Further designs

We have decided on our Digipack and advert designs after much deliberation. The final draft has two less panels than our original, and the pictures have been changed considerably, but our Ideas have developed from those shown before, and will now be produced on Photoshop.

The front cover will now be a collage of various different eyes hands and other body parts, with the double faced head (that appeared in the original designs) in front of it. We will also be using the text that we decided on earlier in our project for the band name.

I was able to convince the group to change our album name as well. I believed that it should like to our design more, as well as be ambiguously intimate as is the convention for our genre. The album is now called ‘Colourless faces’.

The inside pains will now be a hand holding a band photo, and a hand holding our CD. This is again ambiguously intimate, and links to our cover.

The back now links more to the front cover than before, because it now includes the double faced head from the front cover, but inverted.

The advert has also changed. We continued to have the same design for the front cover of our album, and our advert, as our genre conventions dictate, but we altered it slightly. The advert is now a large version of the collage we used for the album cover, with an opaque sunset overlaying it.

22/11/2011

Today we have began our first steps to producing our rough designs on Photoshop. I have begun work on the album’s spine, back cover, disk, and publishing logo. Katie and Laura have started audience research on what we should use as and album name.

Music Video: Final Cut

Diary Entry: 16th, 17th November

Wednesday 16^th  November

I have been again focusing on blog by making sure we have everything we need and started organising. I have also been watching how the video is coming together. Looking forward to tomorrow night!

Thursday 17^th November

Deadline day! Our video is coming along and we’re nearly finished! All that’s left to do is check and double check all the work and video to make sure there are no mistakes!

Locations

For our locations, we wanted an industrial landscape with an edge to bring more of an ‘indie’ edge into the video.

We decided for the running scenes we would use urban areas and film in back alleys mixed with local scenic roots, such as the sea front. We wanted the skies to be bright blue to create the idea of something bright, colourful and intriguing coming towards the characters’ lives, but we’d still have the dull, uninteresting landscape they are currently trying to escape from. Here we tried to incorporate the idea of escapism, as the characters are trying to break free from their current surroundings.

For the band performance, we mostly concentrated on the motif of the sun setting. Our original idea for the performance was to go to the Baltic at the viewing point and to let the performance have the back drop of the Newcastle nightlight as the sun went down. We had to chance our idea because the Baltic had the Turner Prize on around the same time that we wanted to film, and it also became very difficult to get permission. We then considered filming in a field as the sun went down, but again it was difficult to get permission and thought we would have a very limited amount of time to film.

As we had decided that we would all like to make the sunset a stronger motif in the video, we decided that we could bring into the performance of the band. We had then all finally settled on the idea of projecting the sunset and looked at how and where we could do it. We decided we needed a black room to make it most affective, so we used the drama hall at our school, where we put up a white sheet and projected the sunset from behind. We then put all the band and instruments and added leaves, which has become a theme through our running scenes.

The tea party was also filmed in an industrial landscape. Luckily, Iona had noticed an area where a building had been knocked down so it had rubble and was very imperfect. This was essential for our video, as we tried to incorporate Claude Levi-Strauss’ idea of binary opposites. We also thought it could be a metaphor from their perfectly normal lives, the normal buildings, to their wanted lives where they destroy the things that define them most, relating to the rumble around the site.




Another location we used was the shoe tree in Jesmond. We thought it would be a fantastic idea for the homeless man to collect his shoes from there, and looking at the footage, I think it looks very good!

Advert designs

These two images are our drafts for adverts. They both link to our digi pack, and repeat an image from it, just as our audience research and existing product research dictates. The one on the left is a repeat of our design for a front cover, making it very easy for the viewer to link the two products, whereas the design on the right is a reapeat of an inside panel, yet look more artistic and eye-catching. Both designs include a web address, but we are still debating over the inclusion of a quote, or any extra text like the design on the left has. Much deliberation will go into producing the final advert, and hopefully we can compromise and create an attractive advert.

Digi-pack designs

As well as the massive amount of editing we have done this past week we have also began to discuss our digi-pack and advert designs. We have had these in mind all the way though the project, but these are our initial drafts, and beginning ideas. Over thing we will develop these designs, and then produce them neatly on Photoshop.

This image is of the front of the digi-pack as well as the back, the spine, and one of the inside panels. Our audience research has helped us a lot with this part of the project, we have followed what people said they would prefer in a digi- pack, such as including artwork as appose to photographs of the band. Using artwork also fits into our genre research, as most of the digi-packs we looked at did not use photographs, and chose to look more artistic and creative instead.

The front panel includes a double faced head, one half light, one half dark, to link partly to our video, but also to the digi-packs theme of ‘Transitions’. The different shaded parts of the cover are meant to be different types of crumpled paper layered onto each other. The different pieces of paper are supposed to show two conflicting elements in a creative way.

The back is supposed to be plain white paper that has been slightly crumpled, with plain black text on it, along with all of the bands information. This fits the template for the ideal back to a digi-pack that we discovered whilst doing our existing products research, that is; keep the back simplistic so it does not distract from the cover.

The inside panel continues the theme of using different coloured paper to make it look creative and artistic. Behind the paper is an image of the moon, and the night sky, this links to the idea of contrasts and transitions, not to mention the theme of our song.




This image has an inside panel on either side of the disk.

The first inside panel is the inverse of the inside panel from the other Digi-pack image. It is a picture of the sky during the day, with a layer of white paper around it. Once the digi-pack is produced this panel will appear on the back of the picture of the night sky, to emphasise their contrast.

The disk is a simplistic design, much like the examples that we studied in our existing products research task. It fades from dark to light in the same way that the image on the front cover does, to keep a constant theme of changing. The text being on different parts of the text, and being different colours also shows the conflict of this theme of transitions.

The final image continues the sky motif in the previous two inside panels, but is a half-way house in between the two images. It is the sun setting, so it is just as the sky begins to change from one of our pictures to the other. We also chose to remove the paper from this picture so that is would not be grouped with either of the previous images, and would remain neutral.