Creating our front cover- Digi Pak

 

 

 

We started by using Photoshop to edit the image we had selected. As I was more experienced with Photoshop I had the lead role in it. To give the image a more professional finish I started by airbrushing Millie's face. The steps seen below are the ones I completed while editing Millie's face. 

 

 1) Change the colour mode to CMYK, copy and paste the yellow channel and invert the layer. Change the mode back to RGB and change the layer blend mode to soft light.

 

 

2) Copy background layer, move it to the top and then use the spot healing tool to get rid of blemishes. After that, covert all layers to smart object.

3) Copy layer and select gaussian blur - move scales until you can barely make out the skin but the eyes are still visible.

4) Copy the original layer again, select high pass and more scales so that you can make out skin details. Then, change to linear light.

5) Group all layers and insert a layer mask - use the paint brush tool to apply the airbrush.

6) Merge layers then use dodge + burn tool to contour.

 

After airbrushing the skin I made a few final touches; filling in her eyebrows, brightening the eyes, defining her cheekbones. 

 

The second part to editing was actually creating the front cover itself.

 

The image to the left shows the process of turning the photo to black and white.

 

  

 

 

Next we duplicated the layer and put it onto a light grey background. We cropped the image to make it CD size.

 

Next we added our artists name 'Nova' and the name of our album. We used a text called 'Basic title font' from DA fonts for the album title; this font is minimalistic yet sophisticated and doesn't take away from our artist's name. 

 

 

This was the last stage of creating our front cover and most probably the most complex. We started the process by finding a basic hexagon shape on google and copy and pasting it onto the photoshop document. We then used the gradient filter to create a fade in the colour, so from yellow up to blue without any definite lines that clearly show the transition of colour.

 

 

This is the final outcome of the front of our album. We are extremely pleased with how it turned out as we feel that it looks professional.If we were to do this again we said that we would try to use a larger amount of colours to make the cover look more vibrant.

 

Song selection

We wanted our song titles to go in a transitional order. We wanted the album to be about finding yourself after a heartbreak; therefore the first few songs are about breakup and heartbreak with the last few songs being about self love and finding herself.

  1. 'Without You'; As this is our chosen song, it's no secret that it is a real song by Lana Del Rey so we didn't create the title however, we feel that it was best to start with this song as we feel that it connotes the idea of Nova being unable to live without her now ex-boyfriend. This song therefore will show Nova at her most vulnerable.

2. '1811'; to the unaccustomed, this title is a challenge to figure out however, this is something we intended to happen as we want the audience to think about the meaning behind the songs, we don't want it to be obvious. As a group we wanted this title to represent a time; the time they broke up, the amount of times she thought of him, the time it clicked that they weren't together anymore. A time. We wanted it to represent her mind being so involved in the moment that she can't focus.

3. 'Infatuation'; It continues on from the idea of Nova constantly thinking about her ex: it is rather self explanatory. She was and still is obsessing over their relationship and she finds it incredibly difficult to come to terms with her reality.

4. 'No Light'; This is the last heartbreak song on the album. For us it represents Nova at one of her lower points, she can't see how she can live without the man she loves, she's really hurting. We feel that this shows that Nova feels like she has nothing good in her life, as if all of the light has been turned off.

5. 'We Are Human'; For me, this is the turning point in the album, this is where Nova begins to get better. She realises that it's okay to feel sad over the situation, everybody goes through it at some point and most people go through it multiple times. This song shows that its part of our nature to feel emotion.

6. 'Spectrum'; This title is quite vague but once explained it becomes fairly obvious. A spectrum is a large range of colours; this is a metaphor for Nova's emotions, she is letting them all out - releasing them to help her become happy again.

7. 'Recovery'; This is the breakthrough of the album, this is where Nova is putting in effort to become herself again.

8. ' For Me';  I feel that this song represents Nova's self love, she realised that the most important love you need is love for yourself, she now knows that her main priority is herself. It is also a secret message of her recognising that she's made this album for herself, when she goes through a heartbreak this album will help her through it.

9. 'Afire Love'; Afire love is a title that we feel shows Nova's passion and intense enjoyment for her career, her life and her friends; we feel that this title shows how grateful she is for being able to lead this life.

10. 'Home'; this is the final song on the album so we really wanted it to be a sentimental one. This songs symbolises her full recovery, she is herself once again. She went back home. The title 'Home' also connotes the overall idea of comfort, family and happiness.

Creating the side strips- Digi Pak

 

To complete our album we needed to create the design for the spines. To allow the front and back cover to flow together we needed the spines to have the same geometric design. To complete this task we copied and pasted a strip of the shapes and then pasted on all of the text onto the strips. To highlight that Nova is signed to Opal Records we decided to have the Opal Records logo a different orientation to the other two fonts.   

Creating our magazine advertising poster

This is the final outcome for our tour poster due to its colour scheme and layout this poster comes across as sophisticated and stylish, this is due to the layout and colour scheme. The white writing compliments the colours of Nova's dress as well as standing out from the background. Overall I feel like the layout is successful and aesthetically pleasing, mainly due to the poster being clean and sharp. Below I have written a step by step as to how we made the poster and the reasoning behind some of the choices we have made... 

We chose to do a poster advertising a UK Tour (just the initial advert for it, meaning just the dates and venues) and the album instead of just the album as we felt that this is what most fans look for, they want to know when their idol is going on tour pretty much as soon as they hear that there is going to be an album.

1. Firstly, we unlocked the background layer so that we could move the image to the left slightly so that Nova was positioned off centre, this is to have continuity with our footage. We decided to go for a landscape advert as we feel that this will stand out against the other adverts that it will be near due to not many adverts being this orientation also, it allows Nova to then have a double page spread in adverts, giving her more publicity.

2. Next, we airbrushed Nova, just like Evie did when we were creating our album cover.

3. The next step in this task was to insert the text; we started off by inserting the artist logo and the album name. We originally had the font black however, we thought that the poster needed to be bright so we opted for the option of white font. 

4. We decided that we wanted the tour to be in the UK only due to Nova being an extremely new artist, and even though she has a large following on YouTube, we did not think that the rest of the world was quite achieveable yet. We chose May as a good month as it is in the spring, spring represents new life and in terms of the msic industry, Nova is a new born. To get the locations we looked at other tour posters for inspiration, we wanted to do a show in Cambridge since that is where Nova is from and we wanted it to be her last date as the last song on her album is called 'Home' therefore, it all links nicely - we researched into venues in Cambridge to find the 'Cambridge Junction.' The font used for this information is 'Basic Title Font,' the same as the album title's font; this is becuase the font is quite simple and we did not want anything too fancy that will be distracting from what the font actually says. Just like the back of the album we used the paint bucket tool to make some letters bolder than the others to give it an edgy look. We placed all of the font to the right of Nova as we felt that it would be better if all crucial information was together rather than spread out.

5. The next thing we decided to do was insert in her social media links, this is so that her fans can follow her and see what shes up too - this is where they need to look out for more information such as when the tickets go on sale and where you can buy them; we opted not to put this on the poster as this tour poster is just an initial one that gets printed way before tickets go on sale, it is simply to let her fans know that she is going on tour.

6.We then had a small advertisement of Nova's album, letting the fans know that it is currently avaliable on iTunes - we chose to advertise this on the poster as for those people who just stumble accross the poster, they can then go to iTunes to preview the album and hopefully become interested.

7. The final step to this process was to add in the Opal Records logo. We placed this next to the album advertisement as Opal Records, obviously, had a lot to do with all of this and the album was just the begining. We made the logo white so that it matched in with the rest of the poster.

Back cover- Digi Pak

This is our finished back cover. The process of creating this began with us opening a Photoshop document the same size as a CD case. We then used the droplet tool to select the grey from the front cover and used the paint bucket tool to turn the whole of the new document this colour.

we went on to create the similar geometric pattern seen on the front cover. Like before, we copied and pasted a basic hexagon shape onto the document and then used the gradient filter which creates a fade in the colour - allowing for the mixture of colours to blend together. 

Then we inserted the song titles. For these titles, we used the same font as the album title, to create a link. We wanted to make the font slightly different though so we used the paint bucket tool to make some letters thicker than others.

 

Lastly, we inserted legal information, our record label logo and a barcode onto the cover, this was to make the cover look more realistic.

 

Magazine advertising poster photo shoot

After planning on the style that we wanted our images to have we went to the studio to begin our shoot. 

After considering what outfit we wanted Nova to appear in chose to go with something bright- a blue dress with fragmented circles on it. We thought this was perfect as the geometric look of the dress compliments our digipak; also, the blue matches the colour theme to our video well. 


We specifically chose to do use a studio setting for our photo shoot as we felt that a plain white background would be appropriate when it came to editing in the text for our poster- nothing would be distracting the viewer from the information shown. Due to being in a studio we had access to the studio lighting, meaning our images would look more professional and making the quality of the images sharper too.  


The aftermath of this shoot involved us having a large amount of images to choose from, which we managed to narrowed down to a final four. Personally I think this photo shoot was successful and will produce an effective poster. 

Creating our inserts

For the inserts in our album we wanted to go for a thank you page- to show Nova's gratitude, and a picture page. To create our thank you page we used a still image of one of the videos we shot when on our filming day in Margate. We then inserted a short thank you note in white writing, then used the 'curves 'tool to arc the writing, we then moved the horizontal scale to make it flat to the wall. My opinion is that it looks really professional due to the writing looking as if it's meant to be there. We chose to use a really plain font as we didn't want it to overpower the whole image.

We then decided that the image we wanted to put in it was a selfie, as seen to the left, however after much debate we decided that this wasn't the way we wanted to go as we had some more professional pictures that we thought would work better. Unfortunately, we couldn't all agree on what image to use so Millie came up with a solution. She put all of the images in the frame, as seen below. In conclusion, the final insert looks really professional and artistic.

Magazine advertising poster photo selection

Option 1

This image looks natural,and is  one of our the most successful that came from the shoot.  her stance seems casual and approachable which is great in terms of attracting an audience.  She is positioned off centre, linking in with our video as vast majority of the footage that we filmed of Millie was off centre. I like that Millie's body is turned ever so slightly to an angle as it is suggestive of Nova being interested in her audience, she wants to open up to them. This will be good for Nova as her fans will feel as if she cares about them, making them interested in her and what she does. Having Millie's hair half infront half behind makes a difference to a majority of albums where we see celebrities with all of their hair immaculately done and all bought forward. Lastly I think the fact that you can see Millie's shadow is effective as it looks almost mysterious, which will intregue the audience. In reflection, I feel that this image is a strong contender for our final choice.

Option 2


Our second option is a simplistic image of Nova looking directly into the camera. Her body is shiftily slightly towards the side and her face conveys a blank expression. Millie looks quite stiff and forced- something we're not going for as we'd prefer a much more natural look, also the stiffness creates an atmosphere that Millie doesn't want to be there; which we're not going for. However, i do like the way Millie is staring into the camera, slightly peering over. This creates a mysterious and seductive presence and could intrigue the audience. When it came to hairstyles we tried Nova's hair placed behind her shoulders; allowing more of the face to be seen and creates quite a statement look- although still appears casual. Overall we feel that this isn't one of our best images, therefore won't be using it for our tour poster. 

Option 3

In this image we decided to try our artist posing in a different body position- to the side so you could see Millie's side profile. It was crucial for us to experiment with different as then we'd know which angles work successfully and unsuccessfuly. I feel that this position is different yet successful as it is an angle we haven't tested before- this will show another angle of Nova making even more of a personal connection to her fans. When it comes to adding in text we could then do something a bit more creative like having the text morph around the outline of her profile. The only downside to this image is the lighting as it isn't as bright and flattering on the ace compered to other test shots. 

Option 4 / Chosen Image

This is the fourth and final imgae - this ended up being the image we all liked the most.  I feel that the pose expresses an element of confidence which is something that we want Nova to inspire her fans to have. The way that Millie is starring right down the lense of the camera suggests an element of authroity  or power, this tells Nova's audience that she is serious about the tour and her music.

We chose to place Millie's hair behind her shoulders to show off her face and keep the look in her eye as the main focal point. I feel that the quality of this photograph is professional, as if Nova is in the big leagues of the music industry. The shot we used (wide medium shot) works really well here as it shows off the right amount of Nova's outfit as well as leaving enough space either side of her for text to be inserted or for space to be cut out.