Album drafts

As I have to invent my own name for the artist I came up with two ideas, one is "Vanessa" as it is the name of the song and the second one is "Gothic" as I drew inspiration from "American Gothic" by Grant Wood.

This weekend I am going to print copies of the above album draft and then play around with glitter to create some album covers inspired by "Santogold's" 2008 album cover.

Album cover drafts

This is my first album cover idea. I arranged for Sadie to meet me in the photography studio to take photographs primarily for the ancillary texts. This is as I initially used screenshots taken from the music video and the quality wasn't very good. I uploaded the photos onto Photoshop and using the "Healing brush tool" created a flawless look as it is a convention that music artists always look there best. Then using 'Curve levels' I made the background very plain so as to make Sadie stand out. Then I duplicated the layer and set the opacity to 60% and using the arrow played around with it to create a double exposure. This links to the music video as there are shots of Kate with double exposure and also the use of different images goes with my kaleidoscope theme throughout the video. I then used a text box to write the artists name over the album cover and made it pink to not only make it stand out but to give the cover a feminine edge which goes with the ideology of Grimes music.

This is my second idea for an album cover, using Photoshop I cropped an image of Sadie to make it square album cover shape and then using the brush tool went over her eyeliner to make her eyes stand out more. I then used the text tool to write 'GRIMES' over in baby pink to add femininity.

Photos for the ancillary texts

Before:

After:

Today I took some photos of Sadie for the album cover which I'm going to start editing. So far I have done a few edits such as the layers to create a flawless look.

Ancillary text

My album cover needs to have the same look as the video and therefore I decided upon the idea of a double exposure shot of Sadie as she's the performer. I want to keep the cover simple. I screen shot a clip from the third draft of my music video and using Photoshop used two layers to put one image over the other however slightly to the right. However the quality of the picture due to being a screen shot rather than an original photo makes it look poor. I am going to arrange a time to meet with Sadie and take photos to create the same effect with a better quality and then overlay the artists name.

Here is the third draft of my music video

  I have added in some new footage and put more kaleidoscope scenes in.

Repetition of Kaleidoscopes gives the video more of a theme throughout and links each scene to the next therefore it doesn't just look like a montage of abstract scenarios.

I decided to add in some more  close ups of Sadie (the artist) due to there being too many medium long shots making the video predictable.

Errors in the third draft...
I accidentally forgot to line up the bottom mirror image correctly and didn't realise until after I had published it onto YouTube. I have now corrected the error by lining them up correctly.

Screen shots from my music video (inspiration for ancillary texts)

Second music video draft

 This is my second draft of my music video, however there are still blank spaces due to footage that I haven't yet shot. I'm filming more shots of Sadie tomorrow in a different outfit and trying to get a different range of shots such as long shots of her sitting on the floor.

During the first shooting with Sadie we projected different images and GIFs onto a back drop behind her as she lip synced to 'Vanessa', one of the ones we used is the album cover for Tame Impala who like Grimes, creates 'trippy' music. Their album cover for 'Innerspeaker' is designed by Leif Podhajsky who is an inspiration for my ancillary texts. The key theme in my video is mirrored images therefore I included a short clip of this scene at the end of my video.

In this second draft I aimed to continue the theme of having a range of girls as a convention of Grimes music videos are having several different female dancers around her such as in "Genesis" - (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FH-q0I1fJY)