Album design #3

Another concept I had for my potential album cover is making the male lead like a ghost behind the girl. This is because in our video we have the girl running back through many different eras with the boy always watching but never seen: quite like a ghost. I've tried to show this with the image above, which I could easily adapt into an album cover if I decide on the concept for my final album cover.

Our performance part

We've had so many problems regarding getting our performance done. The plan, initially, was to get a band together and get them to perform our song, which we would film and cut inbetween the narrative scenes. However, this has proved difficult as all our candidates for band members have exams and other commitments at the moment or weren't available over the Christmas period, so we found that at this late stage trying to organise it now would be near to impossible.

Our The new idea is to finish editing the sequences of all the different eras and then export and download them: that way, we can hook my laptop up to a tv and play them there. Connor (our male lead) would then be alone in a living room and singing at the tv, watching me (the main girl) go back through the ages but be able to do nothing about it. This way the lyrics 'If You Wanna Come Back' are directly sung by the lead singer of our band to the girl, and they make sense. Also, this means we don't need a full band, can get an interesting bit of performance in and also use the technique of voyeurism in our video. We were also then thinking at the end he can see all the sequences rewind on the tv, which represents me going back to modern day, and I could then burst into the room for a reunion scene.

Album design #2

Another idea I had for my album art design was using double exposure. I wanted to incorporate both the boy and the girl in this design, and to do this I decided to use the girl's scared eye with a picture of the boy inside. As the boy, Connor, is also the main singer for the band this is useful because it will fit with the convention of displaying band members on the album cover. This cover could also be textually analysed, with  the boy being trapped inside the girl to mean that he is always with her no matter where she goes. This is a theme we have presented strongly in our music video, so I like that my album art could reflect that.

Alternatively, I could reverse the roles here. I could make the eye a picture of the boy, and have a photo of the girl visibly trapped inside: as she cannot escape in our music video, it makes sense if this was carried onto the album art. I could also experiment more with the photography that way, by having a photo of the girl miming with her hands against the iris and edge of eye, as if she's actually trying to force her way out but can't.

By doing this mock up I learned how to double expose and change opacities on Photoshop, which is going to be useful for my final design.

Album design #1

After doing some research into the digipaks, I tried to make a mock up of what mine would potentially look like by making some sketches and putting them into a CD case with a title on Photoshop. For this idea, I would dress up each band member (all male) in the female costumes the main character wore in all the different eras. This would be something unusual and abstract, but also use the convention I've found in my analyses of presenting the band members as the face of the album.

Digipak front covers

The Killers - Sam's Town digipak analysis

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One thing I found interesting in the digipak aside from that listed above was an insert. It advertised ringtone versions of the Killers' songs for the customers of the CD to purchase and download: this cross media convergence is something I haven't seen much of before in CDs, and it might be an interesting idea to incorporate it in my design too. 

Filming #5 *ADD PICTURES*

We've just filmed the 1940s scene, set in a bomb shelter. We filmed inside a crawl space inside a roof, replicating the cramped conditions of bomb shelters in WWII. We plan to use an external shot of a bomb shelter that I currently have in my back garden in order to set the scene, and then use what we shot today as the interior.

It was a fairly successful shoot: we had lots of fun and filming by candlelight gave a really nice ambient look to our footage. However, we did have to be extremely careful as we were filming inside a wooden roof and lighting and relighting candles many times. Luckily, the smoke alarm was all the way downstairs so we didn't set it off!

As always, we tried to replicate authentic costumes of the time. I wore my hair in plaits with a floral dress, knee high grey socks and a cream cardigan. We thought this was quite iconic of children at the time of the 1940s. To compliment this, we also had an authentic gas mask box and old teddy bear, although we aren't sure how well these have shown up on film.

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*Insert Date* - Update.

We have now successfully finished our 1940s scene! We filmed in my back garden outside - unfortunately, the timing was horrible as we had to film in the snow, and the dress I was wearing was not very warm at all. The shoot - luckily - was a quick one and I am proud of the footage I got.

For this scene I had to run in on the left side of the frame (as I had run out the right side of the previous shot) and go into the bomb shelter. After a couple of takes, we also decided to start experimenting with shaking the tripod to create the effect a bomb is hitting. I think this looked really good on camera, and we are looking forward to editing it.