July Assignment- Technical Processes

We started by being given a specific genre of music in order to produce a music album cover for this genre. We were given Country Western so our group decided we needed to do some research in order for us to produce a successful CD cover.  We began this research by looking up on the internet famous western singers such as Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton. We looked at music stores online to see other recommendations of which the audience also like who purchased this product. We looked at album covers of these artists and looked at generic conventions which were main features.  We noticed that costume was a large part of the Mise-en-scene and decided to put these ideas into a brainstorm.

After we had researched current Western stars, we started brainstorming ideas on what we had found and what we had noticed as a common convention. We then decided to produce a separate brainstorm as to what we wanted to include in our CD cover. We used ideas that we had found particularly the style and costume of existing artists. This included features such as mise-en-scene and the costume selection as this is a key feature of the cover which shows that it is a country western album. On the Dolly Parton album cover we can see that the male artist is wearing a cowboy hat so we decided to use this idea when considering props and costumes. We also noticed that most of the shots were taken outside to represent the “country” music.

Once we had a plan of what we basically wanted we then produced a props and costume list ready for when we took the photos.  We arranged to shoot the photos at Hannah’s house as she has horses and we thought this would be good to show on our album cover. We arranged a time with the rest of our group members and took as many photos as we could so we had a lot to choose from when it came to editing. We didn’t arrange any specific shots before hand as we were not quite sure what would work and what wouldn’t so we took as many different ones as we could so that we had a variety. We also had to take into account that if it was going to be a sunny day, we would have to change the opacity of the image when it came to editing the photo.

Once we had done this we uploaded them onto the computer and chose the most appropriate ones for the front and the back cover. We chose similar ones to show the beginning and end of the album. Once we had uploaded them we then had to start editing them to make them look professional and add generic conventions to it such as commercial information and song titles.

We firstly decided on how to present the front and back cover by editing the actual picture. We changed the contrast to make it look slightly darker and added the blur tool to edit the main feature of the girl and horse, which is opposite to the front cover.  We then added song titles and commercial information by using the text tool and placed it in a place that was recognized to be a CD cover.  We used the same font for the song titles and commercial/ legal information to keep the same professional style throughout the album. We used record label logos which we had created as we noticed this was a common generic convention of the back of a CD cover.