Advert Final Cut

We are really pleased with the final cut of our advert and feel it is conventional to rock while also showing our brand very clearly. I feel it works well with both our digipack and advert as a clear campaine and band image.

We chose to just have our lead singer on the advert as it is conventional and was a main feature of a lot of the adverts we analysed. Through our research  and through making our own video, we know that this is because a lead singer, weather they be male or female is always the centre of attention. The fact our singer is a woman makes our band even more noticeable in the male dominated genre of rock. Our lead singer is looking directly at the camera engageing the audience (the reader of a magazine flipping pages) and so the image is more eye-catching.

Also, we tried to make our logo (our stylised sacred heart  the centre of attention both by placing in our singers hands and by adding a soft outer glow on Photoshop. We added a similar outer glow to the figure, the band logo and the picture of the album to hilight there importance. We feel this adds to the iconic look we were aiming for and makes the image bolder. In some ways this could be classed as a more rock-insperd version of Christ (or perhaps the virgin Mary, linking more to the Pretty Reckless' Video) offering his heart to humanity: this heart represents the singers music (which, as any would, she has poured her heart and soul into). Here she can be seen offering her heart/music to the audience of this advert, giveing them something personal and almost 'pure' (which i am sure any fan would respond well to).

By adding an image of the product we are selling we are making it very clear what we are selling, so there is no confusion for a reader. This is a convention of most music magazine adverts selling albums. We also chose to make the date a little bigger and bolder to make the text more interesting and to emphasise important information for the reader (who will not necessarily pay the advert lots of attention).

There is a similarity between our advert and the advert of 'Lungs' by Florence and the Machines as we have taken inspiration from the body-parts element of the image. 

Digipack Final Cut

We took inspiration for the cover of our digipack from The Pretty Reckless' album cover. We liked that this looked old and abused and we thought that it would look good with our type of song. We found an effect on Photoshop that created the worn out effect but in a more tidy way. We thought this looked good as the image doesn't look quite right which is reflected in the album name 'Goddess of Chaos'. 

We used mostly black and white for our digipack to give off a sense of darkness and light being mixed which is typical in rock. 

Throughout the digipack we continued the theme of the barbed wire (down the spine) and also the heart. I felt this was effective as it gave all of the products the sense that they came as a package. Also, the font is consistent in the advert and digipack.

We wanted to give the digipack a demonic feel to it because it would go well with our music video. We didn't want to use zombies again because all of the digipacks we have looked at don't use the same make-up on the artists in the music video and in the album. We thought instead we would use an effect which would look quite like decay and quite abused. We think that this worked well because it gave the whole digipack the zombie effect without actually using them.

Fonts

We decided to use a simple hand-written-looking font so that it would be easy to read but also because we thought it looked Rock-like. It is similar to a lot of other rock bands fonts and so we felt it would be appropriate to use.

Our Record Lable - Geffen

We decided to choose Geffen Records as our record label as after researching lots of rock record labels this  one seemed like the best choice. After looking at all the bands Geffen produces the records of we instantly knew we wanted our bands music to be recorded by this particular label. Some of the bands they have singed include:
- Areosmith
- Blink 182
- Guns N' Roses
- Misfits
- New Found Glory
- Papa Roach
- Rise Against
- Rob Zombie
... and many more...

Advert - Main Image

I tried to recreate my original sketch and am very pleased with the outcome. We used an outer glow effect on the heart to make it stand out and look more important/iconic. This effect, coupled with the rest of the image being black and white made it very clear that the heart is the most important element of the image.

Black and white images with elements of colour was going to be a running theme in our digipack and advert but halfway through creating our products we decided our work looked to crisp and clean, which did not work for our genre. Rock products usually have a worn out, destroyed look so we experimented with different filters on Photoshop before finalising our decision.

 

 To help us with our advert we asked some members of our target audience which image they liked better and why. Overall they decided the grim colours looked more professional than the black and white. They said they could appreciate the photo more as they could see the lead singer better. Although this is different to our original plans I agree with our research and think it looks good and makes our work more stylised and more conventional to rock.

Digipack - Photos, Colous and Effects

When we started to make out Digipack we struggled to make our images look conventional to rock. We felt they looked to neat and clean (the opposite to what our research told us they should be). We had found an image of an album by the Pretty Reckless that captured perfectly what we were trying to achieve. We liked how the image looked slightly grainy and distorted and was slightly scratched, making it look old and worn out.

We put our main digipack image on Photoshop and started experimenting with effects and filters before finally finding the effect we needed:

Photoshoot

Before our photo shoot we felt we needed a better knowledge of how to direct our models and so chose to look at how other rock bands, especially those with a female singer pose. We used Google to find some images that show conventional poses to help inspire us:

  
For the individual shots of Jess we looked at Taylor Momsen's typical poses, closeups of just her head and shoulders. we took note of the messy hair and angular shapes she makes with her body, in particular her arms and decided to direct Jess to do the same.


Because we wanted a more equal band (not just a lead singer with a nameless band behind her) we decided to focus more on Halestorm for the band poses as we feel they seem to have a sense of band-togetherness which the Pretty Reckless does not have. Here the lead singer is dressed the same as the rest of the band but is still at the forefront of the band. In some of the photographs she was leaning into the camera and we like this pose as it makes the image stand out.

With this in mind we took our photos: