Magazine Advertisement research

Before making my own magazine advertisement I decided to research the magazine advertisements of other famous artists. One such artist is Ed Sheeran. Here is the magazine ad I will be looking into.

What I really like about this magazine ad is that the artists name ‘Ed Sheeran’ really stands out and the album title is placed underneath in a different colour. The reason why I like this is that I feel that since my magazine ad will be featuring a new artists it shows me that I need to put more prominence on the artist name rather than the album title to make sure that even if people were to just glance at the ad the very least their mind will pick up is the name. The artist name is bold and visible and I will make sure to similarly make my artist name stand out.

Another thing I noticed was the font that Ed Sheeran uses the same font and colour codes in both the digipak and the ad. What this does is to create synergy and brand identity around the product. It acclimatises the colours orange, brown and red to Ed Sheeran and the audience will now associate those colours with him creating a mass target audience. I will use the same colour scheme in both my digipak and my magazine ad to create the same brand identity across all forms of multimedia for my artist.

I also like the fact that that the ‘Q’ magazine drops a line explaining what they like about the album rather than just leaving a generic 4 star sign. It shows that the magazine has really listened to the album and it feels a lot more sincere when there is a reason accompanying the rating. At the bottom there are links to Ed Sheeran’s personal homepage and twitter to give newer audiences links to see more of him. I like both these aspects and will be sure to use them in my own personal magazine ad.

Editing

Abul and I started our version of the editing today and I found it fairly hard at the beginning. We hadn’t arranged the scenes we wanted to use from the scene we didn’t want and so I watched through most of our clips again to remove the irrelevant ones. This was very time consuming and so we didn’t have much time after to do the editing.

When I started the editing after going through the clips it went very smoothly. It pays to be organised as we immediately got to work on matching the music to the clips. I must admit it was harder than I thought it would be as Erick was singing very fast in some clips and in others the filming had stopped before the end of the lyrics. We did get the first half of the music video done but this will only be a rough draft and so Abul and I don’t expect it to be perfect.

All in all a long but productive day.

Third Shoot

                                                                      

We did some filming today at Westminster Bridge and London Eye. We shot the scenes where Erick is singing and we shot after dark. We got some good scenes and made sure to minimize the risk as there is a lot of footfall at Westminster Bridge with plenty of tourists. We made sure to keep an eye on our equipment and we were very cautious as we filmed the scenes on the bridge. We made sure to only shoot on the road when it was clear and fortunately we got some great shots.

We then moved directly under London Eye to film the rest of today’s scenes. Everything was going smoothly and we got to film some amazing shots with the London Eye as a backdrop.

Filming today was very smooth as there was alot of things that could go wrong at a place as famous as Westminster. We did an equipment check after we were done and so we were very pleased with today’s work.

           

Digipak Research

As I was making the previous digipak blogpost I came across certain aspects of of Ed Sheeran’s digipak that intrigued me so I did some research. I decided to follow his lead and not clutter my digipak analysis with unnecessary information so I will put my research findings here.

The first thing I noticed was that Ed Sheeran had continued the theme from his first album front cover by using ‘X’ (multiply) after his first album was +.

This showcases the importance of thinking ahead when designing a digipak as your actions today can also affect what you do tomorrow.

Another thing I noticed when analysing the digipak was the paw print on the back cover. I was very intrigued to see a seemingly random paw print and wanted to understand why Ed put that there so I did some research. I discovered that the paw print is logo that Ed also used on his first album (+) as it was the logo used on his very first album.

                                           

It shows the importance of synergy and now the paw print is recognisable logo that the audience will know identify as Ed Sheeran.

Here is Ed Sheeran telling a small audience the story behind his paw print.

Digipak Analysis

Ed Sheeran – X

Ed Sheeran has decided to go for a very simple looking front cover, with a bright green background and a big black X. It is interesting to note that Ed has refrained from putting even his name keeping the content of his front cover very minimal. This could be because he didn’t want to clutter the front and he feels that sufficient marketing has gone into the album to not warrant anything else on it. He didn’t want it the front to lose its minimalistic appeal by putting in unnecessary additions. By leaving his front cover vague it also keeps the audience guessing and they’ll be drawn to it as they’ll want to see what this ‘x’ is and why it’s there.

The back of his digipak also follows the same colour structure with both black and green being used continuing the pattern. He uses a very simple font to showcase all the songs on the album and slightly increases font size to put his name at the bottom. The big X dominates the back and I like that multiply is the name of his second album as it continues the theme from his first album (+) and showcases the importance of synergy.

The CD is black with green writing around the circumference of the CD. Ed continues using the same black and green to let the digipak flow and showcases a consistency across the board. Again he has decided to go for a very minimal approach and you can see throughout that he seems to favour a less is more approach and doesn’t want to clutter the CD.

Second Shoot

Our second shoot went well. We got there in the afternoon today (31/01/2015) and shot the scene involving Lucas, Abul and I. Martyna took plenty of different shots and made sure to refilm a few scenes with better lighting. Overall today we had a productive day and managed to film the remaining London Fields scenes.

The football cage was empty today so we weren’t bothered by anyone and were pretty much left to our own devices. It was a good day and we made sure to have tripod umbrella just incase it rained as we were filming. We followed the shooting script and so we had a good plan to follow to ensure we didn’t waste any time.

Overall a very productive day!

Shooting script

Here is the shooting script we will be using to film our scenes.

Risk Assessment

Here is my risk assessment for our upcoming shoots. 

Storyboard

Here is our storyboard that we will be using for the duration of filming.  

As you can see our storyboard is well structured and and gives us a clear outline of what we’ll be doing. The storyboard is an important feature as it allows us to visualise what we want to do and helps us when we’re filming to keep on track.

Here is the animatic for our storyboard.

Locations

This is a list of locations we will be shooting at:

Hackney rooftop

Mabley Green

Westminster bridge

London Eye