Video 3rd Draft

This is the latest draft of my video. I am now missing only 40 seconds of footage and I am very satisfied with the way the video is going. The only issues I am currently facing are some imperfect lip syncing at points in the the second half of the video but apart from this I am very happy with the results so far.

Postponing Of Filming

Unfortunately due to personal circumstances, Izzy had to drop out of filming tonight. This has thrown my hopes of completing my video before Friday out of the window; however having talked to my teacher I have arranged to organise the rest of my filming for next week and to just try and complete part of my evaluation for Friday whilst posting another draft of my video so far.

Filming Plan 24/03/15

On Tuesday I plan to film the remaining shots for my video featuring both Tom and Izzy and the shot of the glass smashing. The weather is set to be a good 9 degrees Celsius and the brighter nights allow me to have more time to film after college. Once I have these remaining shots I only have 40 more seconds of editing to do before my video should be finished in time for my deadline.

Magazine Advert

This is my finished Magazine advert. It includes many conventions of other magazine adverts such as the masthead title of the band name, ratings from magazines and information about the available formats of the product. I used a traditional psychedelic colour of purple as my background and used an arabic style font to represent my product as part of the psychedelic genre as eastern influence is a big part of psychedelic music and culture. Seeing as I could not have a picture of the actual artist I used a still from my video for the main image. I used this particular image as it is part of the video that uses a solorised effect that represents the trippy and psychedelic feeel of the music as well as fitting the colour scheme of the advert.

Digipack

This is my design for my digipak. It incorporates my cover design along with some conventional features of back covers such as the record company label, a bar code and small print. It is mostly stylistically similar to my cover design for continuity. 

Creating My Own Design

I had already decided on my background colour and font I wanted to use. I used the Mistral font; which is a vintage script style font that I liked using on my previous drafts. I also decided to using the "strong" setting on my artist name to bolden it as this was an idea given to me by feedback from peers. For my background I used a very pale shade of yellow to create an old parchment/paper look reminiscent of the artwork for "Talkie Walkie" by Air.

Selecting the Mistral font I had used in my drafts

Using the strong text preset to bolden my artist name

Selecting my parchment/paper style background colour. 

Now came the issue of getting my main image of the clock. I am not a talented drawer or artist so i asked a friend who is an graphics student to draw a clock for me after showing her my ideas. She sent me this the day after and I was very happy with it. I scanned it in and put it onto Photoshop. After some struggle recolouring the white parts of the paper it was originally drawn onto; I eventually got it to fit into my pre-made design fairly easily. I am happy with the results of this as my front cover as it is almost exactly how I imagined it in my head, therefore I am satisfied that I can now move on to designing the rest of the digipak. 

Final Cover Drafts

 I had now narrowed down to my two favourite ideas from both the "Disraeli Gears" inspired clock and the symbol from the "A Wizard, A True Star" album art. I liked the strong symbol from the Todd Rundgren inspired design and the way it stood out from the page more than the clock design. However I feel that the hand-drawn style fitted in with the conventional psychedelic feature of art. I also am a big fan of the idea of the clock symbolising the turning back of time and the way it's hand drawn style also emitted a feel of childishness; which is yet another feature of psychedelia. I therefore chose this idea to use in my own design.

Digipak Template

Now I have some advanced plan designs for my front cover, I must turn my attention to the rest of the digipak packaging. I must now consider, as well as the front cover, the back cover, left inside and the the disks themselves. However I feel that due to my minimalist style I have created on the front cover; it should not take too much time to design the other panels.

A Wizard, A True star drafts

I created these mock-up drafts playing with the imagery and ideas I borrowed from the cover of "A Wizard, A True Star" by Todd Rundgren. As well as the woodblock idea, I played with a couple of the smaller graphics found withing the artwork. While I think that the woodblock idea was successful to some extent, I don't think it is an idea that I will follow up because I don't believe it suits the music or it's message and the influence of the Todd Rundgren is barely noticeable. I think the most successful design from these set of drafts is the first one shown here; which uses part of the cube in the bottom left corner of the album cover. It provides a strong logo type graphic that I was looking for when I decided what I wanted to do with my cover design. 

Digipack Magazine Advert Research

I decided to look at some real examples of magazine adverts for albums to try and explore their conventions and look for inspiration for ideas I could use myself. I took examples from a number of artists of varying genres and tried to see what they all had in common. The most prominent feature I found was a mast-head style title that was usually the artists name at the top of the advert. There were a few exceptions such as the Razorlight and You Me At Six adverts shown here which had the artist name in a more lower-central area. Another common feature I found was the use of a picture of the artist, with the few exceptions using the artwork from the album instead. Other notable features include reviews from magazines and information about the format the product is available on etc. These basic ideas set a fairly broad and generic structure that would be easy to recreate in my own design.

Summary of 1st Mock Drafts

While I think all the images had their own appeal; such as the vintage 60's/70's value of the baby blue clock, I think my favorite image was the hand-drwan style clock. I like how it brings forward again this theme of childhood, how it fits in with the psychedelic theme of art and drawing and hwo it especially suits the font and and background; combining my ideas taken from the Air album cover as well as the clock image I have used from Cream's "Disraeli Gears". However i am also a big fan of the bolder font of the draft with the brass alarm clock so i have decided also to try and combine the two to see if it works.                                               

 

However, after creating this new image I feel that the previous font; "Mistral" suited the image more, so the original image is still my favourite draft image so far and I am most likely to base my graphic on a drawn style image like this one.  

Ancillary Mock Drafts 1

I decided to start making some plans for my actual design using some of the ideas that I found in my research. Though I had decided on a paper/parchment type blank background and a script style font inspired by the cover of "Talkie Walkie" by air, I still wasn't sure which graphic to use. I decided at first to try making some images using the idea of a clock as a graphic. I got some varied clock images from Google images and had a look at the type of ideas I could come up with with my base background and font ideas.