First Idea

 

By Matt Dickinson







This is the first idea i had for our music video album cover. The picture is the car we used in some of the filming, especially in the opening shot of the music video.


Planning





Construction


To create this shot i first took a photo of Dom's car when we out on a snowy day (Hence the icy floor) because of the cool lighting form the street lamps. I set the ISO low and the aperture high then contrasted this with a long shutter sped so only the light trails from the background traffic were captured instead of the individual cars. This meant i could use this to relate this car shot to the steel wool photography as they both were capturing light trails.


I then imported this photo into photoshop and cropped the top and bottom so the car was more centred. I added a gradient map of a turquoise colour and changed the blending options to soft light to bring out the shade and tint in the car paint. I then increased the mid-tones and exposure to overall increase the lighting/brightness. You can see the photo difference below.





Once i had the photo i then created a file that was the exact dimensions of a album cover, (4.75" x 4.75"). I wanted to try out this sort of blind effect that i had seen before so created a black rectangle layer and duplicated it 10 times across the front of the album cover. I was going then going to fill the black from the text with a picture, the car. Firstly though i saved this twice, as the album front cover and album back cover to make sure they were identical to each other.
I then imported the saved Jpeg file of the edited photo as a new layer i then placed this above the black lines layer and created it as a layer mask so the photo only showed where the black lines layer was. This created a really cool effect but the light lines just weren't as obvious as i wanted them to be so experimenting a little i duplicated the layer mask and released it as a separate layer. I then changed the blending options of the duplicated layer to screen so only the light would show and not the dark areas. Then i moved the top images a few pixels to the left which gave it a really trippy 3D effect that messes with you eyes.





Then i had to move on the wording of the album cover. Luckily in "Young Blood" both words had five letters so in a simple plain font i over-layed each individual letter in separate bars on two rows. I then just rearranged the Naked and Famous logo in some text in a weird formation to fit into the bottom corner but this wasn't going to be the final logo design for them so i wasn't really too bothered at that moment in time to get it perfect (we have another post out soon experimenting with logo designs for both ancillary tasks).


I then saved this and deleted this half of the photo. For the back cover i then removed the text and moved the photo over till the rest of it was in shot. However the photo wasn't long enough to cover the whole background so i trimmed the photo to only cover a few bars and then fade out into black.



Feedback



Feedback was overall positive about the album cover and artwork. Our teacher said it looked very artistic and had a very idea for the album cover however the task was to design an album cover not a singles cover. Which meant this was completely wrong. It didn't have the name of the album "Passive Me Aggressive You" on the front which is the key essential and neither did it have any of the sings on the back. Also there was no coherence between the idea and the album name. Overall was a good idea to the wrong task. This meant we had to go back to the drawing boards.