MediaCast Blog Design

MediaCast blog design 

( all the schemes were found/created on http://colorschemedesigner.com/)

Color Scheme 

This blog is going to be aimed for a number of students, both male and female, with ages varying from 16 to around 27. The thing that makes these people a group is their interest (and for many their school subject) media. Obviously since the target audience is so vast, I will chose a neutral color scheme, but without making it boring and normal. I want the colors to be welcoming and pleasant for people that will be using the blog for long periods of time. My initial plans were to create the blog using colors such as grey and light brown.

I also looked at more elaborate color schemes but still among these lines 

I decided to change my plans, because these colors may be too bland and not welcoming/eye catching enough for a blog that is going to be used by creative people. 

I started looking at brighter color schemes, but keeping in mind the variety of people that are going to be using the blog.

  I particularly like this color scheme, obviously not all the colors will be used, but I think the mix of blues and oranges will give the blog a fresh look.

This is a more toned down version of the one above

I like this one also, but maybe it is a bit too feminine. 

Media Cast Blog Research

MediaCast Identity 

Who is the audience? 

The audience of this blog is specifically the media students that attend Mcast Art and Design, but it will also be accessible to all the students, lecturers and staff that are interested in this subject. 

What is the brief? 

The brief is to create an interesting, creative and easy to use blog for the MediaCast. Since MediaCast is still quite new, the brief also requires detailed research about the audience in order for us to create the blog that this audience needs. Apart from the actual creation of the blog, which includes banners, color schemes and overall design, the brief also includes marketing the final blog to the audience.

Market Research

Since MediaCast is still quite new, we had to conduct our own research to understand what market we were working on.In order for us to do this, we conducted interviews, and questionnaires and gave them to some of the media students. From the results we obtained, we realized that the our market was quite diverse, but the fact that they were all media students put them under one category and gave them all something in common. Apart from understanding our audience , we also understood what they would like form the blog, and what they were expecting from us. Basically this research helped us focus on what is essential for the blog and what is irrelevant. 

Marketing 

 The marketing research starts from researching to understand your market’s needs and how you can reach these needs. A good way to conduct research is by actually speaking to your market and get familiar with what they want and what they are looking for. One can accomplish this by the use of questionnaires, surveys and interviews. After understanding the audience, one has to create a marketing plan, which is essential for a successful marketing strategy. Deb Roberts, an expert in product marketing said that ‘ A marketing plan is good for focusing your energy towards the right actions that will deliver on what you want to accomplish’. The reason for creating a marketing plan is to make general things more specific, and this means that the client and the market will have a clear view of what you are offering them .Whilst creating the marketing plan, one has to keep in mind a number of important factors , like, the available markets, other competitors and  budget for the marketing sector. Many big companies use the term 8 P’s to represent what they should be concerned about, these are :

1. Price - The amount of money needed to buy products
2. Product - The actual product
3. Promotion (advertising)- Getting the product known
4. Placement - Where the product is located
5. People - Represent the business
6. Physical environment - The ambiance, mood, or tone of the environment
7. Process - How do people obtain your product
8. Packaging - How the product will be protected     

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_plan)

Obviously these are more relevant to tactile products, but even though this brief is to create an interactive product, some of these elements are still important. The actual plan has to be:

• Clear- this means that everything should be stated clearly.
• Quantifiable - meaning the outcome of every step is explained, so that monitoring can be done. 
• Focused - revolving around only important topics and not straying to other irrelevant subjects.
• Realistic - every part should be achievable, it is useless to make a plan for something impossible.

Another important part to a marketing plan is to create targets, for example setting a particular number of people( form your market) that you have to reach.

The actual marketing can be done in various different styles, the main two are traditional or internet/online marketing. Traditional marketing has been used for many many years. This type of marketing includes flyers, posters, prints on newspaper and magazines, billboards and other tactile media. Nowadays, experts say that internet marketing is much more powerful. Internet marketing, or online marketing is much more widely spread, this means that more people will know about your product. Social networks are a perfect place where one can place his product so an entire society of people that otherwise would have little chance of coming across it , especially when it is in another country. 

Confidentiality 

Privacy and confidentiality are things that we have to take into consideration as we are building this blog.When you post something on the internet such as websites, blogs, mailing lists, or chat rooms, you generally give up the rights to the content and any expectation of privacy or confidentiality. In most countries, anything you post to a public space can be saved, duplicated, distributed, and published, even years later, by anyone in the same way as a photograph taken in a public space like a city park, even though this is technically a crime. 

For one section of the blog, we have planned to create an archive for the works of the media students to showcase. To ensure that we are safe, this will be done by asking the students if they would like to showcase their work , and to sign a release form.

Technical Considerations

As we are creating this blog, we have to keep in mind that we not building a website. This means that we may be limited to the functions that we can insert in it. Another important thing to keep in mind is that we are not professionals. When we are planning we have to plan things that we are capable of producing, and not something that is impossible for us to create.

Pre Production folder-Ideas

Ideas

Idea Generation

After reading the book and researching more about the author I have some ideas on how I would like to do the advert. My main aim is to promote the book and make people interested in reading it. In order for the advert to do this, it has to be entertaining and it has to raise curiosity in the audience. Since the book is about an artist that is very mysterious, I think the advert should be shot in a gloomy setting, with an actor that never shows his face. Obviously music has to be a big part in the advert, but I don't think that it has to be informative (apart form showing the book at the end) .

Style 

Apart from the book itself, I looked at video clips from Tom Waits' performances and also some pictures of him to get inspired. A lot of his pictures are seen in b&w and always have that 'smokey' atmosphere, so I think I should create this atmosphere in the advert.

First Ideas

My first idea is to create an advert, focused on a man that is running away, or hiding from the camera. My plan is to treat the camera as a person that is following the actor. The camera will symbolize the people that are interested in the book, or more specifically in Tom Waits. The actor's face will be hidden from the camera, this means that I have to be very careful when planning the shot angels. The advert has to be one minute in length, so I'm afraid that it will be a bit boring with only this concept, but if the shots are interesting and the atmosphere is right, I think that one minute will be ideal. 


Content 

Till now I am sticking with my initial idea (camera following the actor), but I have some other ideas that will make the advert more entertaining. The first shot of the ad , will be a WS of a big room, with a piano placed at the right hand side and a man playing it. The man will be shot from behind , and the song being played will be one of Tom Waits' songs. This will introduce the artist by showcasing his song. The other shots I have in mind are of the actor walking in narrow streets and the camera following him . In order to get the message across that the camera is following him , I think it would be best to work without a tripod on these shots, I have never hand held a camera of that size , but I think that that is the only way to get the 'stalker' feeling across.
Another idea that I have is that between every shot/scene , there will be a split second black screen. It will symbolize the camera(person) blinking. Also I have the idea , that as the ad progresses the scenes will become shorter, and more hectic, to add the agitation and curiosity.

Production Folder

Background Research

Brief 

Broadway Books Publishing house is starting a new way of advertising it's published books. Adverts will be made and broadcasted on diverse television stations. The main aim for this campaign is to promote their books. As another part of the campaign they are organizing a fictional world wide competition for the best 1 minute advert. This competition is open for young creative media students. The competitors are to produce a fun and entertaining advert for a non narrative book published by Broadway Books themselves. 

The rules are : The advert must be 60 seconds in length 

                        Must be about a non-fiction book of your choice 

                        Must fall under the 'G' rating criteria as regards to regulation

                        It must be short, fun and entertaining 

Client



Broadway Books, from the parent company Random House, are a production house founded in 1996 and situated in the United States. Random House Inc. is the largest English- Language general trade book publisher.

 Broadway books publish books that come from different categories like: Narrative Non-Fiction, Memoirs, Health and Fitness, Inspiration, History, Travel, Pop Culture, Politics, Finance, Humour and Contemporary Fiction. They are mostly known for Memoirs, like 'Elizabeth Edwards' Memoir ' and  ' Bill O'reiley's Memoir' . Other famous publications are 'A bold Fresh Piece of Humanity' , 'Liberal Fascism' and ' A Lion called Christian'.

They publish approximately 70 titles every year, a good percentage of those become New York Bestsellers.

http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/broadway-books/


Author

Barney Hoskyns is an English Music Critic. He is also the editor of an online music journal Rock's Backpages. Hoskyns is an Oxford Graduate in English. His first experiences began when he started witing for Melody Maker and New Musical Express. He wrote articles about music in general and some reviews about bands of that era. After some time he quit his job to start writing a book about soul music. The result was the book 'Say It One Time For The Brokenhearted: Country Soul In The American South' .
After this publication (1987) he became well known in the 'music business'. Since then he has written for varius famous music magazines and worked as a contributing editor for  The Times, The Guardian, The Inependent and Arena Magazine. He also contributed to the magazine Rolling Stone for some time.
During the 1990's he worked as Associate Editor and later on US editor of Mojo Magazine , one of the biggest music magazines in the whole world.

In these past few years he has devoted his time to writing Biographies and Memoirs of some of the legends in music history. Some of his most famous publications are : ' Waiting for the Sun: A Rock and Roll History of Los Angeles' , ' Across the Great Divide The band and America' , ' Low Side of the Road : A Life of Tom Waits' , ' Into the Void : Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath' and the list goes on.
In 2000 he became senior editor of CDNOW in London.
Budget 

Since I am a student, I will be working on a very tight budget, or no budget at all. Obviously I will not know how much this production will cost un till the story board is finished. Because of this I have to see how I can create this advert with spending as little as possible. 

Deadline 

In order for me to finish this advert on time, I have a number of deadlines that will keep me working throughout this period of time un till the final closing date. This is the plan for the first 4 weeks 

WEEK	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4
What To Do	Research + Generate Ideas	Finish Pre-Production Paper work	Finalize Story Board and Script + Book Apparatus from school	Start Filming

Technical Resources 

The equipment I will be using is owned by the school. The school currently has 4 HD cameras and 2 Tripods. For the idea that I have till now, for my advert , these will be ideal. Apart from this, we are provided with computers that are installed with editing programs, obviously these will be needed during the post production stage. 

Technical Constraints 

Although the school is very well equipped with filming and editing apparatus, there are still some things that we do not have access to. One of the things that I wish I had access to is a dolly track. I think this would make the advert I am planning more entertaining to watch , since it would create more dimension in my shots. 

While researching similar equipment, I found methods to create your own dolly track, but I wouldn’t feel safe with a home made dolly cart and an expensive HD camera that isn’t mine. 

Target Audience

To help me identify my target audience I started out by conducting a questionnaire. The questions were :

1. Do you enjoy reading Biographies?
2. Do you only read Biographies about people you know ?
3. Do you prefer detailed Biographies ?
4. Do you prefer Autobiographies as opposed to Biographies?
5. Would an entertaining Ad encourage you to read a Biography about someone you have never heard about ?

I asked these questions because the book that I have chosen is a biography about an artist (Tom Waits) that is not very well known to the mainstream audience. I gave questionnaire to 15 people, their ages varied between 17 and 56. After looking at the results I found out that middle aged people enjoy reading detailed biographies, and do not mind reading biographies about artists that they have never heard about.For the question about advertisements, the younger people seem to be more influenced by entertaining adverts.

From my findings, I think that my target audience is :

• Music Oriented
• Aged between 15-50’s
• English Speaking
• Interested in the 60’s and 70’s lifestyle

Regulation

Since the advert has to fall under the G rating, this means it has to be suitable for all ages, I have to be careful about the content of the advert. There are various things that cannot go into the advert, for example things like drugs, violence, nudity harsh language and racism. Associations like the ASA and Malta Broadcasting Authority provide guidlines for producers in order for them to produce material that is suitable to be shown at all times for all ages.

Book Ad Pre-Production Meeting

Today,me and  my group ( ShaunPhillip Aquilina, David Rapinett and Marco Attard) had a pre production meeting where we decided a lot of important things. The first thing that we did was to look at the story board and made some minor changes to make it easier for us to shoot in a short period of time.

After that we saw which locations we had available to us. After discussing some public gardens, we decided that the garden behind the school was very suitable and close for what we had in mind.
We also contacted the actors to see when they are available, and after finding a date that was convenient  for everyone we booked the camera and tripod from the school technician.