Wednesday 2 February 2011

Target 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. Meaning that they have a relatively average rate of income and disposable income to spend on gigs and CD's and downloads.  Women are also included in this target audience, but it does consist mainly of men. We would hope to make our target audience as board as possible to please more people, meaning more money. However this is the audience we would be aiming to please if we released the album. By marketing ourselves in a similar way to bands such as Hadouken, and other bands in this genre with this target audience, we should generate an image in people's minds that associates us with bands that they have heard and enjoyed before. These artists have a common theme of dark shades contrasting with bright fluorescent colours which is a follow up from the rave scene of the 80's and 90's. We have followed this theme on our website by having a predominantly black background but with flashes of pink and yellow in the text.

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 a variety of media methods such as Internet advertising, TV promotion and posters at gigs and festivals and possibly attempting to get our album onto iTunes and other downloadable sites.


We would use websites such as Facebook and My-space 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. Obviously radio influences would massively affects who listens to the song and who hears our name. A survey on our target audience and a questionnaire on our school of the similar age range, shows that 60% listen to BBC Radio 1, 30% listen to BBC radio 2 and 10% other stations. Prime time to play our track to our target audience is late afternoon and mornings, (before school) due to the times when our target audience is most likely to listen to the radio. 50% of people listen to the radio between 8:00 am and 9:00 am. Prime time to play our track to our specific audience is on Radio 1, possibly on Chris Moyle’s breakfast show.
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:



Also to keep up to date with the change in technology we would try and get our tracks on iTunes as it has become a major site for people to get there music on a global scale. To do this we have to go through sights such as this one below:

This site enables anyone to upload their music to a wide variety of download sites, including the big names such as iTunes and Amazon. To do this we would have to pay a one off fee and then we can upload our album and get to keep all the rights and profits made from sales. This would increase awareness of our track to a great extent.
Also we conducted a small survey of our year group to try and establish where they got their music from. This is to help us chose how to reach our audience. A massive 72% said they got their music from download sights such as iTunes and Amazon, 18% said they bought Cd's and 10% illegally downloaded their music. From this information we were able to establish that the majority use download sites, so this is a vital way to distribute our track. Also the research is based on our age range which is also within the target range so it shows this would be a very affective method to reach our audience.  

Group Discussions - Digipack Alteration

As a team we must keep an on going discussion and  with criticisms and feedback make constructive alterations to our product, non more so than the Digipack. We decided to discussed everything that we had been doing and all decided to go against our original plan of using a circuit board theme throughout our Digipack. Instead we chose to use new photo's we took and stills from our music video. We were then greatly influenced by the album cover of Chase and Status's album, No More Idols 
(shown below).















From this we used a still of the dog in our film and got a still image of it barking and incorporated it as the cover for our Digipack. Then Louis took some photo's of Sam in the white mask and walking about, altered the images, changing the contrast, colour scheme and many other effects to give it an edgy feel. However only one of the images is in colour and the rest are in black and white.The inside of the Digipack will also carry this theme of the masks and stills of the film but again this is open to review but must be finalised shortly.

Website

Website
We used a simple website making programme called Wix.com
http://www.wix.com/how-to/getting-started


As part of our project we were to create a band web site. As the auxiliary task enabled us to research similar band websites and ways we were to create a web site. Having never created a web site of our own this was a new skill we were to learn. Sam and Jack proved very able to select appropriate colour schemes and images in order to make the web site look good, they showed this from an early stage and so I continued with editing leaving them to create the web site.

We created a website for our band to make it seem more professional and also enable the band to accessible to everyone around the world, similar bands also use this website as a advertising aid for their own bands and this is also our aim. We used a website called wix.com, it set up a template for use which we then could change and develop it as we pleased. We were able to select colours, images and extra tabs for links to other pages similar to actual link we had researched along the way.
This image below is the main page, it shows three pictures of the band and the band’s name in the top left. We will be replacing the album artwork with the real album artwork once it is finished. Below the name is 4 tabs which are Home, Discography, tour'n'Gallery and Contact'n'comment. All of these aspects of our website were careful thought about. Each font image and colour scheme and even the links are added to match conventions of similar band websites in order to establish our own band amongst existing bands.

This next page/ image shows the discography area of our website. It shows the tracks on our CD and also gives background information on how the band got noticed and the band members themselves. This part was though up on the spot and is easily changed. For example the album cover and the titles of each track can be change to suit our specification points- Ones we feel can match and go against conventions when needed to establish our band as ‘drum and bass’ but also with a difference.
Another cool aspect within the website is the ability for the audience to have a chance to listen to a track of our album. Also the speakers move with the music, giving it a more professional feel. This is similar to the prodigy’s website and so we thought would also suit our own.


This is a screen shot of the Tour'n'Gallery page, this contains information about when and where the band will be touring, posters and adverts shown on researched websites showed the audience when the tour dates occurred however this was quite hard to establish with some band website having to look at multiple links to find any information about touring. We then decided to show the audience straight away and clearly tour dates, rather than the hassle of (kick-starts website looking for ages finding out that all dates occurring and information available on future posts).
Also shows all the bands photos so the audience can feel closer to the band. Keeping the audience up to date will help keep the ticket sales as high as possible maximising the bands profits making us huge rock stars.


This is the last page of our website, it enables our fans to get in contact with the band and this makes them feel valued. Also it helps the band make decisions on where to tour next in relation to fan demands. (This was influenced by the ‘Spice Girls’ when they asked their fans what city they should perform to next with the voting system used on their website.... un/fortunately the fans chose Bagdad)
This website was relatively easy to use and we soon got the hang of it and managed to produce a convincing official website for our band.


We looked at other similar bands websites to try and get a feel for what the norm for this style of music is, and then add our own unique twists to make it individual and original to us. We were advised to ignore the prodigy website as we are already using a prodigy song and need to keep as far away from copyrighting their merchandise as possible. So we there for we looked at the websites of The Qemists, Pendulum, Chase and Status, Example etc.




Filming Considerations

We have to constantly monitor the weather to check when it is possibly to film in suitable conditions. Because our film is set outside weather and light plays a massive part when deciding to film in order to keep the continuity and the ease of filming. it being winter light is short and so its harder to do a longer days filming when the light fade very quickly.


Another barrier and set back to our filming is that Me, the actor is unfortunately injured meaning that any physical/ running scenes are temporarily unable to be filmed. however we shall re film what we can with the use of the green screen so that making around me is easier of jack to create the clone and fighting effect with. hopefully my torn ligaments in my shoulder will not affect our filming too much.

Introduction Effect- Earth Zoom

Earth zoom

Jack was able to create the introduction to our music video. We decided to establish the scene with a clever earth zoom effect, this would hopefully inform the audience what will happen and what to expect from the video. The spinning and colour changes would hopefully inform the audience that this is a trippy and strange world they are diving into. Jack was able to create this using after effects.

For our music video jack was to created a zoom effect that made it seem as if the camera was coming from out of space onto my house, the scene where our movie starts.

jack was able to create this by flowing a tutorial on http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom/
This was for a zoom from Earth to space, but just quite simply jack reversed the scale so the 'camera' starts from space and then zooms in. jack came into a bit of trouble with the scale when the zoom went really slowly, and then ridiculously fast due to the scale being linear. To fix this he made the scale "exponential" which makes it similar to the way a camera would zoom.
To start with we made a new composition lasting 5 seconds at 29.97 frames a second. Jack then got 8 printscreens from Google earth at varying heights, and crop out the bit I needed in each image in photoshop.
Jack had to parent these images together so that they would go into each other seamlessly and feather around the layers to make it blend in even more. After he had parented the layers to each other, the corners of each image within the other could be seen. To reduce the notice ability of this he placed an elliptical mask on each on of the images, feathered it 250 and on the mask expansion factor put it to -250. Jack then added a 180 degree rotation to a null object to give it a more interesting/ trippy and effective effect. He made the key points "easy-ease" which stops the rotation starting and stopping harshly, it will 'ease' it in and 'ease' it out.
After doing this Jack created a new solid and added fractal noise to it in order to create the stars. Jack clicked on transform and altered the scale so it looked more like a static tv, brought the contrast up and the brightness down. I then moved the layer below all the others so they over lapped it and parented it to layer 1 so everything was linked. This was decided by the group and jack was able to add this in after the discussing.
The next thing we wanted to create was a camera wobble as it was zooming through the air. We thought that this would be more effective and show the audience speed and if they are on a ride. And to do this jack put the Earth Zoom Composition and placed it in a new composition. After this he added a slider control so he could animate the wobble. Jack then input some code by Alt+clicking on the stop watch: wiggle(10,(parent to the slider control)).
A problem arises when you make this shake, a black fringe appears on some of the sides because to make the wobble effect the computer offsets the image from the viewers box. To overcome this jack added the motion tile preset, turned on mirror edges and set the x and y factors to 120.
After this he created a new layer and added fractal noise to create clouds. Jack even experimented with the clouds to make shapes and it more 3D.
By turning the fractal type to dynamic it gives it a more cloudy effect. By increasing the contrast and decreasing the brightness it makes it look even better and less oddly shaped. Change the transfer mode to screen so the black is removed and the clouds overlay the layers below. Now in the tutorial it says to find a hole in the clouds for the camera to zoom through but as a group we thought a better way to do it would be by having the cloud fade and zoom towards the camera and then fade and zoom past the camera. This gives the effect that the camera is actually travelling through 3D clouds (the clouds thinning out as they decrease in density as the camera is travelling through it), rather than travelling through a 2D hole. I did this effect 2 or 3 times and we think it works quite well and makes the effect more interesting. Jack then feathered again and reduced the expansion so it didn't look square and also changed the shape of the mask to give it a more random look. Also the clouds need to have an exponential scale so they do not change like a linear scale would. Jack then parented the clouds to the rotation so they rotate with the landscape.
He tried to make our name "A Film Production Company" come up in clouds, I got quite far with this but encountered a problem with the name coming up too fast. I tried to solve this by changing the scale, but for some reason it still came up too fast even with an exponential scale. This just made it look terrible so got rid of it, but Jack managed to take some printscreens which you can see below. We then scraped the idea as it made the film look tacky and unprofessional for our genre of film. instead we kept the clouds natural but managed to change the colour of some of them as the earth rotated. The earth has an oval shape to it and this is quite hard to get rid of due to the imaging from Google earth. We have to keep this oval shape but we don’t think it damage our film too badly .over all i am please with the effect and I’m sure jack is proud of this too.