Selecting Ancillary Images

When looking at our ancillary texts, we had to make sure that we selected the right one in order to show our artist the specific way that we wanted her represented. We all decided that we wanted Mikah in a dominating position which is why we wanted her to have the bat included within the picture. We also wanted Mikah in the similar style of clothing that she has worn throughout the music video which is why we chose the cropped hoodie and black jeans. Although the cropped hoodie conforms to typical R&B conventions, the pictures of Mikah make it seem like she has a longer hoodie on, thus covering her midriff and subverting the sexual R&B stereotype. We also wanted Mikah to look natural within the pictures which is why we let her get into positions that she felt the most comfortable in. This is why you can see within the pictures that she is sitting down, has her hand on her head and has the bat cover her body. Although this body language may seem as though Mikah is shutting herself off to the public, we thought that having her look natural and comfortable within the pictures allows for her to connect with the target audience and to show that she is a normal person just like them. As you can also see to the right of this writing, we got some close up shots of Mikah and her piercings. We done this because we wanted to show off her 'trademark'  that Goodwin said helps an audience to recognise an artist. Due to Mikah's piercings being her trademark, we wanted her to have her hair up and to do a few close ups in order to showcase the trademark we want her to be known for. However, we decided that we didn't want to use the images on our ancillary texts because it didn't particularly look as good as we wanted it to and it didn't really fit in with the rest of the digipak/poster which was unfortunate.

Final Digipak Design

 This is our final digipak design for our EP

'Gangsta by Mikah'.

Front cover

Inside lyric page

Spine

CD

Back cover

Final digipak ideas

This is a video explaining our final ideas on our digipak design.

Digipak Research

Below is a slideshare presentation that I have created on Digipak Research I conducted in order to give me ideas about the digipak that I will be creating.

Digipak research from nsmithson

Font Research for Ancillary texts

Font 1

Font 2

Font 3

Font 4

Font 5

Below is a voice recording of me describing the following fonts

Production Schedule

The picture above shows the production schedule outlining what will be happening on each day in regards to deadlines for filming etc. However, if certain things change i.e. if filming needs to be cancelled or weather changes, these dates will change also. This is a rough outline of dates that we will be aiming to keep to. 

Target Audience Research

For our target audience research, we asked a series of questions to find out what people liked about an artist and their style in order to see if we could appeal our artist towards these people.

This is a copy of the questionnaire we created to give to our responders.

As you can see, we asked various questions including the responders favourite artist, their favourite age range, and their favourite music genre. We asked 10 people which allowed for an even split of boys and girls to answer.

We then created a few graphs to represent our findings.

The first graph that we created  was based on the type of style that people liked an artist to be. As you can see, from the responses that we received, the overall favourite was casual female. This then allows us to style out artist around this style. Furthermore, our artist is already rather casual which means that she will appeal greatly to the target audience.

Our next graph was based off of the question 'When watching a music video, do you prefer the focus to be on a male or female? (Circle one)' As you can see, there is an even split with five responses answer female, and the other five answering male. This is good because it gives us some creativity in deciding if we want a female or male or whether we want our artist to be feminine or masculine.

 

The next question that we made a graph for was asking what the respondents favourite music genre was. We gave them a wide spread choice with all answers being rather different from each other. From the graph, it is clear to see that the favourite music genre is R&B. This then means that we need to centre our  music video around that of the R&B genre because it will then appeal strongly to the target audience. Furthermore, our song 'Gangsta' is of this genre which already give us the upper hand of appealing to a large amount of people.

The final graph we made was based on the age of the artist. We gave them a choice to decide whether they want the artist to be old, young or middle aged etc. Our artist is between the ages of 18-22 meaning that we will appeal to 40% of the audience. However, she does look like she belongs in the age bracket 23-29 which is the answer that 60% of the respondents answered. Overall, we believe that our artist will appeal to our target audience from the responses we have gained from all questions.