Looking at Album Covers





Album Over 1 'One of the Boys' Single

  
One aspect of our project is to create a album cover to go alongside our music video. In preparation for this, we decided to look at a number of other album covers within the 'indie pop genre', of which we had chosen.

This allowed us to consider some ideas of what we wanted our own music video to look like, through studying the typical codes and conventions of real existing products.

We focused alot on Katy Perry's Album Covers, as she was the artist's song in which we had chosen to do and are a key role model with in the indie pop genre.

We learned a lot through analysing the album covers :
Many of the album covers tended to use 'Mid Shots' to display the artist on the front. We really liked this as it was quite a simple shot, and also meant that we could focus more on the costume, makeup and pose of the model, to really enhance the look of the album.

Artists within the Indie Pop genre, especially Katy Perry, are really well known for really encouraging individuality and originality. They are also known for being quite bold and not 'following the crowd' The image above does not fully reflect this, but was a common factor in a high majority of the other album covers we looked at, a few of which you will see images of below, such as the single 'teenage dream'.

Album Cover 2 'Teenage Dream' Single

This is a brilliant example of showing the 'indie pop' genre. With the connotations of the genre in a mind, this album cover really captures it with its use of bold and bright colours. The use of a blue wig for the artists really reflects the uniqueness of the genre. The use of neon lights and colours upon this album cover really stood out to us, and we thought this would possibly be something we could try to adapt to our own as felt it really captured the genre, and really stood in relevance to the general look of the album.



Again, this album cover holds a mid shot of the artist. We think this is something we will most likely do ourselves. The use of the mid shot draws more attention to the artist, and that’s the main attraction. We also liked how this one was slightly to an angle and the way in which the artists face is tilted up, with her eyes looking up. It made the album a bit more creative and different rather than a basic mid shot.

Album Cover 3 'Teenage Dream' Album



We also found on a number of albums that special effects were used, to create abstract backgrounds. The 'Teenage Dream' album is a good example of this. We really loved this album cover. We thought it was visually striking and stood out against other album covers, however the effects they have used, such as placing clouds in the background and slightly animating her face to be quite 'dolly like' are not factors you 'typically' find on an album cover and were also quite out of our skills range. Therefore there wasn't alot that we were able to take away from this. However we did like the colour schemes and the fonts used for the text. The 'doodle' 'girly' style writing that Katy Perry often uses on her album covers, is something we would really like to try to adapt to our own album cover.

Album 4 'One of the Boy's Album

 Another factor we found was the use of quite abstract props. Although we really liked this idea, we wanted to stick to our original idea of keeping to a mid shot, like a large majority of the album and single covers we had studied. Although this is something we may try as an alternative. 

What this album cover did provide us with, was a good look at costume ideas for the cover. The costumes we have found very frequently on the covers have all been quite bold colours, or bold patterns. This is something we want to remember when choosing what costume we will choose.

Overall we learned alot through looking, analysing and studying the album and single covers and have gained alot of inspiration for our own.

Theories

Over the course we have studied a number of theories.

Andrew Goodwin- 'Music videos are simply an extension of the lyrics'

This theory has been a key factor throughout my advanced portfolio. I and my partner really agree with this theory, and we felt that by trying to apply it, we could really make something of our video. It helped us to plan and create the narrative shots, as we were able to analyse the lyrics and reflect the story behind it.

Why we chose 'Indie Pop'

We decided to choose the genre 'indie pop' to base our music video on. We looked in to a number of other possible genres; however we were quite keen on this one from the very beginning.

Both myself and my partner jess had chosen this genre for our foundations portfolio's and individually were both very interested in this particular area of music outside of the course and therefore we both had a good level of understanding of the genre, and of the typical codes and conventions. As a result of this we believed that we would be able to capture the genre and reflect it to a much greater standard than we would have been able to do with others.

Location Plans

We chose to use our school's professional studio to shoot the majority of our performance shots. We chose the studio as this would allow us to really increase the quality and standard of the music video by using the backdrops and lighting to create that 'professional look' that we wanted, and that is in, of course, professional existing music videos. We also chose this as it would always remain a reliable source. It would always be available to us and factors of it wouldn't change as say the weather would if we chose to shoot outside.

We chose to shoot our narrative shots within the school grounds. By doing this we would be able to reflect the 'theme' of the song. Our song is 'Teenage Dream' and it tells the story of 'young' love, 'first love' and 'teenage love'. The sense of it being teenagers gave us a really easy way to reflect by having shots of our actors, or our 'couple' together on the school grounds. We also chose this as it would be a perfect way for me and my partner to easily film as we are at school every day and can therefore always find time to be at our location frequently.

We used the sofas within the school to do some two shots of the artist Jess and our actor Luke. We felt these would be some easy ways to capture some moments of the two together in a school setting or a sixth form setting.

We also used some school objects to perform pans around for different points of the video to set the scene.

Ellie Goulding - Starry Eyed

Analysing Ellie Goulding

Analysing Exisitng Music Videos of the 'Indie Pop' Genre.

Ellie Goulding.

Ellie Goulding is an example of one the artists we chose to look at in order to analyse existing music videos of the 'Indie Pop' genre. One of the videos we watched was 'Starry Eyed'. This video is embedded below.