A2 Media Studies Advanced portfolio

The first thing I did was search on the internet to find a template for an album digipak I then overlaid my front cover design image onto it in the first box of the template. I had already designed the digipak cover from making the magazine advertisement for the digipaks release. I print screened it, cropped the image and transferred it into my digipaks photoshop document. I then got an image of a church window from the same church as the background picture of the front of the digipak was taken from (taken by myself). I put it into black and white as I didn't want the digipack to be too colourful as I felt the horror/thriller themes of my digipack would be lost. I put a translucent square above it so that any text that was of a monochrome colour would be seen, and so that you could still see the background. I then added the picture of the candle seen in one of my music videos, this is as candles are often seen in churches and I thought the smoke made it a ...

       I have now put the name of the artist and the album name on the cd of the digipack, I have edited the background of the back cover of the digipak so that you can read the names of the songs better. In addition to this, I have added shading to the digipak to make the cd look a bit more realistic and less out of place. I made the barcode on the back smaller after showing it as it was too close to the text on the back cover of my digipak. I added my music company logo to the digipak as well. I added text to part of the inside cover to fill the space and make the digipak look more finished. The text is part of the lyrics from the song 'Take me to church', it says: There is no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin In the madness and soil of that sad earthly scene Only then I am human Only then I am clean Amen. This relates to the digipak as the words 'only then I am clean' is a reference to the front cover with the blood on the hands. The uses of...

It was said that my digipak still looked quite busy and that there was too mush going on. There was too many different coloured text and font variations which made the advertisement look to cramped. So I changed all font that wasn't to do with the artist or the name of the album blue and changed it to the same font, Didcot. I then moved some of the album information above the name of the album name to make the text look less cramped between the hands. I then moved all the logos down to the bottom of the advertisement to make the advertisement look more professional. I also changed the colours by putting filters on the image so that the advertisement stood out more.

I have stuck to a serif font with both my ancillary products as this related to my concept of church and religion. Also while filming in the church I noticed that nearly everything was written in serif font. For my digipak I have used multiple different versions of serif font to vary my use of typeface, this added diversity to the text on my digipak and in addition to this, to further diversify the font, I changed the thickness of the font and the gap between the lettering. For the back of the digipak I struggled to fit the whole name of the song within the box without making the rest of the songs titles look really small. Then when I put the rest of the song names on the line underneath you couldn't differentiate between what were titles of songs and what were continuations of the song titles. To solve this I put a plus symbol to almost act as a bullet point. I used a plus, as plus signs, also look like religious crosses only the shape is slightly different. This helped push my ...

I have heavily used the theme of religion in my project especially with my ancillary products. This is not only because the song that I have chosen is about religion, but because Hozier refers to religion in a lot of songs on the album. this is shown in songs such as from eden, angel of small dea th,  Foreigner's God and take me to church. It's because of this that I have heavily used this in my project and why I utilised the religious and life/death concepts throughout my ancillary products. In addition to this one of the songs on the album relates to death which is another theme I have used to push my gothic themes and horror/ thriller genres. The song is called 'my love will never die'.

For my digipak, I have used an image of an eye for the cd on my albums digipak. This is there because I thought that it worked really well to have the pupil of the eye right in the centre on the cd. In addition to this, I wanted to play with the theme of religion shown in my digipak. I really liked the idea of death as it tied in nicely with the religious themes and the horror/thriller styled digipak I have created. The candle is supposed to represent the light, to light a souls way to heaven and the eyes illustrate the soul. It is often said that eyes are the window to the soul, the eye on the cd represents a soul. Souls are often referred to in religion and souls are supposed to travel to heaven or to hell after a person dies. The blown out candle represents to the loss of life and soul. The smoke leaving the candle illustrated the idea that the soul is leaving to body to find heaven. In addition to this candles are frequently used in religion which further relates to my the...

Mrs Dixon's feedback (teacher):  Mrs said that my the Cd needed to have either the albums name, the artists name or both on it. This is as most cd's in digipaks have text on them and this would help my digipak look more professional. She said she liked the use of the church windows but the text needed to be a bit more readable as it was a little hard to read. Claudia's feedback (student): Claudia said that she really liked the used of to contrast between the brightness of the front and back cover of the digipak. She said that this made it eye-catching as the contrast and diversity between the front and back grabbed her attention. She also liked how the front cover would fold over to the black that then fades into candle, and that the panel above the back of the digipak is lighter than the panel above the front cover (the square with the candle). This further pushed the contrast between the light and dark on the inside of the digipak as well as the outside.

To make my music company logo I used powerpoint instead of photoshop as it was easier to make a simplistic logo from that program. I used the shape tool, font and gradient background designs to make the logo that I wanted. I then print screened the presentation and cropped it. I then lift clicked and saved the image to give me a finish logo image.

This is my final design for my logo/ ident for my music production company. I choose this as I thought that it looked crisp, would work with my music video and album digipak, and most importantly, you could see the company name clearly. One piece of feedback I got was that it looked cinematic with the darker background and I think this important as music companies fundamentally deal with media, and for it to look cinematic makes it look like a professional media company, which is what it should be.

Jade's feedback (another student): She said that she liked the contrast from the triangle and the dark background. She said that the darker designs look the best, and the intricate designs would be better seen on a bigger screen. She said that the font looked crisp and professional. She said that she likes the first design to the right best, as the contrast between black, white and grey looked really interesting. Emily's feedback (another student): Emily said that her favourite was the middle version of my music production companies logos. She said that the white made it stand out more than the other designs. Morgans feedback (another student): Morgans favourite design is the first one you see on the right. She said that the darker backgrounds were better and you could read the text easier. This is important as, if I wanted to make money as a production company, I would think that my name is the most important piece of information so people could find my company to as...

These are the first three designs for my music production company. The name of my company is my initials followed by the word productions. I will later change the font if needed but I really like how simplistic it is and how it sticks to monotone colour scale. Most music companies stick to this less is more type of design in their logos so I went with a similar idea. I really liked the design of the fading triangle where it gets lighter towards the bottom. This gave the top a silhouette sort of look, especially with the top design. The top background on the first and third design have a darker background which makes the triangle look less noticeable but the company name more so.

I have looked at some music company logos and from what I have seen they are all really simple and include a monotone colour scheme with simple shapes of images. They all include the name of the production company in crisp bold font. This is something I'm going to use on my album digipak and music video as i felt it was missing something. This is why I have looked into music company logos as I wanted to see what the designs were like so I could professionally make my own.

Digital art is something I have grown to love through my exploration of different art mediums as my own interest in art had led me to find out about it. I usually paint using clip studio paint pro but through this project I have learnt to use some of the brushes in photoshop. The brush that I found most useful for painting the hands is the soft brush tool as that comes with the programme (you don't have to download the brush tool). This was great as it helped me to blend and merge colores together. This really helped me make my digipak look original and help me create my vision of what I wanted it to look like.

Claudia's feedback (another student): She said that she wouldn't change a thing other than the music companies logos at the bottom on where to buy or listen to the single. She thinks that they should be smaller and that it might be better if I moved them under the release date for the album. Morgan's feedback (another student): Morgan's feedback was that she really liked it and that the colours scheme worked really well and helped draw your attention to the poster. If any thing was wrong she said that it might work better if the text moves slightly upwards above the hands, but it doesn't need to. Mr Osborne's feedback (teacher): Mr Osborne said that he would think about making the blood on the hands brighter as they seem dulled down more than they originally where. He also suggested that I should get rid of the 'such as', as he said that most other digipak advertisements didn't include a phrase such as that. They would just limit it to ...

Magnetic Lasso tool The magnetic lasso tool is something I learnt that has been really useful. What it does is it notices a change in the colours of the pixels and laches onto that divide to help you crop usual shapes out so you can layer your work. This helped me layer the image of dripping blood over a picture of my own hands to make it look like they were was a pair of bloodied hands. If I had used the rubber tool it would have taken so much longer to get the hands to look like that and layer the two images properly. Soft brush and palate I used this tool to help me paint some extra blood on my hands to make them look extra gothic to make it comply with horror-thriller genres that I have used in my music video. Text editing With the text editing, I was able to create a text layer to help create a great coloured font that went with my ancillary product. I had to learn this from a youtube video as I had no idea what I was doing, and how to make the text look good. Another thing...

Final product I wanted to incorporate the idea of the blood on the protagonist's hands as that is what is shown in my 'take me to church' music video. I thought this would be iconic and would make a big visual impact for my digipak and my ad for the digipak. I had an exact idea of what I wanted it to look like so I merged an image of my hands and a similar image of bloodied hands that I found on the internet. I did not have to be wary of copyright as I knew the final product would not have enough resemblance to the original image. I did this by making multiple layers and putting them into a folder to group them together to essentially make the final version of the image one layer. This allowed me to move all the layers at once instead of separately essentially allowing me to treat them as one image. First, I cropped out my hands by using the magnetic lasso tool to get the hands. What I wanted was to get the hands coming out of the darkness similar...

With this, I have just finished the final touches by adding the logos of music companies and where to find the song when it releases and just subtly moved things around to make the make the poster seem less cramped. I really like the use of the logos at the bottom because it attracts your eyes to the release date which I was originally scared wouldn't be seen.

This new design is what I came up from the peer feedback I got from other student and teachers. The general feedback was that I needed to move the text up as the bottom looked too crowded. I also moved the hands up so that the poster looked balanced. In addition to this, I took out the use of the hand with the car in this to make it simple and follow the less is more rule. In my digipak for the album I will include this to fill the empty space that will be left by the loss of text. For the text colour I used the same colours and tones in the window in the background.

With the text colour, I kept the white as no one had any complaints about it and they thought it looked very crisp and professional. I used the blue from the window like Claudia recommended and I used a darker orange than the original yellow colour. I moved the text so it looked aesthetically better and used the orange colour from the window near where the middle text is to make it fit in. I had to make it brighter though as it didn't stand out as much.

Morgan's feedback (another student): Morgan said that she liked the blue font at the bottom of the first idea because it stood out more. she said she liked the light red for the 'including singles such as ...' section of text as it was easier to read than the yellow and looked more aesthetically pleasing than the yellow. She said that she liked the third positioning of the text best out of all of the ideas as it looked less cramped. Claudia's feedback (another student): Claudia said that she liked the placing of the yellow text on the first and second design above but with the light red in the third design as a colour. She also said she liked the dark red in the second and third design but thought that it wasn't as noticeable as the blue for the 'album out now text'. She said that she thought it would be better if the blue was darker as it was a bit too bright and looked a bit out of place and that maybe I should use the blue from the window o...

Claudia's feedback (another student): Claudia said that she thought that the third design was her favourite but it needs changes. She thought that is was better that we could see more of the window as she didn't understand the reason behind the use of the cars, as the album isn't about the narrative of the music video. In her opinion, an album cover should represent an album as a whole not just the music video of their most favourite song and music video. Also, she thinks the first image of the car looks flat as the image was taken from above where the image of the hands is taken from the front so it looks wrong in terms of perspective. Although, she understands some more of my idea of including some of the narrative o the music video. To make the third idea better she thought that it would be good if I moved the hands slightly upwards and had the text 'including other singles such as from Eden and cherry wine' above it. She said that this would balance the cov...

In this design (my choice for the best design) I used the yellow and for the albums release date I used the blue text colour found in the church window in the background. I did this to link the colours in the poster to the font because if I had too much text colour it would give the poster a more sort of gospel feel to it and that's not the genre of music that my digipak fits into. Also I felt like I would lose some of the horror themes I wanted to display in the poster if it was too colourful. With this I used the red for the release date as I had seen form other magazine ads that they had used red for the release date to get people to rush and feel a sense of urgency when going to buy the product, however I found that this didn't work with my project. This is because the red used got drowned out by the use of the red in the hands and was too dark to stand out. This is a problem as this is one of the most important parts of the magazine ad. In this desig...

I started off with a base layer on photoshop as I wanted to draw peoples attention to the centre of the image which is why the first screenshot of the first layer is black has a grey spot in the middle. As I was fiddling around I realised that the background was really blank so I bought an image into it, however, I found that it was too slanted so I used the perspective tool on photoshop to turn the image forward. I also edited the colours on the church window image to give them a reddish purple tint to fit in with the red themes of blood I wanted to incorporate throughout the poster. I then blacked out the edges to bring the centre even more forward. the opacity of the image is turned down as well so that the base layer (first layer) helps the centre stand out more. I did this so that peoples attention could have a focal point to focus on. I then incorporated my idea of the blood on the protagonist's hands in the image as I thought it was iconic. I put it right in t...

These are my first three ides spired on from my initial idea os what I wanted to create for my digipak and magazine ad for the digipak. I wanted to make the digipak and magazine ad visually the same so if a potential audience where to look at the digipak magazine ad when they looked for the album they would know exactly what to look for when trying to purchase the album. This first one show is my first choice for the design as it incorporates more of the boy with his hand holding out a car, whereas before it was just the protagonist's hand with blood on them. This represents that the young boy is giving his life away. It also includes the idea of the car and that, that might be something that relates to his death. His pale skin shown in the image represents the young boy's innocence. This design has the most going on and I think it is the most visually engaging. The use of the hand draws attention to the title of the album, which is the title of the song i created my musi...

In a group viewing of student films my music video was shown and given feedback. The first piece of feedback was that they really like the build up of the narrative as the story was revealed slowly over time. They like a lot of the clearer shots of the church but think I should add some clearer shots of the church as some of the shot where either to blurred or not clear enough. They also said that I might have to sort out some of the pacing in the video towards the end. Overall they really liked the narrative between the characters and a lot of the atmospheric shots. They said that it went in time with the music really well and that the narrative and genre was very clear.

For my first idea I have been very inspired by the Imagine Dragons album cover for their smoke and mirrors album that I have analysed. I really like the idea of the hands and how they reach out to try to catch the bird. I have decided to incorporate this into my own idea but making the hands reach out to catch the toy car I have featured in my video. The hands that are reaching out will have blood on them as this captures the idea of being caught red handed and similar to a visual shown in my own music video. The car will represent the young boy (as he plays with that car) and his life, the hands trying to capture the car to stop it from falling represents the protagonist trying to so his life slipping and falling away, however, his hands are already covered with blood so there is nothing that he can do about his life as it has all gone. This is further shown by the fact that the image looks like the hands won't get to catch the car in time before it falls through the hands and eve...

This s a very extensive digipak as it is much bigger than your average digipak. Containing two more panels than your usual digipak. The reason they have done this is as two artists are involved in the making of the album. Another reason they have done this is because the genre of music that is displayed in the album is unconventional so they probably made an album cover differently to your generic album cover, to stick to that theme. On the front of the album we have graffiti patterns on a light brown background. We have cartoon illustrations of band instruments. This theme of urban street art appeals to their young urban target audience. The use of the colour blue appeals to a male audience as blue is trade mark male colour. The illustrations on the front lead the audience to believe the album will have a rock/punk themes as there are illustrations of band instruments, with the addition of spray paint it gives it a scruffy feel. This could suggest that the music on the album is a ...

In this digipak, you can see all the band members faces put together to form one big face. Each of their faces has face paint that comes together to form the face an beak of an eagle. You can see the name of the band at the top of the poster flowed by the name of the album underneath the picture with name of the singles in smaller text, and 'out now' in big red font at the bottom. Putting it red was essential for them to do as it makes people realise that they can buy the album now and getting money as soon as possible is important for the band, because after a while the value of the album goes down so people buying the album now means they can get more money. In addition to this, the colour red connotes a sense of attention and errancy as the colour almost demands attention. In comparison to the colours in the rest of the album it really stands out as nearly all of them are monotone colours. Red also connotes excitement which is what the band wants the listeners and buyer to ...

In this magazine ad for the albums release the layout of the ad is much more simple as it includes just the artists name, the title of the album, information about the albums release and popular singles featured on the album. It's good that they have featured the singles as someone might recognise the song and then purchase the album based on their enjoyment of the singles. They might also recognise the artist as that is the first word you read when you look at the poster as it is at the top, this could entice them to buy the album because they recognise her and they like her previous songs and her and then buy the album based of that. The use of font is very clean and crisp and this makes the poster look modern. It's not too bold which is good as it doesn't distract from the picture of Rihanna which is the centre piece of the poster. The use of the word 'loud' relates to the picture as her expression, in terms of hair colour, is bold and could be considered as ...