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We chose the song “What Other People Say” by Demi Lovato and Sam Fischer for our music video. In this, a boy and a girl were singing therefore we chose both a female and male character to represent the two artists. Our most prominent actor/character was Phoebe who played Demi Lovato and was our female lead throughout the video. Although there was a male voice that had almost the same amount of input as the female voice, we chose to base everything around Phoebe (Demi Lovato) and how she is going through a hardship that is making her lament the loss of her mum and the mood and overall tone is supposed to come across as sad and almost depressing. To keep the realism of the video we decided to take society's view on women and portray it. Females are stereotypically known for being more emotionally unstable and vulnerable compared to men. We felt as though this would draw the audience in and make it more believable even though males can often be just as sensitive as women if not more.

In this day and age, mental health plays a big factor in how we live our lives and certain guidelines and rules that have been put in place to try and spread awareness for mental health such as depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts. It is such a big thing now that although it is a sad contributing factor, some people may be able to relate to the music video more if they feel as though they have gone through something similar themselves or knows someone else who has had troubles in the past. Audiences can become more invested or like something better when it shows the problems of society and how life can change from being an adolescent girl to a struggling young adult. This idea was based on the research we did of the original artists where Demi Lovato had a past of mental illness and struggled with drug abuse herself. 

I decided to try and maintain a blue and purple-hued color scheme throughout my digipak as well as mimicking the colored lights that are seen in the music video. In contrast to the cold colors we used a lot of black and white to represent the ‘dark’ times and how her whole life felt like it was in literal darkness and shadowed, so I took this into my digipak as well as my social media page, where my first post of the ‘artist’ is a black and white photo and she was smiling to almost let viewers know that although what we filmed about is a hard-hitting topic, that the artist was okay and enjoying producing the album. I also used black and white images taken from the music video on the inside of my digipak so that it maintained fluidity and wasn't overwhelmed with too many colors or different shots. We chose to use Instagram because in this day-in-age moire than 45% of teens now either own or have access to a smartphone. Nearly half of the teen population aged from 13-18 have said that they use Instagram compared to Facebook, released in 2004. This was ideal as our target age range was anywhere from 15 to mid-20s. 


My CD case's front and back cover was purple staged lighting, the front cover containing an image of the artist (Phoebe), and the back just of a purple screen with a stage lighting streaming through and lyrics on the back. Although the music video is supposed to be sad at the beginning, it is also supposed to be a sort of visible breakthrough where our character comes out the other sad despite her difference and I tried carrying that through into my social media page where there are images of Phoebe doing different things like holding an umbrella in the rain. To keep the Instagram page realistic, I had to also take inspiration from Demi Lovato's real page and tried to carry that through to make it realistic. For example, she had just announced that she is non-binary meaning she is neither a boy nor a girl nor a selected gender. Because of this, I used a lot of gay pride images or pictures showing support to the LGBTQ community. A big part of my digipak was based on Richard Dryer's Star image theory first introduced in 1979, where it's based on the idea that the viewer's perception of a narrative is highly influenced by the image of the stars. In order to follow these guidelines, I made sure that Phoebe was the main feature on the cover and the bold font behind her was to give the impression that she is now a solid and firm wall who is slowly rebuilding herself, but it also made her stand out almost 3D. 

To engage with viewers we had to determine a target audience, because the genre of the song is mid-tempo pop, we thought that this is best suited to females aged from 15 - 40. The song is slow in some places and has a melodic tune but is also quite touching, and to really grasp the concept I feel that the person has to be a bit more in touch with their feelings, something women are usually known for. I tried to keep the design of my digipak, not ‘girly’ but so that you could definitely say that it had more of a feminine touch with the colors and fonts. This was carried through in all the different elements both seen in the music video and my social media. On the Instagram page, there are different links that you can click on to take you to the music video on Vimeo, because of different copyright regulations, etc we aren't able to upload it anywhere else limiting the realism of the song actually being produced. Even though this may have restricted what we were able to post I still tried to incorporate a lot of different interactive hashtags and carried the slogan ‘#WOPS’ throughout my post adding continuity to the images and creating hype because of the acronym of ‘What Other People Say'.

Since doing the music video first, we had to learn a lot about the different types of conventions that were usually seen in a video from mid-tempo pop. A lot of them had a storytelling/ narrative theme where the audience was to follow along with the message being portrayed rather than just singing or seeing different images that had little connection to the song or the meaning behind the lyrics. The narrative theory is based on the concept that people are essentially storytellers, a theory coined by 20th-century communication scholar Walter Fisher. Another convention was how nearly every music video from every genre had lip-syncing. In my opinion, a music video, depending on the way it is being made, can't be a music video without singing or some sort of lip-syncing. To make it look right we had to watch different tutorials from Youtube to learn how to overlay the original song over the lip-syncing in editing without hearing the original audio and making it look realistic. In different videos it had tips and tricks such as always getting your actor or actress to actually sing the song when you are filming and just cut it out later, it makes it easier to match up the mouth movements with the different words in the song. Having your audio always on is another helpful bit that we forgot at times thinking that we wouldn't need audio but then when we got to editing we didn't know what part they were singing.