Album promo adverts in magazines

For another part of our coursework we have to make a magazine advert for the release of our album. I have done some research into other album promos from music magazines of our genre. The magazine that I found these adverts in is Q, a monthly music magazine that is usually focussed around rock music.

This first album promotion is 'The Peoples Key' by Bright Eyes. I think that this advert is a typical rock genre album as it uses the colours red, yellow, orange and black which are common rock genre colours that we found from our questionnaire. It is a very simple advert with no photo of the band or of the album itself. It creates the feeling of a fire which may be linked to the actually album content and colour scheme. It has the release date and also a star rating from the magazine which are all typical conventions of an album promo.




The second album advert is 'The Fool' by the band Warpaint. This is a smaller advert in the magazine as it shares it's spread with 2 other adverts as well. This advert is slightly different from the one before as the band is actually shown in the picture and then there is another picture of the actually album which may help the fans find the album in the shops. Once again the colour scheme from the album is used in the advert and the colours are dark, typical rock genre colours of red, black and gold. This also has star ratings from the magazine and also features the bands website and record labels website for extra promotion.




A final advert that I found in the magazine is for the band The Go Team. The reason I like this advert is because the background has some relevance to my digipack with the mosaic type effect. The advert once again used the black and red colour scheme that in associated with the rock genre and it also has ratings from the magazine and the official websites.




Those were the 3 adverts that stood out to me most from this magazine however here is a selection of other album promotions that I also found in the same magazine:















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Codes and conventions of magazine adverts for album releases

Within any music magazine you will find advertisements for new albums being released by bands however big or small. There are certain things that can be found on almost all of these adverts that will be crucial for me to include when making my own magazine advert to make it look realistic and reliable.
These conventions include:
- The artists name and the new album title.
- The release date of the album and the download.
- Website, myspace, facebook or twitter of the artist.
- Product content such as extra DVD footage or any bonus tracks that are included.
- Magazine reviews and star ratings from magazines and newspapers depending on the genre, such as NME, Q, Smash Hits, Kerrang, The Guardian.
- The name of record label.
- Tour dates.
- Photographs or graphics of the artist or things associated with their album.
- Where the album is avaliable to perchase such as HMV or Amazon.
- Lines such as “out now” or “debut album”.
- Any offers that are avaliable such as free downloads.

The Brits

Last night the Brit awards were on ITV1 whilst it was being filmed at the O2 arena in London. Loads of performers and artists turned up hoping to win some of the important and well recognised awards. Take That who won the British group award opened the show with their new single and Cee Lo Green who won the award for International solo male artist closed the show with his song "Forget You" who was joined on stage by Paloma Faith who unfortunately did not win the award she was up for which was British Female solo artist. Tinie Temper , Mumford and Sons and Arcade Fire were the main winners on the night. Tinie Temper won the awards for British single and British break through act while Mumford and Sons won the British album of the year and Arcade Fire won International group and International album.


Within the nominees for best international album, was the group that we are using for our music video coursework, Kings of Leon, with their album "Come around Sundown". They were also nominated for best international group but unfortunately lost out on both of the awards to Arcade Fire. It would have been really nice to see Kings of Leon win at least one of their awards, however, Arcade Fire were deserving winners with their album "The Suburbs". The fact that Kings of Leon were nominated for these big awards show that they are well recognised around the world and their music is being appreciated internationally as well as nationally in their own country.

Editing and voyeurism

In our last lesson we were editing our video and finally worked out how to do a spilt screen on iMovie. We were experimenting with different shots that we could put into a split screen and found that when we put the same shot of Charlotte on the floor lip synching next to eachother and flipped one side, it looked like she was looking at herself singing and this could create voyeurism in our video which it something we need to add. I think that this looked really effective and I will upload it once we get it on YouTube. We still need to also do a 4 way split screen for the opening of our video but we cannot do that on iMovie so will have to wait until we can get onto final cut pro.

We were also discussing that we need to film some more footage for our video so we were deciding when and what to film. We are hoping to all get together after school this Wednesday to film at someones house and we are going to try and film the 3 way split like in the Blink 182 video that I have spoken about before.


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Reasoning behind my digipack designs

I carefully chose every aspect of my digipack so that I made sure it conformed to the conventions of digipacks from our chosen alternative rock genre. I also made sure that it had a connection to our music video. The reason I chose to do the front and back panels in colour and the insides in black and white is because I thought this was the best way to link it to our music video. In our video we have made our performance shots in black and white and then our narrative of Charlotte, in bright colours. The pictures that are in black and white are of the drums and Tom singing which are both part of the performance in our video and the blue bass that I have put on my front cover, features in the narrative of our video. I have also made sure however that I haven't soley based my digipack on our video because that is not what albums usually do. By having the instruments and microphone on my digipack this makes it broader than just my video as these would be featured in all of the bands songs.
The background that I have used on my front and back cover also convey certain aspects of the rock genre as when I was researching other digipacks I found that some use a mosaic type of design such as the Muse and Killers album covers which could be linked to my choice of jumbled up background.

Final digipack

This is my final digipack design all put together:



and these are the individual panels so you can see them more clearly:

Front


Middle


Middle (holding CD)


Back

The inside panels to my digipack

Next I had to design and make the 2 inside panels to go with my digipack. I decided that these panels should be black and white so that they conform to the rock genre. I also found in my research that a lot of rock digipacks use black and white and one dominant colour, for example red, so I tried this out on my inside panels.

Once again I used Photoshop for this part of my digipack but I also used Paint for some parts. I found some print screens from our video that I thought would look effective in my digipack and decided on these:





I like these photos because I think they represent the rock genre because there is always a lot of performance associated with the genre and also I have chosen a shot of Tom where only a small part of his face is shown as it not very common for the artist to be shown on their album cover in the rock genre which is very different compared to other genres such as Pop where the artist is usually the main focus of the album cover.

To try and use what I found in my research with the black and white being used with one dominant colour I decided to use a lipstick kiss mark as this is something that is featured in our video. This is not something that would usually be associated with the rock genre but I decided to use it as it represents our video. I found a lipstick kiss on Google, made it smaller on paint, copied it into photoshop, used the Lassoo tool to cut it away from the background and rotate it slightly and then pasted it 3 times onto the photo of Tom. I then changed the kisses the black and white apart from one which remained red. I like how this has turned out and think it looks like a realistic representation of a rock digipack inside:



For the other inside panel, I didn't do much to the photograph as I already liked what it looked like but as this is going to be the part that holds the actual CD I represented this by drawing the outline of the CD onto it using Paint:

The back cover of my digipack

The more I looked at the back cover that I originally made the more I did not like it. I thought it may just be because of the font, but even after I changed it to the new font I still did not like it. I decided that maybe it was because of the blue strip down the middle which although fits with the bass on the front, makes the cover look a bit unprofessional and not very nice. On Photoshop I started to play about with the background again and used the "smudge" and "blur" tool to play around with the colours and found that if I blurred the background, you could see the white font clearer, meaning that I could take away the blue box. I also changed where the track list is and rather than having it vertical down the middle of the cover I moved it to going horozontally across the top which made it more interesting and there is also a Kings of Leon album that does this, showing the conventions of a rock genre album.



I also added a barcode to the bottom right hand corner that I found on Google images as this makes my digipack look more professional and realistic. I then added some more smudges to my background and some more text that says:
"www.themagsofficial.com"
"www.myspace.com/themags"
"Mac One Productions"

These bits of texts also make my digipack look more realistic as many artists have their own offical websites and myspaces which it where a lot of artists start off their career. I used Mac One Productions because this is also the production name that our group used last year for our film opening.

Font used on my digipack

I originally used the font "Small Font" that I found on Photoshop for the font on my digipack for the tracklist and album name on the front:



At first I thought that it may conform to the rock genre and look good on my digipack but the more I was looking at it I found that it made my digipack look very home made so not very professional. I decided to look on a website "www.dafont.com" and download a better font to use that would look better on my digipack and conform more to the rock genre.

From my research I have found that the writing on rock digipacks are fairly simple and easy to read. These are some of the ones that I found that I liked:









But then I finally came across the font called "Sketchy" which I really liked and thought it would be perfect for my digipack for the album name on the front cover and track list on the back:





I decided that this was my favourite font out of all the ones I had seen and so changed the writing on my front cover to see if it looked good with my digipack and really liked it:

My digipack

I have made amendments to my front cover for my digipack by adding a Parental Advisory sticker in the bottom corner as this makes it look more professional and realistic:




I have also started to work on my back cover for my digipack and added the track list to it. The back of my digipack is very similar to the background of my front cover, but I blurred and smudged the images together to make it look more disorientated which could relate to our music video. I had to also add a block of blue down the middle of the cover to allow the writing of the track list to be seen. To keep the theme consist ant through my digipack, I made the strip the same colour blue as the bass on the front to tie it all together:



I still need to add some more features to my back cover however, such as a bar code and copyright symbols to make it more realistic and true to other digipacks.

My own digipack design

Tonight I have started to design my digipack and using Photoshop have made the front cover. I used the image from our stop animation of the blue bass and on the Photoshop software, took out the lipstick kisses and tilted it to make it look different and interesting. I also changed the background and smudged lots of different colours together to create an unusual, colourful background that makes the bass stand out.
I am happy with this album cover and will now start to work on the back and 2 inside pages of my digipack based on different images.

First draft

This is our first draft of our music video for Charmer so far. There are a lot of black spaces in our video as we started by editing the end of the song, we will then be able to go back and edit all of the black parts to eventually fill up the whole song. This draft shows our work on the ending where the music changes and builds up. It shows some of the performance elements of our video with our band that we edited into black and white and also the lip syncing that Charlotte done. It also features some of the stop motion that we experimented with.

Whilst we were uploading our footage today there were a few other people in the media room who we asked to watch our draft and give us their feedback. It was all really positive which we were really pleased with and most of their favourite parts were the stop motion, in particular the sound board.

This is our first draft:

Stop motion

Last night Molly filmed another creative stop motion sequence of a Soundboard at her church. She moved the buttons up and down so when edited together looks like the buttons are sliding up and down to the music on their own. I really like the look of all the stop motion sequences we have made to put into our video and think that this sound board one in particular looks really effective. When put into our music video Molly changed it to black and white to link with the performance part of our video and also decided that the Hard Light effect looked better for this particular shot rather than the Vignette.

This is the edited sound board before we put it into the actual music video. It was too long to fit into the video so it was cut down and edited further to fit into our video effectively.

Possible ideas

Molly proposed an idea to our group after watching a music video on TV. The Blink 182 video for "Always" is filmed in 3 strips and gives a distorted effect to the viewer. Although we would not do this for our whole video, our whole group really liked the idea of filming something in this way and as we still have a few final bits to film, this would be possible to achieve. We thought that maybe we could film Tom, our lead singer with the blue bass and also Charlotte with it as well so we could split the screen into 3 parts and have maybe Tom's head, Charlotte's body holding the guitar and Tom's legs, or the other way round. We could experiment with different ideas for this but I think it will look really effective and make our video more interesting to our audience and give us some unique shots.

This is the Blink 182 video that the inspiration came from:

Editing

We have started to edit together our raw footage and put it to our song to start creating our music video. We are using imovie for the main production of our music video on our macs but for our final touches at the end we are going to use final cut pro on another mac. As our opening shot is going to be a split screen of all the bands instruments as they come into the song, we need to do this part on final cut pro so we have started to edit our music video from the end. To do this succesffully we put the song onto imovie and have made the whole video black so we can edit different parts of the song as we go along.
At the end of our song, the music starts to change and there is a big build up of music. To try and make this look effective in our video we have used short shots of Charlotte ripping up the magazines and newspaper on the floor and also performance shots of the band inbetween, getting faster and faster and representing time through black transitions that go with the beat of the song. We got this idea from The Wombats video for Lets Dance To Joy Division as they do this in their video too.

This is the Wombats video and around 2.05 is where they use the black fading transitions that inspired us:




After editing this at the end we decided to go back to the beginning to just after the split screen and put some shots of Charlotte doing her make up looking into the camera in to the lyrics "She's such a charmer" as Charlotte is going to be representing the "charmer" in our video. We have also started to add in performance shots of the band and change them to black and white and also put a Vignette effect from imovie onto them which makes them look more professional and also conform to other Alternative rock music videos where lots of them are in black and white.
I have really enjoyed starting to edit our video together and look forward to seeing it come together more in the future.

Initial ideas for my digipack and iPhone blogging

I have just found an app on my iPhone called BlogPress that means I will be able to blog things straight from my phone and will also make it easier to upload photos without having to put them on the computer!

I have drawn out some initial ideas for my own digipack so that I can see what it looks like visually. I chose to put the blue bass from our stop motion on the front as I really like the colours and also think that a bass guitar is an important symbol of the rock genre. I also designed the back cover and one of the inside panels which will hold the cd. I thought that by having the drum on that inside panel will look effective because it will be the same shape as the cd. I now just need to design the other inside panel and then start putting it together properly. These are the pictures of my initial drawings:










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Initial ideas for my digipack design

After all my research into digipacks from our genre I have started to come up with some ideas for my own.
I think I am going to include the bands instruments on my digipack and one of the ideas I had was to maybe have a different instrument on each side. I really like the shots of the blue bass guitar that was filmed on the first day and I might use a close up version of this for the front cover of the digipack. This will be realistic of other digipacks because it won't just relate to the music video we are doing now, but will relate to all of the songs because all of the songs would include these instruments. I was thinking of maybe also including the lipstick kisses that are on the bass guitar in the stop animation to represent the "hit song" on our album. I thought that the bass drum from a front view could be a good idea for the inside of the digipack as this can be where the CD goes, so when the CD is not in it you can see the drum. For the other inside part of my cover I think I am going to include the "thankyou's" from the band and other little bits of writing and for a background picture I might include the magazine cuttings like this one:


These are just some initial ideas that I have thought of but I will soon start drawing up some ideas so I can see them visually and upload them on my blog.

Theorists

Todorov's narrative theory
Todorov proposed a basic structure for all narratives. He stated that films and programmes begin with an equilibrium, a calm period. Then agents of disruption cause disequilibrium, a period of unsettlement and disquiet. This is then followed by a renewed state of peace and harmony for the protagonists and a new equilibrium brings the chaos to an end. (http://www.esfmedia.com/page/Narrative+theory)


(http://asanda2mediastudies.blogspot.com/2007/11/todorovs-theory-of-narrative.html)


Barthes' theory
Barthes once said "A galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..."
This basically means that a media text can be interpreted in many ways and mean different things, there is no right way and the meanings can be infinite. He said that the different things in the text that can be interpreted in different ways are called narrative codes and these could be categorised in any of the following:
•Action enigma code
•Symbols and Signs
•Points of Cultural Reference
•Simple description