My Album Cover
From looking at and analysing album covers of famous R&B artists I have decided that I could do that better than a poster or magazine advert because I know have a better understanding of what they should look like and I understand how the key conventions are similar and how they can effect the audience. I have taken some photos in a group of people and we decided to go for a punk look after looking at the band Paramore. It is quite different and we thought we could do it wel and would look good as an album cover and after looking at Paramore and what their photos and album covers look like I had some ideas of how I wanted my album cover to look.
This is the Paramore single cover I got most of my inspiration from. As you can see it shows all of the band members in the middle of a road which is a simple but beautiful background and isn't to eye catching so the attention is still on the band. The title of the band is large and is what draws you in most as it is one of the only sections of colour on the cover, although it is large and colourful compared to the background it uses a plain font making it easy to read. The same colour is used to the title of the single to help tie it in, as it's called 'the only exception' this also links with the coloured butterfily wings of the main singer and why she is the only one all in white compared to others. This all links in making the single cover very interesting and exciting.
I told my group about this idea and showed them the image above and we agreed to do one similar to this, we then went out and took a load of photos to choose from and see what looked best for an album cover. We tried a range of camera angles and styles to shoot our photo in a long with a range of poses and how many of us were in the photo to make it look the best it could be, below are all of the photos we had taken.
We have experimented with a range of styles and poses for our photo, we used a different amount of people to see if more or less worked better in different poses. We chose to have a simple but beautiful landscape behind us so that it wouldn't steal away the attention from the band but still looked nice and neutral, this idea was taken from the paramore single cover and you can see how we have applied this to our own work. We used a guitar to help our genre of music come through in our photo so we used it in every photo we did and is the main prop and also one of the main focuses of our photo. The photo I like the least is the last one of all of us on the hill as we are quite far away and the attention is focused too much on the landscape than the band however I really like all of the other photos and found it hard to choose which one I wanted to take forward and use for the final album cover.
From looking at the R&B artists I like the idea of having one person being the main focus so we tried some photos of individuals and the 5th photo of Evie Hartley looking away and waving her hair gives a good punk/rock vide with ideas influenced from R&B album covers. Having only one person draws in the attention to them but also shows the landscape background and the guitar which is why I think I will use this photo for the final album cover. My second choice would of been the 2nd photo of all of us walking towards the camera however this would need editing and zoomed in closer so that we stand out more compared to the background, this one would of been a good choice because it shows how a large band can be used on an album cover and still look as good and as eye catching as that of a solo artist.
I have taken inspiration from the R&B artists I have previously researched as they all focused on one main character in their album covers, this person is the main focus and fills most of the album cover which I have tried to portray above. I have taken from the Paramore album cover the plain and natural background so that the main focus is on the star in the foreground and all of the colours are quite neutral which also helped me choose the colour of the font, I chose a yellowy colour as it is close to the colour of Evie's hair but also not to bold compared to the background which is also similar to the Paramore single cover. I used the same name of band and name of album as I couldn't think of one myself that would match this kind of album style, I also used the same font as Paramore. I used a different colour for the name of the album so that it would stand out a bit more from the name of the band even though it is a much smaller font.