Cd Cover Final

Cd Cover Draft

When creating our cd cover we wanted it to simple but also eye catching to the listeners. We first decided on using a city background to contradict the acoustic genre as it is usually associated with the countryside, however when we finished our draft we thought that our cd cover looked over crowded and the city background distracts from the importance of our artist. The use of the birds being the only thing in colour was used to emphasize the idea that nature conquers over the city as this idea links to the acoustic genre. This idea is conveyed by the birds being in red which is an extremley powerful and dominant colour. From this draft we kept the image of lucy the same because we thought the idea of not having a close up is different from other album covers which will make our artist unique and suggests that the music she creates is also very different from other artists today. Also we decided we didnt like 'Bella Diem' being in white as it doesnt look striking enough to attract listeners or passer bys in music stores and thought plain black would look far more classy and attractive. We also felt that the style font used on 'Bella Diem' was not what we wanted. We wanted it to be very swirly and fancy, as we thought this would suit our target audience better as girls would not like a font that is bulky and unflattering on the cd cover.

Group logo for cd cover

I designed our group logo for the Cd cover and tour posters on photoshop. When designing this logo i decided to research on well established logos for inspiration:

This simplicity of this logo is effective in showing the audience cleary which record company produced the cd and the black and white effect is powerful in standing out on the back of the cover. From this i decided to create a black and white simple logo as i felt anything too fancy and over the top wouldn't be clear to the buyer and would make the back cover look messy and overcrowded.

The idea for a silhouette of a cocktail glass was created after a discussion with my group for what  symbol would best represent us. We decided that because were all female we should have something sophisticated but also something extremley simple. This lead to us browsing the internet for ideas. We wanted a silhouette of an object because we wanted a very plain logo. This eventually ended in us having a small cocktail glass as we felt this looked classy, simplistic and stood out against the light backgroud of our media products.

Inspiration we recieved from Adeles 'Rolling in the deep' video

From watching Adele's 'Rolling in the deep' official music video on Youtube, we was captivated by the simplicity and beauty of the shots. I really liked the close-up shots of Adeles face as they were very emotive and the close-up of specific features such as the mouth and eyes helped portray the themes in the lyrics such as love and loss. This video inspired us to have performance shots within our own music video as we felt this would create a personal touch to the audience. When i watched Adeles video i decided to note down my inital thoughts and feelings and will present them in a wordle: 

Location Shots

Inspiration for back cover

When searching for a tree for the basis of out back cover we came across this image which inspired us to create our theme that covers all our music video, cd covers and tour poster. From the beginning of this project my group has wanted to use nature to show the isolation and purity of the young lovers romance. We feel that this image represents these themes perfectly and is an extremley beautiful image that will attract the audience. The image of birds flying towards the tree could symbolize freedom, peace and serenity and this is the atmopshere we wanted to surround the characters with in our video and the use of nature as our video background looks stunning.

Back CD Cover

When researching for our CD covers and tour poster for an acoustic artist I was intrigued by the use of natural imagery being used, a prime example of this is Jason Mraz:

The use of natural imagery is usually linked to the acoustic genre which suggests that this will attract listeners as just from seeing this tour poster they will know the type of music that Jason Mraz is involved in. This tour poster made me aware of how important it is to show what type of genre the artists music is. So when creating our tour poster i suggested we also use an asbect of nature, this lead to our main central image being an oak tree. The oak tree is a symbol of power, this helped  us convey that we think Bellia Diem will be a success in the music industry. Also the Oak tree is a sacred old tree so this could suggest that Bella diem are going back to the old music roots with the songs they produce, they are not trying to be a modern band.

Throughout all our media products we have used birds as a continous theme. We thought by doing this fans of Bellia Diem will look for this symbol and it will help to promote merchandise.

The use of the colour red makes our media products look striking and powerful, it draws attention to our covers. It also provides a contrast to the black and white effect which makes it stand out even more.

The song titles that we use are very significant to our artist. We included very short titles as when researching song titles from acoustic artists we noticed that they were very short, abstract and complex e.g.Laura Marlings album 'Alas i cannot swim' mainly contained song titles of one or two words- 'Ghosts', 'Shine' and 'Old stone'. This could suggest the simplicity of the artists music which links to the simple nature of acoustic music.

Tour Poster

When creating our tour poster we were influenced by famous examples such as Regina Spektor’s:

It is Regina’s tour poster that inspired me to use black and white for ours. I think by using black and white together it creates an image of sadness and loss which could suggest the genre of artist that the tour poster belongs to. As Regina Spektor is an acoustic artist like Lucy, we decided that by using black and white on our tour poster we would be sticking to the codes and conventions of a typical, appealing tour poster. We also loved the font that is used here, and decided that we wanted a swirly font that would make the audience notice our tour poster straight away.

The text we decided to use for ‘Bella Diem’ is very fancy and elegant, which I feel will be useful in drawing attention to our tour poster. The colour black is extremely simple but is a powerful bold colour that symbolizes the dominance of Lucy in the acoustic genre. The colour black also goes well with the simplicity of our tour poster and is overpowering for the audience.

The image of Lucy that we decided to use on our tour poster is very striking. Lucy isn’t looking at the camera, instead she is looking downwards. This could show that she is a mysterious artist who wishes to hide her identity; this will draw the audience into wanting to watch her but could also show her vulnerability and femininity. I also think that this will attract both a male and female audience as Lucy is wearing a leotard and is showing a lot of skin, this I feel breaks the codes and conventions of an acoustic tour poster. As unlike Regina Spektor’s we have decided to use quite a seductive image of our artist instead of using a cartoon or image to represent her. I feel this works better as it widens our target audience and also makes our tour poster look more attractive and by using an image of her our audience will be able to recognise her straight away.  

When researching popular venues for acoustic artist to perform these were what we found. We feel that we have picked the best suited for our artist and have created a believable tour poster for our genre of music. I love the contrast of red and black on our tour poster because in my opinion the colour red suggests passion, love and femininity and the colour black is a powerful, dominant and masculine colour which will help our artist appeal to everyone.

Final product

are you satisfied?
Overall I am extremely satisfied with what my group has produced, i believe we have created a music video that is parallel to the conventions of any music video in a modern society. From the beginning we aimed to produce a video that would contain a narrative and a performance and when watching our music video back we think this is the best decision we made. I think we have made a clear narrative that our target audience can relate, this has been done through the development of characterization of the two lovers. I feel that by having believe able actors in the videos who could express emotions clearly we were able to represent the themes of love, loss and hope very well.
I think that my group in the end worked very hard as a team in order to finish the project and have overcome many obstacles that hindered our progress, but our high spirits and motivation helped us strive for success.

what would you change?
When researching for our music video we created a storyboard in which my group worked together to carefully plan each shot, however when starting to film we rarely looked at it and this is where i strongly believe our project began to fall apart. Furthermore, this lead to my group not entirely knowing what to film which meant it took longer then planned to get the shots that we wanted. We eventually went back to our storyboard and everything started to become easier and we finally decided to stick to our original ideas. If we had stuck to this is the first place i believe we wouldn't have wasted as much time as we did trying to rethink ideas.
If i could start this project again i would also choose an artist (Lucy) in which was more accessible, I've found it extremely difficult getting in contact with Lucy. Originally we wanted to film her performing 'Bullet' and numerous times have turned up and the gig has been cancelled. This meant we had to think of new ideas that didn't involve Lucy actually being in the video... which lead to me miming the song. I also think that more contact with Lucy would have helped us with the meaning behind the song which would have been useful as we might have had more ideas with the narrative.
I also think that choosing a female character that was quite timid was a bad desicion in my group, as being infront of the camera requires confidence and without this it meant we wasted time trying to force perfect shots. If I had suggested that I should be the lead female then we would have finished the project alot quicker, resulting in more time for editing and perfecting my evaluation.

Editing

One of the main problems that i believe hindered our progression were the problems we were faced with when editing our music video. I took it upon myself at home to do the editing, the latops at college were extremley slow and we were unable to convert our video footage due to poor software. Whilst at home i downloaded 'Wondershare Video Converter' which was I found very useful but was slow to use and took over a day to process all of our footage from 'SANY' to 'MOV'. We also used a different editing software to the rest of the class due to using my laptop, we edited our video on 'Windows Live Movie Maker'. Even though this software limited the fancy editing we could do, I found it was useful for my group because it was simple and this went with the image we was trying to convey with out target audience.
When editing our video i decided to use a black and white filter over the perfomance shots in the video. This was done for a purpose, we wanted there to be a clear difference between the performance and the narrative. We wanted the contrast to be noticable to the audience. The performance was edited with a black and white filter to show how the female lovers world is no longer colourful and happy, instead it is endless days of black and white because she is no longer in love. I also heightened the brightness in many of the narrative shots because i wanted there to be emphasis on how bright and happy the female lovers memories were of her ex boyfriend.

Filming

When filming our music video we endured many problems that hindered our progression. When originally casting the two characters in our video we imagined that they would be flexible to film, however on many occasions the female who asked to star in our video failed to show up and this lead to many problems. These included difficulties such as an inability to keep up continuity, the first filming took place with snow in the background and before we had the chance to film again the snow had melted. As a group we managed to make a decision that I feel has dramatically improved our video which was for me to be the female character. This meant that filming was easy and accessible as I knew exactly what I wanted the character to bring to the narrative of the film and felt I had a greater understanding of the characterization of her. Also, because the male in the video is a close friend of mine we were able to create a relationship that was believable to the audience and captured the romanticism of the narrative. We also had to reshoot due to one of the members in my group mistakenly believing the camera was recording, this meant that we had to reschedule another day to film and delayed our video development. However, I do feel that this was a learning experience as from this mistake we was able to reshoot extremely quickly as in our minds we knew the exact shots we wanted and helped us focus on portraying the characters with believable, in depth thoughts.