Magazine Advert Research - Luke

Before me and the rest of my group start to plan and create the magazine advert, we need to know what the general conventions of a magazine advert for an album are. Seeing as our task is to create a promotional pack for the album an an artist, in our case Madeon, I thought it would be a good idea to look at the conventions of posters and adverts that feature his work and tour dates.

One of the first things that I looked at was the poster for Madeon's first tour. As you can see, there are a lot of bright colours surrounding his name, there is a clear and easy to read layout of text, and there is a banner at the bottom listing his social network web addresses and his record labels. There is also the inclusion of a picture, seemingly of an urban, city environment similar to the one seen in his music video to the song 'The City'.

Looking at some of his digipak covers for his previous EPs and singles, I noticed that there are a lot of links between them.

Firstly, you can see that there font used in all pieces is the same, as is the colour scheme used in and around the font. This is used to create a consistent house style between all of the products, and helps to create a consistent brand/image that can be related to Madeon. This is something that will be key to include in both of our ancillary tasks in order for them to be part of a successful promotional park for Madeon's new album.

One other key aspect that can be seen throughout all of the artwork produced for Madeon is the inclusion or reference to the city. This can be seen through the picture in the tour poster above, and as a silhouette of the Sydney skyline behind the name of the artist in the single/EP artwork. As you can see from the artwork below, there are clear links between them, and this is something we will need to cinsider when planning and constructing our ancillary tasks.
















Even though looking at the work of Madeon is extremely helpful, I still do need to look at the magazine adverts of other artists to see if there are any other conventions that I may have missed. Below is a slideshow of all of the magazine adverts that I have looked at.

As you can see, all of the magazine adverts have very similar features.
They all feature a large title, giving the name of the artist/album. This would stand out giving a clear indication straight away as to who the band or artist is.

There is a photo or graphics/artwork that take up the majority of the advert, something that will catch the readers eye when they see it in a magazine. On Madeon's previous artwork there are no photos, only graphics, so we will keep this trend in our own advert.

The date of the album release is always in clear bold text, as it is one of the most important features, letting the audience know when they can buy the album.

5 star rating systems and short quotes from review of the album are also very common on the advert and are essential to give the artist good publicity.

A new feature which is becoming increasingly popular on magazine adverts is the inclusion of QR codes, and an example of this can be seen in the Goldfrapp advert in the slideshow above. Along with links to the artist's websites/social networks theses are great ways for the audience to be quickly linked to the artists pages.

These features are all key to making a successful magazine advert and we are going to include them all to make sure ours would be as professional as possible.

Digipak Flat Plan - James

Ancillary Tasks Font Research - Group

To make our digipak and magazine advert professional looking and relatable to real world products we needed to have fonts that relate well, giving a consistent house style and link to other existing media that is related to both Madeon and other artists within the dance/drum and bass genre of music.

The first idea that James, Josh and I had was to look on www.dafont.com to see if we could find the official font that Madeon uses in his singles, EP digipaks, posters and all other media linked to him as an artist.

The closest thing that we found to the original font he uses was one called 'Expressa TS-Heavy', which, as you can see, is very similar to the font that he uses, and another called 'Pump LET'. The only problem was that in order to use the font we needed to buy it, so we therefore decided to look at other fonts to see if we could find any other close matches.

Another font that we found that looked similar to the font Madeon uses was one called 'Bauhaus 93'. The only things slightly different is the spacing on some of the letters, such as on the letter 'e' and 'a'. We all decided that we could alter these slightly in Photoshop when it came to making our ancillary tasks and that it would give us a better end result rather than altering an image off of the internet, which was our only other real option, and therefore we chose this as
our main font to use.

Digipak Research - Josh

As part of our coursework we needed to design a digipak for our music video. This first consisted of researching album cover art in our particular genre (Dance/House). The first ones I looked at were the ones that consisted largely of graphics as opposed to one photograph. Below are some of the albums by Drum and Bass band: Pendulum.

 Despite the album art using some pictures (that of the eye in 'Hold Your Colour' and the fish in 'Immersion') the art relies heavily on graphics that surround and emphasise these photographs. I personally really like these album covers as they look stunning and are an illustration of how we are able to create beautiful art simply with a few pictures and photoshop.

 The album name 'Immersion' directly relates to the album art, for a man and a woman are submersed in the sea among many other sea creatures. The intricate and detailed art is also meant to 'immerse' us in the sense that we are drawn in by it.

 'Hold Your Colour' could have a possible relation to the cover as it is made up of many different colours and shades, as well as colour being directly drawn from the eye, which is made to draw our attention, eyes being a focus of many different types of art.
'In Silico' is actually an expression used to mean "performed on computer or via computer simulation", which relates to the computer-generated graphics on the album cover, and could have possible connotations regarding what seems to be a fetus enclosed within an egg with sperm encircling it. This could refer to how Pendulum see their work (the album) as their child, the importance they hold to it and how they have created this through computers. We can draw a comparison between 'Immersion' and 'Hold Your Colour' in the sense that they feature original images that have been heavily manipulated to enhance them, whereas 'In Silico' makes use of simpler graphics. There is a continued house style through the covers as they all make use of heavily edited computer graphics to create the covers but there is perhaps no obvious correlation between the three, i.e. no band members are featured or the same font being used.

 There is no prevalent font through the three albums, and although they do bear resemblance to one another, there appears to be no brand recognition in that respect.

  As you can see from the inside design of 'Hold Your Colour', the concept of the stream of light coming out of the eye is continued on from the cover. This also applies for the song list on the back panel. Light is also shown bursting out of a pair of hands on the design behind the CD, very similar to that of the eye and surrounding inside design. The whole design of the panels uses a similar, dark background with a green, blue and pink/purple colour palette, using white against solid black for the font so it stands our easily.

 'Hold Your Colour' was the main inspiration behind this single (Witchcraft) cover art, the use of the eye being the most noticeable feature they chose to centre both pieces on. Again, this has been heavily edited, perhaps even the eye isn't an original photograph. The reason I believe this looks much more like a single cover art rather than a whole album is because there is only one centre-point for the viewer to look at, this being the eye, which takes up a lot of the whole image with there being little else to be looked at. This differs from 'Hold Your Colour' in the sense that, despite the eye being the main focus-point, it is much smaller than the 'Witchcraft' eye and features more around the whole cover such as the roots around the eye and the bubbles rising up through the title.

  The inside art for 'Immersion' bears similar resemblance to the cover; behind the CD it looks like an empty space underwater which the CD fills up. On the left side you can see the 'thank you's' which consists of a lot of text, thus being the reason the background is kept simple with solid black and only a couple of graphics added in.

 

  The song list on the right panel above compare very strongly, for the colour palette of black and blue as well as pink/purple are carried on from the front cover. The font for the songs is the same as the album title on the front. There remain some sea creatures as well as beams of blue light from above the water along with coral amongst other rocky features along the bottom, which all feature on the cover.

 The CD art uses original images for the bubbles as well as the jellyfish. This bears strong resemblance to the other four panels as it is underwater, uses black and blue for the colours and the use of the bubbles is meant to emphasise that the viewer has just been 'immersed', thus also emphasising the album title.

 The album art above by House supergroup Swedish House Mafia is of their two albums: Until One and Until Now. Their first album (Until One) features a very simple design with formal serif text which could be representative of their plain and formal nature. Until Now on the other hand features the three band members with their iconic three circles behind their heads, perhaps striking a resemblance to the circular halos found behind Jesus Christ's head in pictures of him.

 The electronic group Nero's only album 'Welcome Reality' features futuristic graphics accompanied by the name with their unique font spread across the cover. This is typical of albums; to have the artist name in the centre of the page which becomes the main focus of the art, especially considering the artist's name is far larger than the album name (artist promotion and recognition). It also bears some resemblance to a film poster or DVD cover due to the credits at the bottom of the cover. It seems appropriate for an electronic/house group such as Nero to encorporate futuristic graphics in their cover art, since this genre often makes use of the fact that it seems modern and advanced compared to other genres.

 A possibly more mainstream dance producer, Calvin has had 3 albums, with his most recent one '18 Months' reaching number 1 in the charts. His first album makes relatively simple use of a photograph of Harris edited to give it a cartoon effect. I believe this album art to be quite effective as although it is simple, it stands our quite well, yellow and black contrasting quite differently. It does however still retain a certain techno/dance appeal with the digital font. The second album has some continuity from the first one as the picture has the same 'light-filled' glasses along with the same font. The woman along with the glasses add glamour to the art, possible a metaphor to the album title 'Ready for the Weekend', implying going out to clubs and parties, which seems appropriate since Harris's dance music is very popular amongst clubs. His latest album contrasts highly from his first two, since it doesn't feature a facial close up or the glasses, as well as the text instead featuring prominently in the middle of the cover instead of the to the side. It is, however, another relatively simple album art, with an unedited photograph with Harris sitting on the pavement, which could be described as untypical of dance album covers. An interesting aspect of this album cover is that the background features in Harris's music video for his single 'Bounce'. This is very uncommon in not just dance digipaks but also for all digipaks of every genre, since the album is a collective of lots of singles and isn't just based around one. Harris possibly decided to use this for the digipak cover as artists often want to add in a personal touch to their covers (it being a work of their art), and he may feel that the music video for 'Bounce" relates to his life or bears some resemblance to it.

Final Cut - Peer Feedback - Group

 

During one lunch time at school all of the media students watched everyone's music videos and gave them feedback on what they liked didn't like.

In the padlet below you can see all of the feedback that my group received on the final cut of our music video.

Created with Padlet

Music Video Construction - Luke/James

Below is a video showing the construction of our music video.

Music Video Final Cut - Group

Below is the final cut of our music video.