Researching Conventions of Album Covers

There are many different conventions of album covers. There are many different aspects that go into making an album cover successful. We have been looking at different punk inspired covers, to help inspire us with our own ideas, this which would be suitable for our pop-punk genre.

This is an album cover from the punk-reggae band Skindred. I found this album particularly intresting as it has lots of different things going on within the product. The colours work well together as they are bright and have a 'fun' sense to them. Here these colours are known to be used as rebellious colours. For example, the colour red would normally represent anarchy and danger. Yellow is normally shown as happy, or in this case hazardous. And the green symbolizes nature. The band are stood in an intimidating way, this is to help get their band image across. The name of the band is written in a graffiti style font. This is also to show rebellious attitudes amongst the public. Whilst on the other side, the album name is written in a slightly more 'easy to read' writing, as if it was almost hand written.

The background is a blurred sky, which gives moody properties, and in the foreground placement of the band against the speakers, in front of the background gives a feel of a collage to the cover. The band is almost places within a higher-achy of who is most important within the band.

Another great punk album cover is by Rancid.

This album cover showa 'anarchy' colours. Red and Black represent danger here, The white helps contrast against the darker colours. The fact that the song title is 'let the dominoes fall'. And the main colours of the album cover are black and white help link in with the white and black dots of the dominoes. We can clearly see that one of the band members have tattoos. This deffinitly links in with the punk genre of the music that we are researching. The style of the writing of the band name is in a graffiti style. This shows the rebelious impressions of the music. i think the album gives the impression that it was intentionally made to look like the whole image had been spray painted on by a graffiti artist.

Researching Conventions of album covers

Location Shots

We all went out and took location shots and these are some possible location shots for our music video. We need to shoot in a location that matches our brand image and music/song and the genre. We have chosen places such as abandoned buildings, alleys and skate parks because they portray the right image. 

We have also selected a band practice room which is quite dilapidated therefore suiting the brand image and giving the image we want. The image we want to send out is reflected in these locations due to the rebellious attitude portrayed through our brand image. These locations would typically seem 'rebellious' because it is seen as unsafe or inappropriate to be in back alleys and abandoned buildings. The skate park reflects the obvious teen hangout, especially for those interested in this genre, and as our target age range is that of mainly teens it seems a sensible option for our video. We have also looked at the band practice room as this suggests typical pop punk image and would also allow us to do a performance based video and include a separate narrative in location if we wished to. 

The final decision was to use the band practice room as shown above. 

 

Call Sheet

1st Shoot:
Date - 21st December
Time - 12.00 PM
Crew - Steph, Beth, Aimee, Danny
Cast - Calum Sutton, Jonny Marriner, Adam Marsden, Danny Wearing.
Equipment: Camera, Tripod, Tape, Lighting
Costumes and Props: Face Paints, Clown Costumes, Balloons, Instruments.

Casting Shots

These are a few casting shots for possible band members and extras. We have tried to select people that portray our brand image and will be able to relate to our target audience.

Props List

PROPS:
Guitars
Drums
Amps


Microphones
General instruments


EQUIPMENT:
Camera
Tripod
Tape
Various lighting - lamps, strobes ETC
Storyboards


Shooting Schedule:
We are planing to film on the 21st of December

Feedback - 6/12/09

Excellent progress group! The best blog in the group! Keep up your hard work - excellent charts , graphs and research.

Now you need to be planning with a vengeance!

Planning:

- storyboards scanned and an animatic made

- location/casting/costume shots

- props lists

- call sheets and shooting schedule

etc... (See the Before you Blog sheets.)

Miss McNulty

Possible Locations

Possible locations for shooting

We decided to brain storm possible locations for where we would film our music video.

the ideas that we came up with were.

• Jackson's Farm (in the barn). This is where the bad actually practices their music. This would also be a great location as it wouldn't mean moving all the band's equipment about, and it would already be set up. This would mean we could work on our cinematography, and get the close ups, of all the instruments, and the members of the band. This would obviously be for the performance side of the music video. below are two examples of videos that i have found to illustrate my point.

The slip knot video shows us how we can change the focuses of the camera. I feel this would be a great addition to our video. I also like how the background is plain, which makes the members of the band stand out more. Another video that i have found which would strongly link into what we would be trying to aim for in our music video.

This video links into our ideas. As it also 'messes' with the focus of the camera, leading to some interesting shots.

• Clitheroe skate park, This is a great location, and would be interesting for our video. The idea of the skate park links in with the idea of anarchy, where as this is more teenage anarchy than adult. The skate park includes the idea of teenagers skating, and possible amounts of graffiti and street art. Skate parks have been associated with the idea of anarchy since it began in the early 1990's, and into the 2000's. The only worry is, is where we would set up the bands equipment. 

Questionnaire - Research.

This is the questionnaire that we asked several people to complete.

The results were interesting:

From this we can see that our target audience is a small percentage of the full market for music. We asked 10 people to fill out the questionaire, and from the results we found this out. We asked questions that we thought would refer to out research, like 'what genre of music is your favourite?' We tended to ask questions which would get straight to the point, so then we would be able to concentrate on the answers which mattered most to our research.