1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our music video mostly uses the forms and conventions of real media products, whilst in some more specific respects developing and challenging others. The website and album rather use the forms and conventions of real media products as these particular elements are key within marketing to deliver clear communication to the target audience. I will be firstly discussing our music video, before moving on to the website and album cover.

Our artist is a girl band called 'All That Glitters' with a music video called 'No Sleep Tonight'. They are a pop band with a slightly rocky edge. They are still girly however and would fit into the mischievous category rather than good girls. However, they are still a great role model to younger girls and value girl power. 

MUSIC VIDEO

Using Conventions

As a mainstream band with a target audience of the 13-16 year old girls demographic, we felt that working with convention was the best way forward as to not alienate the majority of that market segment. With exception, this age bracket will in the majority still be gearing their interests to the mainstream music that surrounds them, therefore our song choice was centered around the principle that we could imagine it in the mainstream. Firstly, it is a pop song with a rocky sound. As you can see from the below chart, 50% of the top UK tracks are pop. This assures us that our track would sell, with the correct portrayal of artist image.

Secondly, the lyrics deal with a common aspect of teenage culture: sex and pursuing the opposite gender. Therefore it would immediately appeal to our target audience, whilst also more loosely appealing to males of the same age.

As a girl band, we not only had to research the pop genre, but more specifically pop GIRL BANDS. We drew inspiration from these artists, drawing good points from each of them to create the girl band we wanted.



Following the conventions of other genres was also highly significant in the actual content of our video, as this was defined by our portrayal of the stereotypes. As a parody, the audience had to recognize the genre stereotypes we were trying to convey with humor which meant abiding religiously to the conventions they would've been aware of and in some ways exaggerating them. This not only included hair, costume and make-up but also mannerisms, shot type and lighting. In the video below I collected some of our references and explained in detail the specifics of our genre representation whilst drawing upon real life examples: 

Enlightening our knowledge with the works of theorists Carol Vernallis and Andrew Goodwin, we followed what they determined as the key features of a music video. I would like to emphasize the importance of Andrew Goodwin's intertextuality theory, as that was fundamental to our entire concept as we were referencing the well known stereotypes of the music industry and it's genres. This allowed us to make a music video that was conventional and welcomed by the mainstream. We discuss our use of Goodwin's intertextuality theory and Vernallis' music video convention theory in detail in the video below:

Developing Conventions

One of the things that makes All That Glitters unique is the way that we have created a band identity that presents an unlikely amalgam of genres that have been successful in their own way. For example, girl bands such as Little Mix and The Saturdays do not fail to make it into the mainstream, possessing a slightly sexualised yet still female-friendly image. We believe our band could use these characteristics to bring a pop song with a more rocky sound to the mainstream, as unlike these girl bands we write and compose our own songs with instruments. Males tend to dominate when it comes to rock bands - currently the only well known 'Girls with Guitars' band is Haim who at the same time do not possess the same fun image as All That Glitters. We believe this development of the conventions of artist identity allow the ability to draw maximum success from the industry.

Challenging Conventions

As I mentioned before, we were not attempting to challenge conventions for the majority of our video, particularly emphasizing the different genres to be as stereotypical as possible for the point of being funny. However, us being satirical in itself is actually challenging convention. 

According to the 'male gaze' feminist theory, the camera generally puts the audience into the perspective of the heterosexual man. This has given rise to the continually and increasingly sexual portrayal of women within music videos, often living out on the screen what heterosexual males want to see. Not only has this become the unquestioned norm, but it has reached new heights in the current day - with Miley Cyrus breaking Vevo records for her 'Wrecking Ball' video for the obvious reason that she appears naked. Although 'All That Glitters' are sexualised in the sense that we look desirable, we do not take it to a shocking level that would deem us unfavored by our female audience. In fact, we believe that we combat the 'male gaze' by embedding our video with a greater substance that is not sexual power, but wit and satire. This is not the convention. If we consider the satire videos in existence, they are very associated with male artists and directors who have the freedom to venture into other music video types that aren't so reliant on a voyeuristic approach:

Artist - Red Hot Chili Peppers

Artist - Five

The ability to satire also comes from being confident, a quality in women that is diminished by the industries pressure to focus on looking desirable. We can learn this particularly from my last example. Eminem is clearly satirizing against women for many different 'faults' including being fat, being lesbian, being a drug addict and having large female assets. Although the video was quoted as 'the lowest form of entertainment', it went on to win Best Hip Hop music video at the 2009 MTV VMAs. This is precisely the male gaze in action and exhibits how much influence it has in the industry.

In contrast to this video, we believe we successfully use satire as a form of entertainment without alienating any individuals or groups of people. This would be counter productive, as we are trying to engage the female audience who are inevitably the ones satirized against the most. Therefore, we took the approach closer to that of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Five - satirizing what people know to be conventional by taking elements of genre out of context. What I mean by this is that, for example, in Take That's 'Back for Good' video the rain in their faces is seen as a dramatic addition to an emotional song. However, when we mimic the water falling down onto the face of a male boy band member, it becomes apparent that this concept is actually bizarre.

ALBUM COVER

A common theme among artists is that they begin to step outside the area of convention on their second or third album, once they have the industry aware of who they are and can afford to do so without damaging their success. However as a debut album, we felt it was important to follow convention for the purpose of comfortably establishing a place in the industry. This is because as a new artist, there shouldn't be any ambiguity in the connection between name, face and genre - we wanted to spell it out with our debut. However, we also wanted to make a statement within our front cover and make it something that would be remembered.

The diagram below shows the conventions we had in mind whilst creating our album cover:

Below is a diagram showing how we used these conventions in our front cover, which we specifically geared towards a debut album. We also wanted our album cover to immediately be recognised as part of our brand.           

WEBSITE

The main convention that is present within the industry is the move from linear websites to interactive, audience-involving ones. This benefits both the audience and the industry - the audience can have more fun whilst browsing and learning about their favorite artists, and the industry can put as many purchasing opportunities as possible into the website.

Interactivity was particular important for our band, as we are targeting the audience of teenagers who these days expect it as the norm. It would not be well received to ignore the benefits of web 2.0 so we tried to incorporate this at every opportunity. Our full use of conventions in the website homepage along with industry examples can be seen in the below mindmap:

Other forms/conventions we used within our website were:

• A menu at the top, including drop down menus
• More social media links such as twitter
• The ability to watch music videos
• The ability to comment on every page
• Customisable merchandise

Overall I believe our media product was successful in using, developing and challenging forms and conventions of real media products - contributing to the video's wider success. 

2. How effective is the combination of your main text and ancillary texts?

In order to bring All That Glitters beyond just an artist and into a brand that could prosper and make money on many different platforms, we had to keep in mind throughout our project the importance of synergy. This would link everything together. However, synergy is also highly significant in establishing our artist identity - we wanted a clear connection between our main and ancillary texts so we could introduce All That Glitters into the market effectively. Connections between the music video and the album and website would also draw more people to the website which is our main source of revenue. 

One band that was consistently an inspiration to us was Stooshe. Not only were they a band of three girls, but they had the same cheeky characteristic as All That Glitters and have recently released a debut album. Therefore, we considered what synergy they had used before going about it ourselves. Below are some key examples of synergy we noticed:

• The logo.
• The blend between bright colours and monochrome black and white.
• The theme of lights.



This is their website. There is a combination of bright colours and simple black and white.

Website enter page - Not only is this the logo, but the colour scheme is clearly meant to be a London street, adding synergy with their album name.

Album - The blend of monochrome and bright colours in present here. 

Music Video for 'Slip' showing logo - Monochrome black with bright colours featured again.

Colour scheme of red and purple lights shown in music video.

However, we noticed that although Stooshe did take advantage of subtle synergy, they did not necessarily do it to the extent we wanted. We considered this as one of the reasons they had not done as well in the mainstream (their album only reaching number 8 in the charts) as bands such as Little Mix, who consistently use synergy (reaching number 3).


Some examples of synergy Little Mix use are:

Comparing the two artists, we decided we wanted to aim more for the synergistic connections Little Mix possess - lots of them! However, as a very commercialized band we recognised that expecting SO much synergy would be unrealistic, although we worked with the resources we had to make our brand as synergistic as possible.

This prezi shows some examples of synergy within our marketing campaign:

Some additional examples of synergy are:

• The album title 'Good as Gold' is always in italics.
• The order of the three bands members is always consistent - Alicia on the left, Emily in the middle and Olivia on the right.
• Images from the same photo shoot with the same lighting and clothing are on the website, album and in the music video.

Although I am very pleased with the amount of synergy we achieved, with hindsight we could have done even more. For example, we could have specified a colour scheme even further - currently it is pink, gold and black. However, had we chosen one of those colours (e.g. pink and black OR gold and black) the colour schemes could have matched perfectly across every media text. This would have improved the synergy of our campaign and the reputation of our brand. Having said that I think we are closer to the synergy Little Mix possess rather than Stooshe and overall, I believe that our music video promotes our single well. This in turn promotes the album and the album promotes the tour which can be bought on the website. Subsequently, the link between the main text and ancillary texts was crucial. According to our interview with two members of the target (seen in full in question 3), they could recognize the connections between the main text and ancillary texts and agreed that we have created a brand rather than three separate media texts. Therefore, I believe All That Glitters could definitely prosper in the industry with the synergistic approach we have.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback was probably the most valuable source of information we obtained throughout the whole of our project, not only in the last evaluation stages but in research and planning also. In this question I will explain what our target audience was, how audience feedback came in use within each stage in the process and what we learnt from it.

Research and Planning

'What is our target audience?' was one of the first questions we asked ourselves right at the beginning of the project. We addressed this with consideration to our personal strengths as a group and the nature of the industry. For example, as girly females we felt that we could relate to people our age, and so would recognize the means to target them most effectively. Therefore, it seemed appropriate to be targeting this demographic with our artist, as we ourselves are living in a world where we are constantly targeted by the media. Secondly, after analysing the target markets of many industry artists, we discovered the trend that with girl bands in particular, they tend to appeal to teenagers a generation or so younger than them. This means that the audience are likely to look up to the artist. Therefore, we decided that we were going to target predominantly females (and additionally males) that were slightly younger than us. The below diagrams identify our core and secondary audiences in more detail:

Our core audience was 13-18 year old females.

Our secondary audience was 13-18 year old males.

We based the generalizations made in the diagrams above on real people we interviewed in the research and planning process, for example Alicia's brother, Emily's sister and Olivia's friend Patrick. We then used their characteristics to create a core and secondary audience that we felt we could target most effectively.

Post-Production

On Monday the 20th of January, we held a screening in our school's studio. About 70 people came along to support us and enjoy their viewing of what they knew we had been working on. Instead of handing out paper surveys, we created one on an online platform called survey monkey. This way it was easier to organize it and people themselves had to do the action of clicking on the link - it was not us bringing the survey to them. Therefore, each response was serious and detailed. Although family and friend opinions may have been biased, the opinions of acquaintances and strangers were not and by us sending a link out for example on facebook or twitter, they also had access to the survey. Therefore, it was not just our target audience who filled in the survey, but age brackets younger and older than this also. This increased the validity of our results. However, we kept in mind that it is mainly people of our age who use social media/computers and would have had access to the link so it couldn't be representative of every demographic.

As you can see, we included both open and closed questions. This allowed us to collect data that was easy to present on a graph whilst still getting in depth information about people's opinions. Therefore we could analyse the data to an optimum level. The below prezi quotes some of the comments we received within the survey:

As you can see, we got some interesting feedback from the people we questioned. We noticed that the things that continually came up for people’s likes (such as hair and make-up and the humour) were the things we generally invested the most effort into as we believed they would draw in our target audience. Therefore, we believe we managed to target our audience well within our video. We were even pleased with the dislikes because as they were so contradicting between each person (for example some people thought the breakdown was too dramatic, some people thought we could make it even more dramatic), it consolidated that these dislikes were a matter of personal opinion rather than a problem with our video. Something that was also critiqued was the acting, in hindsight we could have practised our instrument performances on camera in the research and planning stage and watched it back to see what we could improve about our performances. We were pleasantly surprised by what people thought the message of the video was, as more people than we expected got the point immediately that female artists and satire don’t necessarily mix within the industry and that we were challenging this. However, some people also formed a literal connection between the visuals and the lyrics – ‘they are not sleeping, they are having fun’.

We have some of our closed questions converted into visual representations. This has allowed us to analyse the data with ease:

We also wanted more specific audience feedback from a male and female member of our target audiences. Therefore we interviewed our friends Alex (17) and Anna (18), for the main purpose of seeing a reaction to our website and album cover, but also for an opinion on whether they worked together as a brand. This interview is down below:

Overall, we believe that the audience feedback we received was put to good use and helped us create the music video we did. Keeping our target audience in mind through out the process was essential to making sure we were continually basing our decisions on what would appeal to them.

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout our project, we used a great deal of new media technologies. This was not just for our own convenience but also as a necessity to create an innovative and engaging marketing campaign for our band that would become successful in an industry that is increasingly becoming dominated by web 2.0. I will tackle this question by referring to each of the stages individually.

Research and Planning

Right at the beginning of the project we set up a Facebook group called 'EOA' which we used continually to stay in regular contact whilst researching at home. This ensured that contact was efficient and that every group member was always in the loop of what progress everyone was making. We also used our personal twitters and also had a facebook chat called 'EOA'. We were able to organize meetings on these platforms to discuss the ideas pledged online face-to-face. The photo snack below shows screen shots from our facebook group:

One thing we used consistently was Google products, such as the search engine and Youtube. For example, if we could think of a style of song we liked (the example in the picture is Girls Aloud's 'Sound of the Underground') along the side were related songs generated.

Another tool that was invaluable to discovering new music was last.fm. This has the ability to find similar artists for any artist it has - some we may not have thought of.

Right from the beginning of the project we were also using Adobe Premiere Pro to make a voice over of our references. This video was made in the very first stages of our research and planning and was made to see whether the different genres worked together with the music. This also allowed us to consolidate our ideas further - one big question posed at the playing back of this video was whether the sleepover was a good idea. In the end we decided against it after collecting mediocre footage that did not compare well with our studio footage.

The internet was continually invaluable right up until the final stages of our research and planning, especially when it came to buying costume. We used cheap websites such as Missguided and Boohoo to order costume elements in. These websites were very easy to navigate, as we could filter by colour and garment. Therefore, once we decided on our colour scheme we could find clothing items immediately relevant to what we were looking for.

Construction

Within the production stage, we were continually using new media technologies for all three of our media texts. I have summed these up in the below table:

Music Video

Our music video relied upon shooting and editing equally, and was quite demanding to make in both ways. Therefore, we used many different forms of new media technology.

We used the Sony HVR V1E as we felt it was most suited to the style we wanted. For example, we did not plan to use any focus pulls and this particular camera had an auto-focus feature. As it is so user-friendly, it meant that it would be okay to have people film it that haven't necessarily done media A level. It also gave good quality footage. Whilst filming, if all of us weren't in the shot another member of the group would film it (for example, for close-ups). We always had a camera operator on call in case we needed someone for shots that we were all in, such as long shots.

The table below describes the lighting we did:

As evidence, we used the Canon 5D to take pictures of us. This allowed us to refer to them in things like our evaluation and blog posts.

As soon as we had finished one shoot, we would straight away start editing. Even if it was just snippets of the song (which it was in every case apart from rap), having these available for us when we began to edit was so much more efficient than starting from scratch. An example of one of these is below:

We used a range of effects that Adobe Premiere Pro had to offer. These were very important as a lot of the time they were signifiers of our genre:

This effect was called 3D. We used it because it made it clear that me and Olivia were together, and therefore Emily was the lead.

In this gif you can see our television effect. We created this in  Premiere Pro to add to the TV concept. You can also see some of the split screens, which we used in the girl band genre.

In this gif you can see the flashing shots. We also added a strobe light in Premiere Pro. This was to convey the mayhem of our rock band performance. 

Below is a tutorial of how we constructed the television channel changer effect:

Album Cover

Within our album we used many of the effects Adobe Photoshop had to offer. Our shoot took place in the media department against a black background. We were using a flash and two lights. The original pictures of us were separate (with the two members of the group not in the shot taking the pictures or doing hair and make-up), but we edited them together. The main Photoshop tools used were:

• Blur Tool - Our pictures were taken with a black background. This could not be perfectly black so when we added to an actual black background on Photoshop, there was a clear difference in color. Therefore, we blurred the boundary between the two different blacks to make it less obvious.
• Brightness and Contrast - As all of our photos were shot in different shoots, the lighting was not the same. We had to adjust the brightness and contrast levels to make the picture look believable.
• Clone Tool - We used this to remove blemishes on our skin. We also used this to put on/remove glitter when desired. A tutorial below explains this with a man's side burns.

Website

Again we used Adobe Photoshop to create our header. For the website, we used a flash-based web tool called 'wix'. The advantages of this were that it had great usability, and we were able to create a website product that matched the industry's current expectations, adding widgets and other additions wix provided us with. Most artists websites these days run on flash anyway, a crucial aspect that gains the audience's attention. We also didn't have to learn to code in html, which saved a lot of time. However, it was quite limiting in the sense that as we build up our website, it could become slow. Also, the applications it had available were not completely up to the times - there was no live twitter feed for example.

Evaluation

Social media became a massive part of our evaluation also, most notably when we were promoting our band for the screening. For example we created a facebook page and a twitter for our band: 

We also used our personal social media accounts to advertise the screening as you can see below:

These were advertising a facebook event our Media year was putting on:

On this same event we also advertised our survey, made on survey monkey. This made sure that we were providing relevant people with the link, before targeting the wider internet community also.

Facebook to those at the event

Twitter publicly (making people aware that the video has been released)

Providing the whole world with the link via an extract on instagram.

For our survey we used an online tool called Survey Monkey. There were many advantages to this program - it was easy to create a survey, it was accessible to all and it made graphs for us automatically. However, we had a 10 question limit and in hindsight we would've asked questions regarding the personal details of the survey taker, for example age, genre likes, genre dislikes.

Within our evaluation I also used web tools such as:

• prezi 
• gifsoup.com
• camtasia
• photosnack

Conclusion

Overall, we were very much enlightened to the importance of new media technologies not only when considering our own target audience's desires but also whilst recognizing ourselves as the user. Without the benefits new media technologies bring to the table, creating a strong innovative and synergistic campaign is not possible in today's technology-reliant industry which is why we tried to use it every step of the way from our initial ideas all the way to analysing the final product.

Carol Vernallis Theory

In this post I will introduce the theorist Carol Vernallis, and explain how we used her interpretation of the conventions of a music video in our own music video.

Carol Vernallis identified key features of music videos that we have included by convention. These are as followed:

1. EDITING - The rules of continuity editing are broken.
2. EFFECTS - Edits are not necessarily subtle.
3. JUMP CUTS - Jump cuts from one setting or scene to another.
4. MASTER SHOT - A master shot is used as a base track to give the video structure.
5. CAMERA - The camera usually moves in time to the rhythm

Editing Examples

• We broke the rules of continuity as our music video does not connote a story. 
• Rather, our music video resembles a montage of lots of different settings and genres.
• We edited in time to the music rather than making invisible edits.
• Instead of taking shot changes step by step (going from long-mid-close up-extreme close up) we mixed this up a bit.

Effects Examples

This GIF shows our television effects and split screen. 

• We created a television screen effect in order to manifest our music video as conceptual.
• Some of our effects were meant to be subtle. For example, altering the grade in Adobe Premiere Pro was meant to increase the visual quality of our footage.
• Some of our effects were clearly not subtle, for example the 3D effect and split screens.

Jump Cuts Examples

• We utilized a lot of jump cuts throughout our music video from genre to genre.

Master Shot Examples

• Although we did construct the editing process around a master shot, this is not necessarily noticeable in the music video.
• Our main visual hook, instead of us being together in a mid-long shot (our master shot while editing) was actually beauty shots of Emily, as she is the main band member.

Camera

• Rather than camera movements, for the majority of the music video we used editing to connect the music to the visuals.
• In the rap genre, we created a stronger connection between the camera movement and music timing.

In conclusion, it was important to bear the theory of Carol Vernallis in mind for the entirety of the process, as we personally were not looking to create anything that defied convention in terms of music video conventions. This would ensure the audience felt it to be familiar and therefore pleasurable viewing.

Website Diary

This post presents a timeline of the process of making our website.

September - Right at the start of the project, we researched some websites. This was mainly to draw inspiration for artist identity, although the biggest lesson we got from it was the massive importance of interactivity on websites. One website we particularly enjoyed looking at was One Direction's. Being probably the most popular mainstream act in the UK, we felt that we were making a good choice to inspire our website from it. We enjoyed the interactivity and were amazed at how many purchasing opportunities there were.

October - We began thinking of a website theme, after noticing that One Direction's centered around a scrapbook design and Katy Perry's was associated with prisms and triangular shapes - with 'Prism' being the name of her new album and therefore presenting a synergistic connection. We began thinking about how we could use synergy like them, in our case between the music video and the website. Our first idea that we all loved was a line-up theme, seen on Busted and Cher Lloyd's album covers. However, this was only a good idea when we were considering doing our music video in a prison setting - it became irrelevant to our music video and no longer possessed synergy.

November - Although we had always placed a lot of importance of thinking of a THEME for our website, after looking at some more real websites we realised that not every artist website did possess a theme. Therefore we dedicated our planning more to colour scheme and layout, drawing upon The Saturday's website as our main inspiration. You can read the full post on our website inspirations here.

December - The process of actually making our website began. We would co-ordinate it in our edit suite so one or two of us did the editing and one of us did the website design to manage our time efficiently. We used an online tool called 'wix' which is a user-friendly and purposeful way of creating websites. You can see several screen shots of the finished product down below.

As you can see the website has been an ongoing process that was vital when constructing our overall brand.

Interactivity on the Website

This post discusses the importance of interactivity in this day and age and pinpoints exactly when we've used it.

One thing that we thought was crucial to the success of our website was making sure there were plenty of opportunities for interactivity. For the reason of our target audience being the technological natives of the population, it would be very easy for our website to become boring in their eyes.This would allow our artist to compete against others for the attention of the younger generation effectively.

Circled on the diagram are the opportunities for interactivity on the homepage alone.

From top to bottom they are:

1. A member sign in section for our fan club
2. Social media opportunities - increasing publicity for our band
3. CD - purchase opportunity to buy the CD
4. Tour Dates - the medium where most of the revenue would come from
5. QR Code - Link to technologically converged devices to be used to reveal more

Website Inspirations

In order to maximise the success of our website we researched websites we enjoyed browsing the most as users. These became key inspirations in the making of our own website.

From The Saturday's websites we liked:

• The white background - we thought it looked successfully aesthetically pleasing
• The placement of the Login/Register button and the social networking links - they were easy to find without dominating the website
• The photo of the group being at the top of every page

From Stooshe's website we liked:

• The informal tone of speech - we tried to adopt this also
• The bar at the top and how the writing changes to pink when you hover over it
• The 'The Girls' page

From One Direction's website we liked:

• The blocky grid style of the website elements
• The font that introduces each piece of news

As you can see, most of our website influences were of the same genre as ours, a girl band in the mainstream. Therefore, in using these as our key inspirations, this should ensure the success of our website amongst our target audience.

Important Decision

This post describes an important last minute decision we undertook. This reiterates that when creating media products, sometimes things can change last minute. 

Throughout the process, we were planning to incorporate a sleepover scene that would provide a narrative to our video. The plan was that the band would be at a sleepover playing the character of normal girls. Then, they'd switch on the television and appear to watch all these different bands (whilst unaware it was them). Then, as the television breaks, a CCTV style footage shot would appear on the screen of them looking around the room. At that point the music video would stop. The message of this would have been that despite being in a girl band, the band members are still just normal girls.

Alternative idea

The idea we feel we are better equipped for with our footage is scrapping the narrative side of our music video that was the sleepover scene, and making it simply a conceptual performance. However, we will still provide an explanation for why the channel is changing, having the channel box on top of the footage. The message of our music video will have to change too - now it is you can be whoever you want to be.

The reasons we changed it are:

• It over complicates the video, why would the girls having the sleepover and the girls in the band be the same? Of course there is a message, but the audience would need to work this out and we don't want to be particularly ambiguous.
• The footage we had filmed appeared boring in comparison to the studio footage.
• The quality of the acting and the footage paled into insignificance against the vibrant studio footage. 
• According to Carol Vernallis, 'the video may break or disrupt many of the 'rules' of continuity editing'. Therefore, we don't actually have to explain the significance of the television breaking - it is conceptual.
• We had so much good studio footage that it seemed a waste of the music video time to be cutting back to shots of a hand changing the channel. Of course we still have this element of channel changing within the music video, just on top of the footage.

We are very confident in our decision, as we feel it eliminates several of the problems we had, making our music video more effective.

Album Cover Photoshoot

On Friday 6th December we had our digipack photoshoot. We were shooting from 9:00 - 12:00.

Inspirations

We liked the look of bare shoulders as we thought this connoted simplicity and a sort of 'stripped bare' look to our audience. However we were in no way looking to sexualize our band too heavily as we believe that our particular target audience (teenage girls primarily) would not appreciate this. Here are some examples of album covers that have done this:

  

However we wanted to take this to the next level by covering ourselves in glitter. This would add relevance to the album cover as our band name is 'All That Glitters'. This was inspired by Miley Cyrus' new music video:

The Shoot

We took individual shots of each other with the intent of using Photoshop to combine them together. We managed our time efficiently, with two people helping one get ready. Then we would shoot that person. We did the shoot against a black background as we thought the glitter would appear more striking. Emily had the most glitter because she is the main girl in the group. Here are some of the shots we got:

As you can see with the shots of Olivia we also experimented with over positionings other than straight on, which was our original plan.



Overall we believe the shoot was a success. We were thinking that we may have to re-shoot Emily's shots as we went very overboard on the glitter and could have applied it more carefully. However, this was actually rectified in Photoshop, as more glitter was applied.