Tuesday 12 February 2013

Ancillary Production - Album Cover Photography

Alongside filming for the music video, I've also started designing a concept for the digipak. There are a number of factors which I have taken into consideration; this post will cover said factors.

Firstly, I want the album cover to be dark. This is because of the dark and 'edgy' imagery I've been going for with the Dark Flame artist, as well as the fact that from my findings this appears to be a common convention of rock album covers - a while back I looked at Muse's The 2nd Law cover, however since then I have looked at more rock covers and have found that quite a few of them have darker aesthetics -




Because of this, it seems fitting to follow suit; whilst it may appear to be a lack of originality - it works as a marketing technique in that rock fans associate the dark imagery with music they enjoy, so when they see a new album with a similar kind of cover they will assume that the album will feature the kind of music they enjoy.

Another reason why I have went for a dark setting is for the sake of sharing traits with the music video; this will reinforce the artist's imagery through another form of media, making it more memorable, therefore more marketable.

After filming the music video footage the other week, I asked Sir to take a few still photographs of me with my guitar in the same costume I was wearing in the performance sections of the video, with the best take being the one which I'd use on my album cover. These are some of the poorer versions:






Whilst some of these are somewhat acceptable, I'm not too keen on them because a) some suffer from mild motion blur (I can't stand still) and b) show me looking slightly distracted. The one I've settled on to use is this:


Why? I like the lighting, I like the way my hair is all over the place, and I like the fact that I look pretty spaced out. It goes with the whole DARK ANGST thing I've had going on. I'm going to greyscale the photo when I edit together the cover in Photoshop, which will exaggerate this more.

-HM.

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