Deadlines/Brief

Music videos are so 80s/90s, right? They belong with the era when MTV screened wall-to-wall vids instead of 'reality' TV? Try telling that to the millions who bought Gangnam Style; were they really simply loving the music? 1.6bn (and still climbing) have viewed the video on YT, not to mention the many re-makes (school eg, eg2), viral ads + celeb link-ups (even political protest in Seoul) - and it doesn't matter how legit it is, this nightmare for daydream Beliebers is making a lot of money, even from the parodies + dislikes. All this for a simple dance track that wouldn't have sounded out of place in 1990 ... but had a fun vid. This meme itself was soon displaced by the Harlem Shake. Music vids even cause diseases it seems!
This blog explores every aspect of this most postmodern of media formats, including other print-based promo tools used by the industry, its fast-changing nature, + how fans/audiences create/interact. Posts are primarily written with Media students/educators in mind. Please acknowledge the blog author if using any resources from this blog - Mr Dave Burrowes

Wednesday 1 February 2012

DIGIPAK/MAG AD: layering is key

A point I keep making: key to picking up the marks is shwing image editing/ICT skills, and the key means of doing this is through careful, creative layering, where you crop one layer to add to part of another and reduce its opacity.

Here's an example George was looking at from Mumford and Sons...

Its actually a little bit ... rubbish! But it illustrates what I'm referring to: you can multiple layers in use, and the opacity of one of these (which has been carefully cropped to remove the people from the original background) reduced to around 30-40% using Photoshop.

The overall concept (a rustic, old-fashioned photo album) works for a folk band, its just that the framming within the 4 photos of the added layers is very basic and wholly lacking in creativity.

What you should be thinking of (not the only way to approach it, but a useful way to start generating ideas) is a single main image you can add layers within; band faces on top of objects within the main image (or even manipulate a pic of a mantlepiece or shelving unit to insert framed photos; a notice board to add ... notices! (could work well for some digipak text), even a rack of LPs... there are infinite possibilities, but central is the multilayering.

Don'y forget, you could create a starker, plainer text as well - you may well prefer the look of this; just make sure you include a version which showcases your image editing/use of ICT.

No comments: