Ideas for Digipak- Front Cover.

 This image concentrate mainly on the lighting of the shot. The shot is lit on one side creating a shadowed effect onto the other side of the artists face. The light at the back was used with a magenta gel to create the pink tint to the image. The image uses eye contact which is a key convention of mainstream album covers and I think here is asserts the audience of the artists power as she looks quite vulnerable in this pose, especially as half of her face is shadowed. This may have connotations for her having more than one side to her. Also, the light in the background links with the other media text.

 This image uses layering to create a very interesting photograph. The photo is colourful and playful which links with her pop genre of music. The position of the typography on this shot is clever as it seems as if she is looking directly down at the writing. The pose is very similar to that of Rihanna and Adele in our research. She looks quite vunerable however which is not something that all of our target audience find appealing. I like the font style in this image as it is a strong and playful font.

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 This image has played a lot with the dark and light places in the picture.The contrast has been changed to highlight the well lit areas and darken the shadows. This is also helped by it using the black and white effect. The pose is very confident and striking and the use of the bold and strong font makes the image even more powerful. The picture is the strongest of all of the images and clearly shows a confidence which we see in the music video.

 This image uses pink tones to highlight different sections. There is a huge contrast between the pinks and black. The image looks very experimental and distances the audience from the artist as you can not see her eyes and there is very little emotion in her facial expression. I don't think this is the right image for us to use as our past research has suggested that the audience like to relate to the artist and this image does not allow them to do this.

With this image, we really like the tones within the picture. Some of these were created using the magenta gel and then others were added during the editing stages of the image. The image is very feminine from her position to her costume and even the calligraphy font. It all seems to channel femininity. Although the artist not looking at the camera could suggest vulnerability she has a confident stance which overrides this. I think that our female audience will find this image empowering.

Digipak & Poster Photoshoot...

For our digipak we decided it was essential for us to conduct a photo shoot in a studio and use professional lighting and cameras to get a very high quality picture. As we didn't have access to a photography studio we used a make shift studio which was made from stretching a black cloth across a wall. We used the lights that our school provides which are three bulb photography lights. For the camera we used a Canon SLR camera.

We used the lights behind the artists head to highlight the outline of her head and we also used coloured light gels to manipulate the colour of the lights. This lighted her but not well enough for it to be seen clearly on camera so we decided to point a light on her left side which created shadows on the right side of her face which we found created mystery and made the photographs have more character.




We also had a photoshoot for our poster. We didn't set up a studio for this as we wanted to try a different approach for the poster. We used a member of our groups garden to get some brick wall shots and also we used a room in her house that was being decorated to get a few shots against a distressed wall. We used the same camera as before and mainly used natural light to light the photos but inside we used the same photography lights to brighten up the area and stop shadows on the artists face.


This video shows a sample of images from both photoshoots...

                                             

Target Audience Research...

When looking at ideas for our digipak we looked at previous album covers for popular artists. Above is the questionnaire we used to ask our audience why they liked certain album cover art.

These are our results...

The results show a split between genres. Females went for the head and shoulders shots of women artists whereas males went for the album covers without people on them. It seems that women like to connect more with the artist than males. However, some opinions may have been bias as we used well known album covers and the participants may have chose the album covers because of the music rather than the album cover art.

However, we still think it is key to stick to the conventions which our target audience (females) are attracted to as by not doing this we may risk not appealing to the audience at all.

Conventions which were popular include having a close up or head & shoulders medium shot such as in the Pixie Lott album cover. Also, having a confident position seems to attract attention. For example the Lady Gaga photo shows her as powerful and confident which is favoured by females. We found that eye contact is a convention that changes. Some of the audience like that the artist is looking directly at the camera and some prefer when they have a more mysterious look (Adele and Rihanna). Therefore, I think we will use both of these conventions throughout our digipak to attract as large an audience as possible.

MUSIC VIDEO COMPLETED!

Our music video is finally completed and now we can move on to the ancillary tasks for our project. This includes a digipak and a poster. Our first step will be to gain audience feeback on existing texts and then start to progress with our ideas.
This will include having a photoshoot for both tasks and then constructing them into a digipak and a poster.

UPDATE...

We are still in post production for our music video. We are making good progress with the video and have started to include effects like multi-split screen which we did by layering the shots. We have also used shot layering to create an effect where the size of the frame changes to the best of the song. The music video is coming on a lot and we are hoping that all of the changes that we are making will help to make the video more interesting and therefore appeal more to our demographic.

Editing Software...

UPDATE...

Currently we are in the middle of post production so there isn't that much that we can share on our blogs. We are currently trying to learn about FinalCut so that we can use some of the features that it offers for our music video. We are editing everything on the programme but there is so much that we still have to learn from it.