Changing our Ancillary Task

Poster Research

The aim of an album poster is to promote the album as much as possible to get the audience to buy the album. For this to happen, an album poster has to attract the audience’s attention to buy the album. To promote the album well, the poster has to give off the same image and tone as the album or music video. In our case, our poster has to give off a depressing tone due to our song involving alcoholism and a sense of mystery which is largely linked to our video as there is a mysterious girl in it. The pictures above some already existing album posters that have a similar look to how we want our poster to look like as they are from a similar genre.

Final Production of the Back if the CD Cover

The pictures above show the original idea we had for the back of our cd. The picture on the left is where we got our inspiration from and the picture on the right is the drawing of our design. We wanted to use a rose or roses to symbolise death as they are commonly used for funerals. We decided to make the roses gold to signify wealth which is what most hip hop artists do. The gold rose will be put on a black background to keep the colour scheme to a minimum. However, after more research, as a group we decided that we would alter our original idea by adding a wine bottle with one rose. This is because it then links to our video as it involves alcoholism and it would attract our target audience more.

















This is the final design of the background for the back of the cd case. Instead of having just a plain black background, I decided to have black roses which represent death and depression. Then I created the bottle with the rose and placed it in the correct position.

The songs we chose to feature on our album:

Swimming Pools
Poetic Justice
Art of Peer Pressure
Wicked Games
Monster
Survival
Devil May Cry
Echoes of Silence
Disturbia
The Party after the Party.

The reason we chose to name the songs these is because after a lot of research into artists of the same genre, we chose what songs would suit our album the best. Most of the songs have some sense of sorrow in them and a lot of them link to our video. The song ‘Peer Pressure’ links to the alcoholism part of the video and that could be one of the reason he is drinking. ‘Monster’ links to the depression and alcohol abuse. ‘Survival’ links to the mental and physical state of Connor and the use of Lily. ‘Echos of silence’ links to Lily’s role in the video, creates a sense of mystery to the album. ‘The Party after the Party’ links to the affects the alcohol and partying has on his body.



ADDITIONAL FEATURES ADDED TO THE BACK

The Barcode:

This is the barcode I used. To make this more unique, I changed the numbers at the bottom to make it my own. To do this I used the clone stamp. I then placed it at the bottom between the singles and the bottle as that was the best place to put it.

The copyright information:

I chose to research real information about Kendrick Lamar from his album to make the cd case look more realistic. From this we were able to get the real names of the executive producers and the right information about the record labels.

The producer’s information:

To get the correct information about the producers, I looked it up on the internet. Keeping the colour scheme black and gold enabled me to make the writing small but still clear enough for the audience to see it.


The record label signs:

To make our case as realistic as possible, we thought it would be best to use the real record label logo that Kendrick Lamar uses. These record labels include Aftermath Entertainment, Interscope Records and Top Dawg Entertainment.

The dotted lines to add the writing to:



After looking at Rihanna’s cd back, she had dotted lines to see where the spine of the cd will be.

First I added the title of the album using the same font used throughout the whole cd. Then I added that artists name and the record label ‘Top Dawg’ and a registration number. This all makes the case look more realistic.

Filming of the Bottle

We filmed a bottle rolling which will be a repetitive shot will throughout the video to show how alcohol is the main focus. This footage will be used in the bridge as it repeats throughout the song therefore this shot was important as it needed to reflect the message and the correct tone.

This angle was unsuccessful as we tried filming it from above. However it worked better when we put the camera on the floor at the same level as the alcohol as it made it look more professional and had the bottle rolling towards the camera which looked better.

This is the bottle at a different angle in order to show the label of the bottle to make it clear it is alcohol. This shot is successful as it uses the label and you can see the alcohol moving in the bottle as it rolls. This creates more features within this one shot.

This footage is successful as it rolls past the camera and starts rolling from side to side which make it look better as it creates more of a focus. The angle is successful as we are on the same level as the bottle which makes it the main focus. We prefer this video of the bottle and decided to put this one in out video.

Font Research for our CD Album Title

We did the font research on InDesign, we used the artists name to create an array of fonts. By putting all the fonts together it allows us to compare them all and visually choose which one would fit our album the best. This is also the font we will use for the whole cd, not just the title.

We chose the font Birch STD as it had the serifs we wanted which makes the font assertive and masculine as it becomes quite Gothic. We will use the same font for the album title ‘Troubled’; however, we will use the font on a title that is all capital letters. This will make the font look different yet will increase the serifs which is successful for a title such as 'troubled' as it suits the masculine appearance. As you can see the font is successful as it looks different on the title as it is larger and capital letters therefore the title and artist font link as they are the same but they do not look so alike that it looks silly and repetitive. By making them look different, we stretched out individual letters. This is a successful font as it portrays the perfect tone and message and visually represents the title and tone of our video. This highlights how important research and planning as we had to gather research before we could choose the best font for our CD.

Filming of the Glass Overflowing

Filming of the glass overflowing:

This is the first filming session we did of the glass overflowing. This footage consisted of blackcurrant juice and red food colouring poured into a wine glass to make it look like red wine. We continued pouring it into the glass until it was overflowing to show Connors excessive alcohol abuse. This footage was successful in ways that gave the right message to the audience. Also visually it created a good affect having a red liquid poured into a clear glass in front of a white background. However, in some ways this footage is unsuccessful. This is mainly because you were still able to see the gap in the papers in the background which made the footage lack quality. The reason for why we used paper was because the liquid we used can easily stain clothes and that was the only thing we could think of that wouldn’t be ruined by the liquid that we were able to throw away straight after. We tried to overcome this problem by blurring the footage, however, this then made it difficult for the audience to see the glass and made the footage, again, lack quality.

Re-shooting the glass overflowing:

We then decided that it would be best to re-film this scene due to the lines in the background being too visible. We decided to change the scenery by filming it outside. We changed the glass and the liquid to pour in the glass. The colour of this glass relates to the colour scheme of a lot of our previous footage – a blue and orange tint. We didn't have any red wine so we used white wine. However, this was still successful as you can visually see the bubbles while it is being poured which makes it look authentic. However, the only downfall to this new shot is that you can’t see it overflow clearly as it isn't a dark coloured liquid like the one in our first shoot. Other than that issue I feel it is visually an improvement from our first attempt and, therefore, is using it in our final music video.

Analysis of Kanye West Promotional Poster

This is general research into posters of a similar genre to ours. The analysis of the poster has been made to show how creative the poster is and how it has been produced to create the correct message they want to send to their target audience.