Ancillary planning:Photo choices

This is the image i have chosen to use for my front panel  i think it is a great close up shot of the artist. in the back round you can see buildings which is the city which is linked back to the song "The City" as it is about London city. the shot is very focused and I am in the center which makes me the focus and alot of background is cut out.

The inside left panel.  A wide shot with a great background with the guitar prop is showing. i think it is a very clear shot of the artist with great lighting.

This is going to me the back panel the guitar head has the guitar prop running through. i also find it to be very effective.

Ancillary planning:poster mock up

 Her is the advertisement poster for the Digipak. the image is the same one used in the Dgipak to make links between them both. The same font is used to link with he digipak. i am going to include great varieties of information on the poster such as the release and the location of availability. I am also going to include comments from well known news paper to increase  the image of the Album and show it in a good light. Going to also promote the song "The City" which is our chosen song. im also going to include the link to my artists web page at the bottom.

Ancillary planning: Mock up inside pannels

This the left panel on the inside which is going to have a wide shot of the artist with the guitar prop. This is where a little autobiography about the artist is going to be which will give the audience an insight about the artist as he is new.

This is the right inside panel where the cd is going to be placed. since a blue theme is used throughout i am going to continue the trend by giving this panel a blue background

Ancillary planning: Digipaks mock up

Ray Jones  is an new artist so the Digipak and poster is used to promote him. I complied with the do's and dont's that i previously displayed. I put a close up of the artist on the front panel which is a do and to make him the main focus to give the audience his visual image and build up a visual identity.   i made the image a little blue to fit in with the theme of his songs. Also the group decided to use only the four following colors blue,red,black and white with the same font for the title and artist. I used the old type writer font from the website dafont.com which the similar font to the one which was used by Ed Sheeran. The title Escape was the same font as the artist name but the bold outline was thinner. I wanted the front cover to be effective but simplistic and not over complicated because it it is over complicated to much attention will be away from the artist as the main focus. for the font and color the writing is going to be black with a outline of blue which goes with the rest of front cover and theme.

This is the back panel . the image i chose to use was the picture of the guitar which is a zoomed in image of just the head. This is very significant to my music video as the artist Ray Jones tends to play the guitar in them and to where guitars are usually used. I added the track list at the back which are songs taken from the plus album. A bar code which is needed on all Digipaks. I am going to include the words "includes the hit single The city" which is the original song to our music video. The production company logo is going to be display on the back and a small line from the original lyrics of "The City".

Planning - How to make the artwork

Planning - Photos that I plan to use

In this slideshow there are the photographs that I am planning to use in my digipak, there is a caption at the top of each one indicating where I plan to use them. I will explain why I have chosen these photos:

The album front cover - In this photograph I have used artificial lighting, which gave a nice illumination to the artist's face and it gives a sense of street lamp's light. It is a median close-up and shows his face clearly, ideal to cover the function of promoting a new artist, and also very appealing for the core audience consisted of young females. The street lights in the background connect with the music video 'The City' as well as he is wearing one of the costumes used in the music video. I want to create a blue tones effect similar to the music video, so this idea of the blue colour can become like part of his brand (similarly to the original artist Ed Sheeran, who uses orange as his brand colour because he is ginger).

The back cover - I am still unsure about whether I should use an image of the artist in the back cover or not, since the idea is to keep the minimalistic style. But I might consider using this image, selecting Ray Jones out of it and placing him in a dark blue background at the back cover. I chose this image because is a full body one and I think it would work nicely at the back, and also he is holding the guitar which is  conventional of the music style and it is a prop used in the music video.

The inside panels - I plan to use this photograph of Ray Jones sitting on the pavement and add a drawing/painting effect, transforming it in the same blue used in the background of the outside panels. The idea is to place this image together with other images/graphics (buildings, etc) to make it look like artwork (similarly to Ed Sheeran's artwork). I plan to use the image of the guitar in the CD part of the inside panels, probably cropping it to a close up, and adding a blue filter to it so that it suits the artwork. I might consider trying to add a drawing/painting effect to this image too.

These are the photos that I am thinking to use in my advert. I am planning to use one of him leaning back on the brick wall. The full body one does not give me space for the text, so I cropped it to have space for the text on his black top (similarly to Ed Sheeran's advert). There is a landscape photo of Ray Jones leaning on the brick wall, which could be an alternative and I may crop it as well to get more of the artist in the frame. The one of Ray Jones sitting on the pavement is a last option, that I could also crop to get space for the text on his black top. I chose these images because they are different from the digipak and they show the artist's face looking at the camera, which is good for promoting him as a new artist. I am planning to use a portrait format for my advert and I believe that the portrait image of Ray Jones leaning on the brick wall could work well with this format, the other ones if cropped might work as well.

Planning - Mock up of advert

Planning - Dos and Don'ts

The ancillary products have very clear conventions that must be followed strictly in order to achieve a successful outcome.

click to enlarge the "Dos"

click to enlarge the "Don'ts"

I have made an example of how my ancillary product should NOT look like:

In this example I have used 4 different fonts, all of them very stylised and not so easy to read. I have used a variety of different colours, which makes the digipak look very busy. The colours are also mostly not conventional of the genre. I have stretched both images and they look strange because of that. I have used unnecessary effects that don't suit the genre and makes the digipak look very busy as well. I have used colours that hurt the eyes to see, and I have placed the text incorrectly on the artist. I used a bad image for the front cover, where you can only see the back of the artist and the photo is slightly shaky, the name and the title are covering him, which does not help with the promotion of a new artist. In the back cover I have used an image that you can see just a little bit of his face, but the effects distort it and the track list covers it, and there are misspellings in the track list. I should avoid all these things when making my ancillary products, especially since they very clearly do not suit the indie pop genre.

Research - Analysis of three adverts

Planning Ancillary: Dos and Donts

1) Make sure a clear and appropriate font is used especially for the Title and Artist name

2) Use a clear photo

3) Follow the conventions such as the 3 color codes and make sure the colors fit in with the images and text

4) Make sure layout is in line with the rule of third

5) Use appropriate logos and bar-codes

6 Make sure the specific information is included

1)Use layer styles

2) Use an out of focus image ( Stretching the image)

3) Cover the artist face

4) use any unnecessary effect

5) make sure any font or color included relates to your genre and theme

Planning Ancillary: Poster shortlist

ancillary planning: list of fonts, colors and design for digipak

I am going to talk about some font ideas i have chosen,colors and the overall design for my digipak. I am also going to talk about where some of my ideas came from.  I have have chosen my final font which is similar to Ed Sheeran fonts used on his albums. I found it is a really good font to use and since Ed Sheeran is our original artist it is even better. i decided to have the Artist name and album title the same font. I first went through most commonly used fonts such as times new roman and Arial but found they were to formal to be on a album cover.





Here are a list of other fonts i picked out:














After deciding to use EdSsheerans font i had to find out what the font was. I used a website called Dafont it is a very useful websites with a huge range of fonts.Ed Sheerans album font looked like a sort of type writer font which i typed into the search and i found the font used  and it offered me the writing of my title in 4 different shades.

Colors:

The color i am going to used are going to blue,red black and grey as many songs such as The City in the album or emotional. i want the color code to be quite simplistic but effective. For example below is an album cover of a indie pop group called "The ting ting"  as you can see it uses a small  range of colors blue, black red and yellow which is similar to my chosen color code. The title of the band stands out very clearly and the colours go very well together.

The design/layout of my digipak:

I want my digipak to have a font and back with to inside pockets. I want two pictures one zooom in and one mid of the artitst. i want the front just to have the artist name and title so main focus is the artist.i want the track list on the back and inside i small paragraph about the artist.

Editing ANCILLARY - Inside Panel

This is one of Taylor Swift’s latest album “Red”. While searching for album inspirations I came across this image. The photo effect on the left is something I find quite interesting and different. The image which I am using for the inside panel does not fit properly onto the template, therefore I have decided to use this type of effect by repeating the image three times.

 

 

The screenshot i've taken above is the first attempt of designing the inside panel. It didn't go to plan as I thought it would :( The reason for this is because the image on the left was not wide enough to fit on the template, also as for the colour of the image it was too blue compared to the front cover. This made it look like two different pieces.  

So I went back to edit the original image again, this time with a less 'blue' tone effect. I was left with a much more natural effect.

 

And above is what it looked like after fixing the images. After placing the images I decreased the opacity.

My purpose for using the artist with the guitar is to show the audience that this artists life belongs to his guitar, it's his everything. This is conventional, as Ed Sheeran has a guitar as well, which he uses in most of music videos/pictures.