Digipak Ideas

 While CDs have fallen out of use in the past couple of decades, the rise in retro/nostalgia culture has caused a resurgence in analog and early digital media such as vinyls, CDs, and cassettes. Being the case, it is especially on the rise for adolescents do buy such mementos from their favorite artists for aesthetic and material purposes. The genre of music which Friday Tiki Club plays also falls furthermore into this category of analog-lovers, therefore making a cassette or CD digipak one of the most appropriate products to release with the song since they are small and cheap.

For the CD digipak, I was thinking a three-panel cover with the song lyrics and possibly some drafts of the song to make up for the empty space on the disk from only having one song. For the cassette packaging, it will most likely follow the theme of the CD cover and will be easier to produce since you simply have to insert a print into the plastic case of the cassette.

Examples of modern cassette digipaks

 

Examples of modern CD digipaks

Note: I would like to clarify that, yes, I have the tools to burn a CD and record onto an analog cassette.

Repairing VHS Camera for Project

 For the video, we want to do a hybrid of VHS/DSLR footage, however, a couple months ago I went to explore an abandoned hospital with some friends and brought my VHS to film, as I did a year before, and broke the LCD screen. While it is not impossible to film with it in its current state, it is irritatingly inconvenient and would prefer to have all my gear working properly, therefore this weekend I bought replacement parts on eBay to fix the camera in time for the shoot.

Note: Now that I think of it, I think I need to buy more video tapes.

 

Guerilla Marketing (+ Target Audience)

 Of the many marketing tactics that I've researched, guerilla marketing seems to work best for the band's target audience: high schoolers. Guerilla marketing consists of innovative, unconventional, and low-cost marketing techniques aimed at obtaining maximum exposure for a product. While admittedly it is difficult to guerilla market on a large scale due to costs, for local audiences it works well since marketing and advertising paraphernalia can be placed in less locations while attracted a large number of viewers due to their placement and/or engagement.

Examples of guerrilla marketing

In our case, the form of guerilla marketing we might employ is through sticker-bombing and putting stickers around our city with Spotify codes for the band's new song. We would most likely do it in places like the skate park which are already covered in various stickers and sharpie graffiti, in a way contributing ourselves to the culture of these places. Through this, not only do we engage audiences through an unusual marketing strategy, but we develop the Friday Tiki Club brand as a group of younger individuals who are like-minded to them. And yes, they do actually skate.

Examples of sticker-bombing

New Pictures for the Band

 While they release their new song, I think maybe it would be a good idea to take new photos of them to represent the band they are today, as opposed to the one that they were when they first started. Not that there have been any radical changes, but I think it is definitely pertinent to show how they have changed their looks and style over these past years so that our audience is expecting a change in the style and quality of the musicians and their newfound "professionalism," I suppose you could say. I will talk to the band to see when I can schedule a photoshoot and in general whether there are any things we can revamp before Sunshine comes out.

The most recent pictures of the band are from 2019-2020

Social Media Presence

 As we start our work on the band's single, we have started to make new postings on their Instagram page informing fans of the new activity, as the band has not posted in several months. We will continue to interact with our audience through social media through the coming weeks to maintain engagement and hype for the song. I've spoken with Mateo about creating a social media presence, so he's agreed to take care of managing the page as we develop our project.

Rough Draft of "Sunshine"

Sunshine is coming along nicely. Today I went over to listen to a rough draft of their song and we started to develop a general idea for the music video. Beachy vibes, blue skies, that type of deal. They told me they could give me the final version of the song nearing the end of the project, so for now we'll use this draft as a placeholder. 

If things go to plan, I should receive the lyrics next week and we should be starting in two or three weeks.

Finding an Aesthetic

Nothing has been finalized of course, but so far the band and I have a general vibe we want for the music video. In similar light to my short film Skateboards and Monsters, it will have an upbeat indie feel which makes the viewer feel welcome and helps develop a positive connection with the Friday Tiki Club brand. 

We have currently found a few examples of music videos we want to take inspiration from:

Shy High - Independent Films

Flying - Last Dinosaurs

Jealous - Eyedress

Notes: Pertinent elements of these videos were handheld shots, skateboarding, playing instruments in strange locations, emphasis on band logo during intro, imbuing casual events with emotion (the song), and editing.

Music Video Production - Friday Tiki Club - Portfolio Project

After assessing the various options for the portfolio project, I think I am deciding on making a music video for the band Friday Tiki Club and their new single Sunshine. I recently spoke with Mateo Escobar, the band's bassist, regarding the terms and logistics of the project, who agreed happily to the project.

Friday Tiki Club house show in October 2020

While the song Sunshine has been written and composed, Mateo tells me I have to wait until this weekend to receive a demo of the song, as the song only exists currently as a video recording of a live performance. I have alerted him of the urgency of the project so he promises he will have the demo ready by next week, dedicating the weekend to recording and mixing the song with the band. In the meantime, he recommends I listen to music from the band Beach Fuzz as he claims they have a similar sound/feeling to their song. Specifically, he recommended their song Welcome to the Club which is highly upbeat in nature with a grassroot boy-band feeling similar to the 1960s band, The Beach Boys, intermingled with aspects of 2000s indie pop.

P.S. You may recognize Mateo and Jake from my previous portfolio project "Skateboards and Monsters"

Documentary Project - Have You Seen This Man?

In preparation for our AICE Media Portfolio Project, one of our first projects in class was to create a 7-10 minute documentary about any subject we wanted. Without even thinking for a minute, it was clear what we would choose to do.

Earlier this year I had singlehandedly sparked a social phenomena at my high school involving a singular image of a blue emoji eating a cookie, leading to an almost cultish following by students and teachers alike garnering thousands of cumulative likes on Instagram and social media. 

It would have been unjust not to choose this focus for our project, and we got to work. Unlike most of my media projects, our group was able to schedule accordingly and create a coherent plan before the deadline. Because of all the interviews and b-roll we had to shoot, we made sure not to shoot everything last minute and have some time to schedule with our interviewees as we would have at least four, requiring lots of time to shoot.

We based the structure of the documentary on the Banksy documentary "Exit Through The Gift Shop," creating a mysterious aura around the person who started the "cookie muncher" trend (me), covering my entire body and distorting my voice like Banksy would. 

Exit Through The Gift Shop

Have You Seen This Man?

While the topic of a blue emoji invading my school is an interesting story to document, we also wanted to analyze an important question which is how does a joke become viral? What we discovered while making our documentary is that it requires spontaneousness, originality, and mass dissemination, a bundle of different factors which were not necessarily realized until organized in a video format. 

While documenting reality is something that my mind is not used to doing, this project was an excellent exercise in such, helping me realize that interesting stories lie in our daily lives. I definitely enjoyed making this project and it received high approval ratings and viewership online on the @cookie.muncher.secret.society Instagram page, serving as an excellent way to wrap up my accidental social experiment. 

Note: Cookie Muncher was an independent project separate from AICE Media.

>>> Link to documentary! <<<

Film Distribution Project A Level - "END" Trailer & Teaser written by Agavni Mehrabi

"I always come back..."
-William "Springtrap" Afton, Five Nights at Freddy's

I am indeed back and kicking it with some new tubular film projects, yo.

Recently, we have completed a film distribution project which consisted of marketing/distributing an upcoming film written by a student in a Creative Writing class. The distribution plan consisted of a trailer, teaser, and key art (which are attached at the bottom of this post).

The prompt we received was a sci-fi drama written by student Agavni Mehrabi, a story about a girl named Rose whose friend gets drafted for an planetary search party amongst rising temperatures due to climate change in the year 2085. Amongst the various prompts to select from, my group decided upon this one because it had elements which we liked (sci-fi) and would pose interesting technical challenges to accomplish. Admittedly, we hit a creative block after the first day of discussing film plans as we realized this feat would be more difficult than expected, leading to a nearly last-minute filming schedule. Despite setbacks and stress, however, we created a final product which is magnitudes better than we expected due to the creative work-arounds our group came up with in the end.

Firstly, we were confused how we were going to find a "spaceship" to film in. If we were to create a set for this, it would require tedious prep time which we couldn't spare, and if we were to just leave it out of the production we were confused how we would segue between the different plot elements. We even messaged the writer to ask if we could skip over the spaceship scene and her response was to maybe focus more on the drama aspect rather than the sci-fi aspect. Luckily, we found someone who was willing to give us a set that looked like a spaceship at Becon TV, a student television/film facility. Due to this, we were able to add equal amounts of sci-fi and drama aspects without sacrificing one or the other.

Another aspect which we tried to focus on to make the film look better in limited time was to focus on an interesting visual aesthetic, settling on a cyberpunk-1950s pastiche look which mixed the looks of films like Bladerunner 2049 and pieces like Pleasantville. We believed this to be an interesting aesthetic to focus on since it is a crossover which is uncommon in today's times, with modern sci-fi dramas such as Stranger Things consisting of a 1980s aesthetic which we thought was highly saturated in modern media. 

Overall, our piece consisted of a lot of compromises and new technical skills in order to achieve with the materials we had. Although stressful, our group had tons of fun filming END and we ended up with a piece which was better than we expected. If I were to take anything from this experience, I have learned that trailers are HARD. Maybe if you have a full film it would be easier, but filming snippets of a story and hoping it will come together coherently is a challenge much harder than anticipated and it required a new level of thinking and planning in order to come up with something that makes sense. Another key thing, start filming earlier!