DVD album covers

For my ancillary texts I have to also produce a cover for the albums release on dvd and a magazine advertisement for the dvd. The brief has recently changed and I am now required to produce a digipak including the cd and dvd. In order to produce to the best of my ability I will do extensive research into cd/dvd covers and magazine advertisements to learn the codes and conventions of each.

I will begin my research by analysing a range of different styles of music dvds. I thought it would be best to research a variety of genres and not just RnB so as to get a good grasp of what would be expected of my digipak.

To represent the unity between the girl group they are all adjoined in a mermaid style fashion. Their gold sequined dresses represents their glamorous celebrity status. The dress is figure hugging showing off their trim figures and the black waist band adds style and class to the sequins. It also relates to the colour of the text which is important when designing a cover as there are conventionally three or four colours that dominate. The text is clear and bold so it can be easily read and recognized by potential viewers.

The dvd title ‘out of control’ is represented through the hypnotizing pink and white candy striped spirals. This is also portrayed though the way they have positioned their arms up in the air and looking in all different directions. The pink and white candy stripes portray their stereotypical ‘girly girl’ group persona. The spirals are made to look fun and inviting, bold and strong. It grabs the attention of consumers as it looks as though it has lot going on when really it only portrays the necessities; the title of the band, the title of the dvd, a picture of the band looking sexy and stylish and an eye catching background.

It is something like this dvd cover that I would like to adapt to my own creation. I want the artist to stand out by wearing something bold and colourful whilst still looking attractive.

Good Girl Gone Bad contains up-tempo and ballad oriented songs, and it heavily incorporates pop and dance-pop music styles. First ever full concert dvd release from multi platinum and grammy award winning artist

Her name appears in bold font, centre to the top of cover. It is white, contrasting the dark background to make it stand out. The cover is a still image taken from her live performance. This can be interpreted from the background lighting and microphone of which she is singing into indicating that she is in the middle of performing. The black is broken up by the lighting which appears as a star at the centre. This represents her star quality and illustrates her celebrity persona.

The dvd is coverage of her ‘good girl gone bad’ tour. Her outfit choice represents her ‘bad girl’ look, this can be seen through her studded, leather, black dress which is stereotypical of the ‘bad’ look. It is appealing and sexy showing lots of flesh, but without looking too provocative as to draw the wrong attention. She looks strong, dominating and in control through a low angle shot.

When thinking about my own cover this would not be suitable as it is promoting the star’s new album therefore she would not yet have done a live performance of songs consisting of the album.


Take That Presents: The Circus Live is a concert tour by British Boyband ‘Take That’. The Circus Live is Take That's biggest tour to date and was seen by over 1,000,000 people. The tour became the fastest selling in UK history, with the 600,000 for all original eight dates selling out in just five hours. They are a pop band and this is evident in their DVD cover as there are a lot of bright colours which is a convention seen in pop music videos and CD/DVD covers.

The Cd cover is vibrant and inviting, mainly because of the great use of colour. It holds a very 'random' theme and the images supported on the cover are extremely varied, however it seems to fit very well in representing a circus theme. This is illustrated through an array of coloured balloons of all different sizes surrounding a transparent hot-air balloon. The dominant colour is sky blue; the background is made to look as though they are in the air, illustrated through the use of faint clouds. The sky looks bright and inviting, maintaining the uplifting spirit of the band, music and dvd as a whole.

During the performance the band walk through the crowd on a giant robotic elephant. On the cover the band are shown to be sat on the same elephant that appears in the show, giving the audience something to relate to and remember the performance. By featuring the most memorable part of the tour people are more encouraged to buy the DVD.

This is something to keep in mind when creating my own dvd cover for the release of my artists new album, as it could be affective to portray her in perhaps her most memorable outfit from the music video.

Eminem's dvd released in 2000. This features the majority of his music videos and fans have described their collections incomplete without this dvd. Eminem is a well known American rapper, record producer and actor. He rose to fame in 1999, now with 11 Grammy’s in his career; he claims the longest running #1 hip-hop single and is the best-selling artist of the decade.

The dvd is entitled a backwards ‘E’, the first letter of his name. There is nothing else on the front of the dvd that says it is Eminem. Due to the fact that he is such a famous music artist and almost everyone knows who he is, he can get away with entitling his dvd with the first letter of his name and people will still know who it is.

The white back-to-front E against a contrasting black background makes it stand out. The blur of green situated behind appears rather surreal, almost appearing as if to represent the image of a sound wave. Which is suitable to the dvd as it features his music. Note the cover only sports the conventional number of three different colours, often a feature of many publications including cd covers, magazine covers and posters. The three contrasting colours give off a rather sinister feel. Artists within the rap genre tend to rap about life experiences or life as it is today, often sending out a serious message, highlighting hidden truths that society play ignorance to. It is therefore important that his dvd cover portrays his music.

Eminem is renown for his use of explicit language used in his song lyrics. It is for this reason a ‘parental advisory’ sticker is situated in the bottom right hand corner. It is important to display these stickers as a warning to parents when allowing their children purchase dvds of that content. This is also a big clue that it is Eminem’s dvd as all of his cd’s feature this sticker and fans would recognise this.

Developing Ideas.

As we are in the process of editing our music video, we are constantly finding out new ways to make our video more professional and to a the highest standard. From experimentng with numerous fades, blackouts and general trial and error editing techniques we found out how to conduct a split screen affect.

This would be ideal for our video as it portarys the deeper meaning behind our video of issues such as split personalities, being torn between two emotions and good vs evil. Moreover it would help bring to light the surrealness within our video, a blur between realsim and fantasy.

We took a series of posed photos when shooting at our beach location. We decided that toward the end of our video we would use a series of still images from each of our locations as the backing music takes the song to a close. Now that we have come across the idea of using a split screen affect, we can adapt it into our video giving it a more professional, unique and spiritual outlook.

Here is an example of the type of thing we want to appear in our video:

Behind the Scenes (chorus)

To represent the idea of a 'sweet dream' and a 'beautiful nightmare', which are the lyrics that appear in the chorus, we have designed the singers face to appear as a contrasting good vs evil. Within our video we have a fairytale theme that runs throughout, to involve this in our chorus we use a red apple, an iconic prop associated with the fairytale 'Snow White'. When the 'good' side is turned toward the camera the apple appears red and shiny. As the lyrics change into a 'beautiful nightmare' the singer appears facing directly toward the camera as she takes a bite out of the apple. As she turns to reveal her evil side, when the apple is removed from her mouth it appears black to represent her poisonous evil.

'Sweet Dream'

We have purposely chosen not use any colour eyeshadow on the eyelid as we wanted her to appear as sweet, innocent and pure as possible. We used lip-liner to create the flower shape that appears to be coming from her eye, to continue on with the idea of a fantasised reality which is a major pattern throughout our video.

Natural make-up with a hint of gentle pink represents her softer side, representing purity and innocence. The pink and white flowers tie in with the idea of love and romance. The hair has been left in its natural flowing curls representing natural beauty.

'Beautiful Nightmare'

The 'evil' side is dominantly black, with smoky silvery eyes to portray the mystery within her character and a smudge of red dripping from her lips to illustrate blood, often a feature associated with the evil character. We used eyeliner on the face to create the bold, dramatic and sharp patterns. The pointed curl on the arrow is to represent the devils tale, the master of evil.

The hair appears in a tight curled bun on the side of her head to show that she is in control and makes her look powerful. We attached the hair onto the face using hair-spray. This unusual creation we decided would look effective in creating a masculine and powerful image, it also helps to make her look more evilly possessed.

X x video experiment x X

(Developed Idea)


















(Original Idea)

In order for my partner and I to create a sophisticated and successful music video it is important that we experiment with different aspects and try out new ideas. We decided that to portray the lyrics 'lost in a fairytale' it would be effective to show the artist as though she was trapped in a glass ball. The best way we could think of achieving this was originally to place a still photo image inside the glass dome. We chose to pose the photo in a way which would look like she was pushing against the glass as if she is 'trapped'. We began to think about how we could expand on this idea into something more sophisticated. We began to explore into how we could make it look like the artist was actually inside the dome and moving around inside it.

Firstly we shot the female playing the singer against a blue background. We tried a range of different movements to make it look as though she was walking around inside the dome, banging against the front of the dome as though trying to get out and also feeling the edges of the dome and rocking from side to side.

Once the footage had been transferred on to the editing suite the blue background gave us the opportunity to make the background appear invisible. We then recorded some footage of the glass dome as it was been shaken up, when it was empty at the required location in which we wanted the scene to take place. Once this had been transferred onto the editing program we simply took still footage of the dome as the snow is in the air and stretched it for 6 seconds. We then edited the blue background footage so that only the singer was visible and cropped the image to fit snugly inside the dome and finally faded it inside the dome.

Although there are significant improvements to be made we can see from this small experiment that our idea is possible and with a few tweaks such as setting changes and framing work our video will look professional.

Prop, Location, Costume and Cast List

My partner and have decided that she will play the main role of the singer/music artist within our music video and I will take on the role of shooting the video and we will both take-part in the editing process.

The reasons for choosing Ellen to star as the mian singer is because we have both had past experiences of working in situations were you have to rely on other people turning up and we did not want to put ourselves in that position. This way we do not have to work around other people and rely on them to be able to turn up where and when we want them to.

Another reason for this decision is that it is hard to get other people to fully understand what we want them to do in the acting postition and if we got someone to act who we don't know that well there may be confidence issues with the actress and this would slow our progress down and with a short amount of time we can't afford to spend any longer than we need to on shooting a scene. As we both know exactly how we want our video to look it will be more effecient for one of us to take on role of actress and one of us to take on role of camera woman.

Music Video Synopsis

The video depicts one girls story of love and lust over a boy who is out of her reach. The boy is forbidden to her and in that sense it makes him her ‘guilty pleasure’. The video poses the question of whether she is in reality or is it all a dream world, this reflects the idea of getting caught up between fiction and fantasy. This boy is constantly on her mind, portraying him as her ‘sweet dream’, but the constant heart ache and uncontrollable lust can just as easily turn him into her ‘beautiful nightmare. This element to the video makes it a ‘must see’ music video for females as they will be able to relate their own thoughts, feelings and experiences into the medium enabling them to connect to the artist on a deeper level.

story board

Animatic

In order to develop my story board to get a further understanding of how my music video will come together I have created an animatic, this basically a moving storyboard. All the clips have been edited to the song sequence so they appear for the correct duration and point in the song.

I created my animatic by taking individual photographs of each shot within my storyboard. As you can see through the video above the quality of the pictures are not that good, however this isn't an important factor as you can still get the feel it.

As you can see, the animatic has been put together in a basic straight cut format. In the actual video there will be a range of different transitions to create flow, but for now I just want to be able to see roughly how my video will look. In the process of doing this I have already noticed clips which will need to be altered and there are places where I will have to create an extra scene or cut a scene out. It is for this reason why it is important that I made the animatic because from a storyboard alone I would not have been able to spot these mistakes as I would have had no idea how it would form together.