Flat Plan: Album cover

This is our initial idea for the flat plan - with the artist wearing a different outfit and perhaps holding a rose.

We also think that a good idea for the CD would be to print a rose picture onto it, something similar to the picture below:

Below is a sketch of what the flat plan for the album cover would look like:

Since then we have agreed that the blank space seen in the sketch will be a publicity shot.

Our Steal-O-Matic

This steal-o-magic gives a rough idea of what type of music video we want to make.
There are lots of artistic shots, playing with angles and lighting.
Our video here is performance and concept driven, with narrative taking a more preliminary role.
As you can see, it is still very broad, and we need to pin down exact shots, but this will be done in our animatic.

Our Audience

We thought that there was definitely a gap in the market for alternative genres, and more and more alternative sounds were reaching and appealing to wide audiences. An alternative genre, which has yet to take off in the UK market (as opposed to the US market) is PBR&B, which delves in hip hop, dubstep, R&B and soul. As a group we thought that this was a good combination, and a genre with a combination of genres within it would attract and appeal to more audiences. The images below show our progress in our production meetings:

Notes from meetings discussing our core audience: PBR&B fans, and our secondary audience: British 16-late 20 year olds. We thought this secondary audience group would be a good target as they are young and more open-minded; not having established rigid music tastes generally. As our genre is an accumulation of genres and sounds, this would appeal to them.

Our Record Label

       

Our record label, Raw Sound Records, stemmed from various ideas from various existing record labels. We knew the genre of our artist and track from our audience research, and so went ahead looking at record labels within the PBR&B genre. We started off looking at what record label our original artist is from, Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE); we liked their approach as an independent record label, but felt that we should look at British independant record labels, and other too.
So we broadened the search to find other record labels, and the images below show some of the notes from this group production meeting:

 As you can see, we found that many of the record labels that appealed to us in terms of a model, were owned by Universal. Hence, we thought that being owned by a big conglomerate like Universal, but still being an independent record label,, would be the best model. This is because you ave the freedom of an independent record label, whilst enjoying the security and support of a well-established, well-connected and experienced conglomerate.
We finalized our record label like so:

Here are some photos and information about the other types of artists we would have in our record label, some are listed in the photo:

The Weeknd

PBR&B, Hip Hop

Sza

PBR&B, Pop, Soul

Jhene Aiko

R&B

FKA Twigs 

PBR&B, Trip Hop, Electronic

Joey Bada$$

Hip Hop

Our Track

This is our chosen track, 'Teen Spirit' by Sza. We had to find a radio edit online, as it has a profanity in it. The quality wasn't as good however so the track above is the edit or the original track, with the radio edit version in for the few seconds where the profanity is. It is very important to have a clean version of the track, as it needs to be able to be played at any time, especially prime-time.

We chose this track for several reasons:

• Firstly. it was within the PBR&B genre which is what we wanted. PBR&B Has elements of soul, r&b, hip hop and dubstep, and this track fell nicely in line with this. 
• We felt there is a gap in the market for more alternative sounds like PBR&B.]
• The artist Sza's vocals were very soul and we found that this is more of a convention for artists in this genre. 
• There is a gap in the market for female artists in general, especially in PBR&B, in fact, we were quite astonished at how few there were when trying to find a track/artist and researching.
• We thought that the music had ambient elements to it and  straight away whilst listening to it, we all could imagine making a music video in line with what we wanted to make.

The track was released by the artist Sza before she signed to her label Top Dawg Entertainment, therefore she owns the rights to the track herself. We contacted her on her official Twitter and Facebook page to ask for permission. We have yet to receive a response.

Our Artist

We noticed a big gap for UK female artists in the PBR&B genre. For this reason, we thought that a female PBR&B artist would be beneficial. Conventions for these artists usually dictate that the females are more soulful and R&B and males are more hip-hop and dubstep.

We thought a name that would suit the genre would be something that is short and snappy, but also alternative e.g. Jene Aiko, The Weeknd, Sza; and decided on Roza.

We decided that are artist image would be similar to the photos below:

This is quite an urban style, with an emphasis on urban fashion and attitude, which conforms to conventions of the females within the PBR&B genre, and therefore will make her instantly recognizable and distinguished. However, we didn't want to over-sexualize our artist, which is what can often happen within the genre.

This Worlde image shows the type of person we want our artist to be:

                            This is a summary of our key decisions when creating our artist:

Production Meetings Summary

We have two meetings, each around an hour and a half every week. These take place in the Media department in one of the classrooms at a table.
Generally, if we need to go on the internet for something, we get an iPad or two so that we can keep the group all around one table discussing ideas. And that was what our first few meetings consisted of, a discussion of ideas and thoughts on the project. As we all had such varying tastes in music we were showing each other various videos of music videos we admired, and tracks we initially like for the project. Luckily, although we differed in taste, the style we sought to achieve within the music video was very similar, and we worked off that common ground that we had finally found.

Once we found common ground, we were able to speed up the process and made our first four decisions during those meetings (audience, record label, track and artist). Once we had agreed on certain things, we then  wrote things down and mind mapped out our ideas and decisions. These images show some of our work during these meetings:

A lot of decisions and disvussions happened on other platforms, such as Facebook and Whatsapp. Whatsapp was more popular as it is much more instant for us, as we have it on our phones like messages/texts. We could include voice notes/recordings, images, videos and this proved useful.

Facebook was much more useful in the sense that we could share documents also, and post links to videos we uploaded to YouTube:

We also used an iMessage chat to speak, we found SMS based group chats easier as they were accessible anywhere as they were instantly on our phones, as seen in the latter screen shot when Matt says he is coming to the editing suite, we could use this anywhere, including in school. 

We found that we were in deliberation at many of our meetings and in many of our discussions. Having a platform to deliberate instantly was useful, as you can see from the iMessage image above, often one of us was in the process of doing something, for instance as seen in the screen shot, editing a shot for our music video, and so we were constantly deliberating decisions on the go swell as more formally in meetings and lessons.

We all had particular strengths and weaknesses which challenged and aided each other. For instance, we were all creative and had strong ideas for things, especially the music video and publicity shots, which sometimes challenged us to find a middle ground and work together.

We were all for the most part quite determined, and so delegation of particular roles helped the fluidity of our production process.