Hannah and Amandeep's A2 Media Studies Coursework: November 2012

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

Thursday, 8 November 2012

Close-Up Sketches

These are the sketches of the hand-drawn images on the digipak:

We found a digipak template on the internet and used it as an actual template for our pack by pasting it into gimp (something we will discuss further in our evaluation). By analysing CD albums we decided on the information we wanted to include in our pack.

Front cover of CD album:

The lead singer is on the front cover of the album as they are usually the most recognisable member of a rock band. We have incorporated a scale-like skin (dinosaur like) onto the singer's body to combine the two aspects of the music video: the performance and the narrative. The image of the busy city behind the singer is used because our music video is set in the city of Tokyo. We had to use an image from the internet because we needed a helicopter shot of the city, and as this was impossible for us to get ourselves, copying an image was our only viable option.

Inside cover no. 1 of CD album:

Again we have made the cover black and white, this time in order to enunciate the red lips of the band. From our primary research we found that making the lips stand out was a commonly used element of a CD album; we used the colour red as it symbolises anger, an emotion stereotypically associated with the rock genre. We have used hand-drawn images of Godzilla and flames to parallel the hand-drawn style of the skyscrapers in our music video.

Inside cover no. 2 of CD album:

We decided to keep the CD part of the inside cover to a bare minimum as we have plenty of detail in the other parts of the album. As Godzilla is the central image of the album, he is used many times.

Back cover of CD album:

The barcode and writing at the bottom of the cover are included on all the CD album we analysed and we have continued to use the same font and colour to keep with the theme. We have placed the band members on top of skyscrapers which is just as we will do in the actual music video.

Album Poster

This is the album poster for our MV; we analysed various album posters and found the type of information we needed to include. We decided on a slightly 'blocky' type of font because it is assertive, thereby paralleling the song and its lyrics. The photo in the poster represents not only the dark side of the music video (namely the song) through the use of black and white, but also the fun, comical side through the expressions of the band. The font is green because that is the typical colour associated with Godzilla and we wanted to link the poster to the title of the song ('We Are Godzilla, You Are Japan').

How we produced the poster using the software 'Gimp' (step by step):

1. We imported the photograph we took into gimp as a layer. This allowed us to put more layers behind the photo and in front.

2. We added the desaturate effect to the photo so it was black and white.

3. We then went into the colour tab and went into 'levels' this allowed us to brighten and darken some aspects of the photo. We did this to emphasise some bits of the photo for example the rims of their eyes are very dark (Gothic look) and their faces are very light, creating a large contrast and eye catching effect.

4. Then we cropped the photo mainly because we wanted to focus in on their faces (emphasising the detail). Although this meant that the photo was the wrong shape for a poster so we added a black background that showed through at the bottom and top. We were easily able to do this because we imported the photo as a layer so we could send the black background to the back and have the photo layered on top.

5. Lastly we added the writing, we used the font tool already on there and chose a quite bold but Gothic styled font. We choose the green colour that has been used throughout the digipak, so they linked together. The writing was added as a layer and layered on top of the background and photograph layer, and then positioned.