band. This document gave me a lot of advice in its marketing chapter on page 20 about how the success of a band can rely on their music video and promotion packages, as well as specifically researching their target audience.

"Videos are an essential tool for reaching music fans through services such as YouTube and social networking sites as well as specialist TV channels".

Stronger video, shot in 2007, had a reported budget of more than US$1 million and was filmed on location in Japan over nine days".

"Digital technology can be used to develop relationships between artists and fans".

I also researched into Q magazine as this is the sort of magazine that our adverts will be appearing in.

Q is a monthly music magazine with a total circulation of around 80000. It features a wide range of music and reviews of many different bands, spanning from the rock bands to the pop artists.

The magazine has a large review section, which looks at bands, artists and live performances. The majority of the interviews are taken with popular artists, no matter what genre they happen to be in.This type of magazine makes it ideal to advertise our band in.

 I looked at an issue of Q myself and found that there were 146 pages in the magazine. This is quite a lot of pages for a magazine considering most others have less than 100.

There are 24 pages of adverts, most appearing at the back of the magazine. 16% of the magazine is advertisements, and overall, there are 15 individual adverts for albums. On some pages, more than one advert is featured on the page.

There is also a huge section at the end of the magazine devoted to reviewing albums and promoting tours and gigs. This type of magazine would be ideal for our magazine advert.

What Music Channel would it appear on?

When looking into the the target audience of our video, we had to bare in mind what channel the video would be featured on. As there are so many different genres of music, MTV have expanded so that it has individual channels for each genre of music.

Our video would fit best on MTV Rocks. From the playlists and highlights section, you can see that this channel displays simiar artists and music to what we are using in our music video.

Target Audience

The music video will be used in order to promote the band as a whole, so we felt a performance video would do best at establishing iconography and the roles of each band member. This is also a common feature of music videos in the genre so would make sense to follow the conventions.

Looking at the site UK Tribes, I began to plan who our target audience would be. Clearly it would be anyone that likes the rock/alternative genre or One Republic, but other interests such as hobbies, fashion and media consumption needed to be looked at to produce a video and ancillary tasks fitting to our target audience.

The target audience most likely to consume our video would be the Young Alts 'tribe'. Tribe icons include Green Day and Kurt Cobain, fitting to the genre we have chosen.

UK tribes states that:

'Young Alts are after something different, but beyond that, they’re not exactly decided. They’ll read about or listen to a huge variety of bands and try Skater, Emo and even Urban fashions. They also love a lot of mainstream fashion and music.

Young Alts are wide eyed to the world and can be influenced by TV, radio and mainstream media. Of course, the biggest influence is the playground and their friendship groups, and they constantly scour specialist magazines and the internet for news and clues about their favourite scenes.'
I found these points interesting as it shows that the target audience we are aiming at is extremely flexible. This allows us lots of options when it comes to filming the video concerning fashion, props and general mise-en-scène. By studying the media consumption table and the description of the tribe, I found out many useful things about the tribe and how it could be targeted. 

The target audience have an extremely high consumption of both TV and magazines, so a magazine advert for the band and an effective music video is likely to attract people from this tribe.

Young Alts also like 'a lot of mainstream fashion' so by choosing a smart/casual look for our band members in our performance video we can address the style and fashion sense of our target audience.

In relation to the magazine advert, the magazine that it would appear in and the genre of the song greatly affects the layout and presentation of the advert. As the screen grab from UK Tribes suggests, our target audience like to read many magazines such as Kerrang and NME, but also 'listen to a wide variety of bands', meaning that a magazine such as Q would be appropriate for our target audience as it includes a wide range of bands.