WEEK 12

This week was pre-production of ancillary 1. I started to do some research on album covers from the early 90's to the present day. For my album cover I wanted to make it a little bit different from the music video by using animation. I wanted a cartoon themed album cover and booklet because it linked to Disney's cinderella story.

But most of the r'n'b album covers were not animated and were based on the male gaze where sexy women were on the front or the singers were half naked or dressed in stylish clothing doing sexy poses. So I decided to focus on male album covers seeing as my artist was male. I looked at Usher's 'Here I stand' album cover and I saw that it was very plain and boring. I also felt that this was the case with Lynden David Halls 'Medicine for my pain' album. Here we see him sitting down and just gazing into the camera. Just like Usher his album had a sense of sex appeal. However, because my music video is post-modern I wanted to make a post modern album cover that rejected all of the normal conventions of a typical r'n'b cover. I then did some research on r'n'b front covers by going onto 'Google' this was where I came across Kanye West's album cover for 'Graduation' he uses animation to create an unusual yet tasteful album cover using vibrant colours unlike the two above. I then looked at Mika's first album cover to get more ideas on animated album covers.

I started to do more research on Kanye West's amimated style and found alot of pictures where he the photographer and editor of the pictures had used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to create styles of animated versions of Kanye. Below are some example of this:

In the first picture the artist used Adobe Illustrator to use a mixture of animation and an original photograph to create a piece of animated art. In the second picture the artist used the artistic style of pop art to create a picture of Kanye west. I wanted my album cover to relate to my target audience so I decided that I wanted to use the 1st animated picture as a template for my album cover. I decided that I would use Adobe InDesign for using texts for the album title and track listings and Adobe Illustrator to illustrate my original photo's.