Political Research

When we came up with our idea to have a political twist to our video/CD etc, we new that we needed to research current politics and increase our basic knowledge.

Tony Blair

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was born 6 May 1953 and is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007; he resigned from all these positions in June 2007.As the casualties of the Iraq War mounted, Blair was accused of misleading Parliament and his popularity dropped dramatically.

Gordon Brown

James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British Labour Party politician, who has been a Member of Parliament since 1983. He served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. Brown became Prime Minister in June 2007, after the resignation of Tony Blair and three days after becoming leader of the governing Labour Party. Immediately before this, he had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007. His tenure ended in May 2010, when he resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party.

David Cameron

David William Donald Cameron born 9 October 1966 is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Conservative Party.

In the 2010 general election held on 6 May, the Conservatives gained a plurality of seats in a hung parliament and Cameron was appointed Prime Minister on 11 May 2010, at the head of a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
 

Nick Clegg

Nicholas William Peter "Nick" Clegg born 7 January 1967 is a British Liberal Democrat politician who is the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Lord President of the Council and Minister for Constitutional and Political Reform in the coalition government of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. Clegg is the Leader of the Liberal Democrats and is the Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam.

Research- Colour and Fonts

Aside from the images, colour and fonts are equally important in conveying the right message. We started to look at colours and fonts that would work, bearing in mind the transition from video, to CD, to advert etc.

Research-Digipack Templates

We started looking at digipack templates as we new how different each song can be. Some CD'S have extra long booklets inside, especially in the case of bands as they have lots of shots of each band member. Some CD singles don't have a back cover as their is only one song to name and some have lyric booklets with details and products for their websites. Here is some of the various types of digipack templates.

Research-Digipack

The three main parts of a Digipack is the front cover, the CD design and the inside booklet. The key to getting this right is all about transition. In all forms of advertising their is a clear link, to the extent that the audience are almost oblivious to it as it is expected. Example, if the front cover had a giant mermaid on it,the booklet had shots of snails and the CD itself was covered in gothic writing an a picture of Marilyn Manson then it would make the audience feel uncomfortable and most importantly there would be no transition. 

Because our CD cover is going to be a single we have the choice of whether to do a back cover or not as some singles just have the CD showing through the back. For example Rhianna's "Take a bow" CD had no back to it.

Research-Advert

Aside from a music video, we are also required to create an advert and digipack. We started researching war videos and war posters to try and get an understanding of what specific things need to be included and how they can come across to the audiences.

With this, we started to put together some possible designs and incorporated our final storyboard images. (in construction pages)

Audience Research- Music Video

 

This graph here asked what everyones favourite music videos are. It was an open question, something general which everyone could answer easily. We didnt anticipate to have the same answer more than once as everyone has a different opinion but having three votes for one artist, must mean that that artist does something in particular to attract his/ hers audience.

We asked this question to find out what captures peoples attention best. By finding out what stands out most to people, we can think about including it (or not including it depednding on whether we want to follow conventions) within our music video so that what we create has the same effect when people are watching it.

This question doesnt have much relevance on its own until it is linked with the next. We asked this to see if any videos were voted for more than once, that way we could analyze that specific video and see what it is that it contains, which keeps an audience for the whole duration.

This was one of the more specific questions we was interested in. By asking this we could see why people viewed that video for the whole duration, by having specific categories (which all videos could relate to) i was able to see what we would need to contain, again to make sure our video was successful. 

This graph above just displays a general information question which we asked, it was to see what type of music the audience listen to. We were expecting a wide genre of maybe old school classics but was surprised to see most people choosing to use more up to date music, with videos that had already been created.

 

By asking this final question it was to find out what would make people choose a certain song. For example if a lot of people chose the song 'mine' by 'Taylor Swift' it could be because they wanted to tell a story within the video. This question helped slightly as it gave an underlying idea to what people think about certain videos and their components.

Audience Research- Digipack

The research for the digi-pak was as vital as the research for the music video. Again at the start we asked general questions to see what the majority answer would be, the highest answer for this question was 5 for the answer of elements relating to the CD. This was a useful piece of information which we took on board when it came to producing the digi-pak.

Again this question was standard to ask. As most people said they prefer CD covers to be striking and interesting, we started to think up ideas of what would make a CD cover contain those two things. After looking at the brainstorms and looking at the results from the surveys we started coming together with more ideas. 13 out of the 14 people who answered, said they prefer their CD covers to be striking and interesting.

 

After discovering this piece of information, we realised that this mainly applies to albums and not singles. However, we did use this to our advantage. We began designing the inside covers for the digi-pak using the song lyrics, band information etc and got some good feedback. In the end we went with the idea that got good positive feedback, to ensure it would be the most effective.

This was the piece of research that surprised us the most. With the invention of Web 2.0, people everywhere are able to download music from itunes and various internet websites. By finding this information out we realised we would have to work hard and come up with various ideas that would interest people to purchase the CD in stores. We would also have to make sure the cover would be accesible via software like itunes so that people can download it at the same time.

Advert Research

The research for the poster/ advert was key to making it sell the CD. As a group, we new that the poster had to be balanced between military and music but also had to be aimed at the target audience of 18-22.

Here are some of our results.

This was the first question asked for the poster/ advert. By asking peoples own opinions, we could work out from the majority, which would be the most beneficial element to contain in our video. Out of the 11 people who responded to this question, 4 said that they would want to show the clothing and equipement. 3 out of the 11 said that they would want to show real or ex soldiers, by taking those comments on board it can assist us in producing some designs.

This was a fairly basic question. Out of the 11 people that responded, 8 said that no adverts recently had caught their attention. The other three who responded said that the T-mobile advert in heathrow was the one which recently caught their eye from the singing, dancing and sheer randomness of the production. This gave us an idea into how diffcult it can be to attract audiences however it also showed us how it is the out of the ordinary adverts that catch peoples attention.

 

This question was useful in an underlying way, 8 out of 11 people answered yes for this question. I knew that for the production, i wouldnt be able to get a celebrity to be on the poster  ( is tony blair a celebrity? )plus it would take away from the message i wanted to get across. However, we thought about what the theme could lead onto, for example The Libertines could re-release this song in a few years time and have it dedicated to the armed forces, at the same time as joining with celebrities to raise money for charity. 

Audience Research- Questionnaire

We new that without audience research our video would not have a starting point and our video would not based on any opinion or reason. We new that every decision we made had to be justified, even if it was not want we personally wanted to do.We started off with a basic questionnaire of 7 questions.

1. What is your favourite music videos?
2. What is it that makes a good music video?
3. Do you think it is important to have a video that is relevant to the lyrics?
4. Do you think all music videos should have shots of the actual band/artist etc?
5. What music video don't you like?
6. Why don't you like this video?
7. Do you think the video detracts from the song?

After colleting the results, we started to build from these questions and ask a bigger range of people more specific questions.