My Artist Persona and Brand Identity

This blog post includes me and my group's decision on a persona for our star to be reflected in our products. We did this task together (Audrey, Chelsea, Rara & Kalista). 

Here are some questions provided by my teacher to help us construct an identity for our star: 

Here is my group ideas written in a poster paper: 

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In order to determine how we want to show our main artist to the audience, it is important that we develop our artist's persona and brand identity before executing it. This will enable us to establish a connection with our audience, particularly with our target demographic, and tailor our artist's image and style to appeal to them. My group and I discussed about this in class, so it will be easier for us to all come up with a final idea for our brand identity and artist persona. I took on the responsibility of handwriting every word on the poster and taking part in the discussions as well, which isn't a burden for me because I enjoyed doing both. I suggested developing a spider web layout, which works well since it makes it simple to arrange our brainstorming thoughts around a central topic and makes them easier to understand. Other than that, I differentiated the main topics covered by using various colours, arrows, and bullet points. Furthermore, we decided to just include the most important points on this poster so that we could quickly review what was written without having to read the entire paragraph again. Since we were well prepared with this persona, I believe it would be easier for us to execute, especially since our main star would not be overburdened and we will all save time and research because our chosen cast already possesses those attributes.

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Research: Branding

This blogpost will revolve around our branding research, which helps us understand deeper how a musical artist’s brand is perceived and helps us to identify opportunities and make strategic decisions for our main star (Cinta Kyle). This blogpost is written by me (Chelsea), Kalista, Rara and Audrey, collectively as a group.

The artist we choose for this branding is Sabrina Carpenter.

Our Media Studies teacher required us to find examples of their;

• Social media 

• Music albums

• Music videos

• Magazine shoots/interviews

And analysed the artist’ branding strategy and image with a few questions to answer.

Here is what we found about Sabrina Carpenter.

Youtube: 

 

Instagram: 

Albums:

 

Magazine covers: 

 

 

Interviews: 

Concerts: 

 

What brand identity are they giving off?

Sabrina Carpenter’s identity is more girly incorporating lots of pink, red, and things that are associated with kisses. This gives the illusion that she's more of a feminine artist with her over the top outfits (sexy) throughout different media products, it builds an image that she's a global style icon as most of her outfits go viral on the internet. Especially in her albums and Instagram, she has built an identity with the colour soft blue, where we can see her most popular album ‘Short n' Sweet’ uses a blue backdrop and another song called ‘Espresso’ using a light blue backdrop it allows audiences to associate the colour blue with Sabrina almost making it her trademark. Furthermore, other mise-en-scene elements such as Sabrina's hair, makeup and outfit has been kept constant throughout her whole music career as she's known to use glowy makeup with lots of blush, iconic blonde volumized blowout which shows audiences that this is her brand image and it has been kept the same throughout her new albums. 

What is their personality? 

Sabrina Carpenter builds an empowered yet mischievous femininity by incorporating glittery outfits in soft pastels and romantic cuts with strong stage presence. In other pictures, her poses and expressions centre on female agency within the music industry, and challenge the notion of passive female representation. Another thing is that, Sabrina Carpenter curates a carefully crafted image embodying her youthful charm, fashion-forward style, and playful personality on Instagram. Her feed, a combination of editorial-quality shots and casual behind-the-scenes moments, has a funny and relatable energy that is still elevated. She often taps into nostalgic aesthetics, Y2K-inspired dress and pastel color palettes, which gives her a visually signature pop aesthetic. Her engagement strategies include: behind-the-scenes or personal stuff that gives fans a connection, touch of humor and self-awareness in captions that complements her relatable persona. Additionally, for music video persona, Sabrina combines playful with edgier tendencies. In Feather, for instance, she utilizes bold, pastel visuals crafting a persona who is both untroubled and in complete possession of herself. Likewise, in Nonsense she leans into a flirty, cheeky vibe, doubling down on her brand as playful, fearless and confident. What we can learn from her branding is that her brand lives in a space between femininity and confidence, where cute aesthetic finds a home with playful lyricism and audacious storytelling. cinematic storytelling, she aligns cohesive themes through her music videos and across her social media to maintain brand consistency. As well as, her activeness on Instagram through fun comments, personalized posts and such allows her to engage with fans on a personal level.

What image are they creating for themselves, how? 

Three things that are associated heavily with Sabrina Carpenter’s image are cheeky, flirty, and vintage. Firstly, Sabrina Carpenter creates an image that is associated with vintage, old Hollywood, and retro style conforming to the traditional conventions of women. Her reel persona relates to Hollywood glamour from her social media marketing, concerts, and outfits as her inspiration mainly comes from the 50s-60s aesthetic. Her advertising and social media presences mainly consists of fonts and typefaces from 50s-60s newspaper or  movie poster and VHS overlays. Her iconic look showcases her vintage-inspired attire and channels old Hollywood pop icons such as Marilyn Monroe which we can see that she was represented through the bold, red lipstick and blonde curly hair. Second, her flirtatious image is conveyed through meanings and themes of her songs, exploring mature themes of love. Moreover, this could be a development from her image as a Nickelodeon child star into a mature pop icon. Her outfits and make-up looks bring up a very feminine look on her concerts, interviews, social media presence, and many more. Lastly, her image as a pop icon is cheeky as her persona reflects how she is a very friendly artist from increasing engagement and connections with her fans. She is very easy-going as reflected on social media. Moreover, the usage of colorful clothes at her concert may connote playfulness.

How do they speak to their fans?

Through her music videos, she uses narratives that connect to her female audiences more such as love, being hung up on a guy or even showcasing men treating women like a princess in her “Espresso” album. It allows audiences to connect more with the artist as they will believe it will resonate with their real experiences or desires in life. While in social media, she reposted many stories of her fans reacting or lip-syncing to her new albums indicating that she watches the content her fans post, making audiences feel a deeper connection with the artist. And in order to keep her audience interested in her next shows or concerts she creates a certain element of surprise her audiences look forward to in each show. In this case her outfit that she's wearing for each show is different depending on which city she's performing at, with a towel covering the outfit until she shows the grand reveal before starting her first song. With each performance that she showcases the song “Juno” she adds a certain pose with the saying “have you ever tried this one” making audiences wonder what pose she's going to do in her next show, keeping audiences at their feet as they want to know what other surprises she has set in place for them. She also uses a lot of informal writing with emoticons such as “neowww” & “thank you :’)”. By speaking informally she gives her fans a sense of familiarity as she also directly consumes and replies to content her fans make, fostering a bond with the artist and audience. 

What visuals link all of the media products together?

In her media products multiple elements are used to create an identity specifically towards the artist. One of the most obvious is her choice of colour, pose, clothing and typography. These 4 elements are used throughout all her products: social media, music video, album, interview, concerts. In her music videos she mostly uses a vintage tone colour, fonts from the 50s that are in newspapers or movie posters with her pose being mostly flirty and showy and this is used throughout all her media products as it keeps her identity consistent allowing audiences to easily recognise her. It creates a feeling of nostalgia as she incorporates both modern trends with old Hollywood glamour but it mostly shows heavy emphasis on old fashion trend such as her 90’s hair blowout making audiences feels amused of how Sabrina is trying to bring back past trends while incorporating her own unique ideas such as personal kiss marks and letters in her digipak giving a sense of personal touch to her audience, connoting a flirty, bold and sexy demeanor of the artist. As she constantly pushes this idea her audience already recognise this to be Sabrina’s style as an artist because all her products theme flow well with one another as she mixes both 90’s and modern styles together creating her iconic PERSONA. In addition to that her over the top looks can be seen from her mise-en-scene such as her makeup and outfits that stays the same in all her concerts, interviews, and music videos. She uses clothing that is sleeveless that mostly shows her shoulders and legs indicating the sexy vibe she's aiming for, while her hair is always kept the same, an iconic 90’s volumised blowout with bangs. It leaves an impression that Sabrina is the “IT” girl always looking on point fully dressed to any event, allowing audiences to focus on the fact that Sabrina is someone they get inspired by. All these repeatedly used elements altogether shows her audience that she's building a brand identity that stands out as someone that is confident, indicating her being the “IT girl” of her generation making her stand out more than other artist. 

How could this artist influence you?

Sabrina Carpenter is one of our main inspirations for our branding as her consistency in upholding her image is top-notch. Carpenter’s identity as a former childhood Nickelodeon star was immediately unrecognised as her brand identity changed completely which was due to the consistency of building up a new image. We want to follow a great consistency in building our star’s brand in order to convey a clear interpretation of our star’s person by using a certain theme and color to uphold in every social media presence. Carpenter’s old Hollywood aesthetic had been consistently used in her music videos, social media campaigns, and concerts. We need to create a certain theme to follow for our star so posts and social media presence could follow and maintain this image. Moreover, Sabrina Carpenter is very feminine which we may tell from the symbolic usage of red lipstick and kiss marks. We are, especially, inspired by the kiss marks which are vital for her image and creates a symbol to represent who she is as a pop artist. We want to incorporate this element in our braiding as our target demographics are similar to Sabrina Carpenter’s. 

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In my opinion, branding research is super important since it enables us to comprehend our target audience, figure out how to set our star apart from competitors, as well as developing a strong and recognisable brand identity. We chose Sabrina Carpenter for our branding research not only because she is a pop star and have similar target audience to ours, but because we believe that it takes her a long time to develop as a successful artist before she succeeds in creating a strong, consistent brand that sets her apart from other pop artists. From this, we could use her ideas as inspiration for our own project to successfully develop a brand identity and consistency across all of our products, as well as to better understand and connect with our target audience. I personally enjoyed writing this blog post because I've always been interested in how artists use branding and marketing, and Sabrina Carpenter's genius branding is particularly inspiring to me. I wish I could have done more research on other pop artists, but given the time limits and other things that needed to be done, we believe that this in-depth analysis of Sabrina Carpenter is sufficient. 

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Classwork: Multicam Editing

Here is the work I did on how to edit with multiple cameras. My group and I filmed the footage, but I edited it myself. My teacher provided a template for the blog post. This blog post is completed by me (Chelsea).

What is Multicam Editing?
Multicam editing is the process of editing footage of a single scene or subject recorded from different cameras and angles. Showing the same scene or subject from different angles helps make the video more dynamic and visually captivating for your audience.

Shooting

Our subject, a classmate, stood in the center of the room and did a short performance. My group stood around the subject to record the performance from different angles. You can also see members from other groups because we did this lesson as a class. To make it easier to synchronise our cameras, the teacher clapped at the start of the scene. This allowed us to line up the video in the editing process and ensure that the transitions would be smooth. Without this simple action it would have taken a lot longer to sync the videos. 

Behind the Scenes 

Our teacher took this picture when we were conducting the filming: 

Our teacher also did a short lesson on how to edit multi-cam for us to follow:

Here are the raw videos from my group members:
Video 1 (Kalista - Low angle)

View link (in case it is unaccessible) here

Video 2 (Audrey - High angle)

View link (in case it is unaccessible) here

Video 3 (Chelsea - Long shot)

View link (in case it is unaccessible) here

My editing process:

View link here

Here is my final edited video:

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In the end, this technique would be beneficial for editing since it would contribute to a scene's meaning, information, and immersion. Since I will be likely be the project's editor and we will likely shoot scenes from different angles, this practice helped me determine which editing technique works best so that I can efficiently and smoothly edit multiple cameras. I discovered that reducing the opacity would be preferable than deleting a clip because, in the end, it does not appear very good or smooth. I can just simply switch between shooting angles and adjust the opacity settings, whereas removing them will require me to upload the file again. I can edit on both my phone and laptop, but for this particular task, I think my laptop was easier because I am already used to the controls. This will help me improve my editing abilities because I think I will be utilising my laptop as my primary editing device for our future project. Additionally, I believe that wearing earphones is quite helpful because I have to pay close attention to the song in order to keep the scene's duration in sync with the beat; otherwise, it would be off beat. I also liked the fact that we could edit using any music. Since I liked this song, I also enjoyed editing it.

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Shooting Practice: Music Video

This post contains a mini project that helped us learn how to shoot a music video. We shot our verse as a group and then created this post together. I (Chelsea) based the content of this post from my teammates (Audrey, Rara & Kalista) since I was absent during this day.

Our teacher gave each group a verse from the song "Here Comes the Sun" by The Beatles. We had to plan a scene which included various camera work and edits. The goal was to learn how to properly shoot certain angles and edit them seamlessly together, this will allow us to prevent casualties happening when doing our actual final music video. This practice will also help us to become more comfortable with various filming techniques, lip sync and editing throughout the pre-production, production and post-production process. 

The song "Here Comes the Sun" by The Beatles is a pop-rock song was not quite suitable for our chosen genre of our project (pop) and the song's overall vibe. However, because it was a well-known song where we all as a class could recognise, this song is chosen. 

Song file (The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun (2019 Mix)): 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/17qlV2KReqxBMMYo7d6D3eAyaKKbNo0xz/view?usp=sharing 

Instructions (from our Media Studies teacher): Choose a verse, create a storyboard (must have multiple shots, film from the end of the previous verse to the start of the next verse), choose a location & a star, film, edit (tip: sing it!) 

PRE-PRODUCTION

- Lyrics & Rehearsal 

Our Media Studies teacher assigned our group a short verse to shoot, which was then combined to create the song's entire music video (shown at the end of this blog post). Our group had gotten the second chorus of this song. The image above is the lyric sheet with some notes about the storyline and camerawork planning (apologies if it is was a little disorganised and difficult to read since it was a rough outline). 

- Storyboard (made by Audrey) 

Here we were also required to make a basic storyboard (The image above, drawn and annotated by Audrey but other teammates (Kalista & Rara) participated in discussion) in order to outline the camerawork's flow, mise-en-scene and other actions that would be captured in the scene. This made it easier for us to plan the shots and remember what we needed to capture. It was only rough outline for us because our teacher only gave us a few minutes to plan both of the lyrics sheet and storyboard. 

PRODUCTION

- Behind the scenes images

Here is a Google Drive link of the raw video clips, including camera tests, shoot attempts and bloopers: 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19OHN2Td7YwuSd0v_Fox0XdjzRIBKDHTg

POST-PRODUCTION 

(This part is written by Audrey since she was in charge with the editing)

I had edited the clips together and made sure that the song matches the scenes along with the lipsyncing of the actors. I utilised the application Capcut as it was a free, easy, and fast platform to edit videos. It only took a while to finish the project in one period of Media Studies class which was advantageous for the group. We were also familiar with the application which made it efficient. 

Our idea was simple which does not include any special effects or color-grading as we decided to keep it natural. This was due to convenience and we wouldn't be applying this editing technique for our music video project as we want to create a visual appeal for the audience. 

Here are the few steps that I did for editing: 

1. Compile final shots 

2. Add the song (download the audio from Mr Nick's file) 

3. Cut, crop, and adjust the video clips according to the correct time frame 

4. Make sure the lipsync matches the song 

5. Turn down the audio volume of the clips

Below are the screenshots of the editing process: 

FINAL VIDEO 

Click the link here to view in case the video above does not work: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CLQ5K0B-wOZNOi7BB9NZjXxKIRmkrQhA/view?usp=sharing 

Below is our REVIEW on how our group did after conducting the pre-, production and post production: 

STRENGTHS 

• Throughout the processes of production, there were no major or significant problems. Even when given a short amount of time (less than 20 minutes), we were all able to work together and communicate well to plan out all the pre-production details. 

PROBLEMS 

• Our initial plan was not precisely executed: In order to highlight the performance aspect of the chorus clip that we had previously recorded, we intended to make a quick cut to capture the character's face in another angle shot (POV) that featured the identical movement in a scene. Since this was one of our ideas for our final project later on, we first planned it out and decided to give it a go. However, this concept was not implemented well, making it odd and unprofessional if we were to include that shot. Moreover, the chorus's timing does not provide support to the use of cuts to show a different angle. 
• Messy transition: Between the first scene (supporting character walking to the sink) and the second scene (main character washing her hand). Since Audrey edited this, she noticed this right away and wasn't happy with the outcome. 

SOLUTION

• As we were only given a limited amount of time to finish everything, so we ran out of time to reshoot, so we left the transition as is. In the end, we discarded the idea of showcasing the performance from a different angle because it would not flow as effectively. Without the shoot, we believe it flows better. 

NEXT TIME (applicable especially for the real final project)

• If we choose to shoot different angles we have to make sure that the timeline of each clip must flow well together with the lyric of the song 
• To fit several quick cuts of different angles & other camerawork, duration should not be too short 
• We must ensure that the scene is long enough in order for the quick cuts to look engaging while also making sure the last action shot we filmed is similar to the next action we are going to use at the beginning of the next scene. This guarantees that every clips flows well with the established narrative and that the transition will go well smoothly. 
• If we decide to go for a more professional approach, we will need a proper equipment to ensure that audience can clearly see the result and that it produces a professional quality. 

Finally, here is the final combined class video (by our Media Studies teacher) 

View link here

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Unfortunately I was absent that day since I was out of town hence I could not participate in the process. But I did actively asked my group what they had done, and I read through their pre-production, production and post-production processes from the screenshots, images, and videos they shared with me (in our group chat). In order to avoid past mistakes and to know what to do and not do, I think this practice will be beneficial for our upcoming project. Though I feel that it will be more difficult for me to implement because I have only read my teammates' reviews and have not experienced these mistakes in real life, I believe that they are common mistakes that are bound to occur in real life as well. I hope that knowing this information will also make me more aware of potential mistakes that may be made later on for our final project as well as knowing what to do to overcome or prevent these mistakes from occurring. 

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