The making of my magazine advert!

I found it really hard to find examples of R&B artists magazine advertisements. For my ancillary tasks I have chosen to design both a magazine advert, promoting my artists album, and a digipak. Although my research was unsuccessful, from both knowledge of this area and examples from other genres I found that magazine advertisements tend to be very similar to the album cover, if not the same and simply enlarged (with more detail e.g. release dates and websites). I also found that newer, less established artists don't tend to have an album name, and self title their albums. To make my ancillary tasks as accurate as possible, I decided that my album should be self titled to enhance my end result. Therefore I will not include the name 'Stride' in my magazine advert as it will not be featuring on the digipak. 

I plan to include a close up shot from my photo shoot on the cover of the digipak, and to make my magazine advert as authentic as possible, I will also include an image from this particular shoot in order to keep them consistent.

Add caption

After chosing an image I started to edit it on photoshop. I wanted to achieve an 'airbrushed' effect which tends to be very common for female R&B artists, on both their album covers and in their music videos! As I want my magazine advertisment to follow the same route I chose to produce this effect. To do this I used the 'eyedropper' tool to select the appropriate colours and filled in imperfections by using the brush tool. I used the same process to perfect the lips and brighten the eyes! I also used the eraser tool around the body as the images original background was an 'off-white' colour and didn't blend in with the advertisements clean white background! 

I decided to keep the background of my advertisment white, as the costume Alice is wearing is black, and I didn't want the overall imgage to be too dark! I found it really hard to find appropriate fonts on photoshop, therefore I downloaded a selection from the website dafont. I will most likely use the same font for both my magazine advert and album cover to keep up the consistency. So I decided to look at fonts on album covers, to get a rough idea of what I wanted! They tended to be either quite simple or big and bold (Like Jennifer Hudson's for example) 

Some of my Results:

I started to try out these fonts on my advert, but they just weren't working! I was finding it really difficult to find one that appropriatley fitted the genre whilst looking proffesional! I had first decided to use a Silver font, as I thought that black would be too harsh, however this just wasn't looking powerful OR proffessional enough! Also, with every font I found the name "Leah B" wasn't long enough to use in the style I had wanted to on my digipak, and as I wanted to use the same font, I decided to reconsider the name. I looked back at my previous suggestions but they all seemed a bit too predictable. Although I need to be addressing the typical conventions of the R&B genre, I was starting to think too far into it! I decided to keep things a bit more simple and use my artist's (actress) own name 'Alice Clark.' The letters in this name fitted the fonts better, but still didn't seem to correspond with one another. I then came across a font called Segoe Script in photoshop which almost gives a 'Signature' effect! This still looked a little plain, therefore i decided to add a black banner behind it, and change the font to white. 

This is fits the advertisement a lot better than the previous fonts, and the black and white complements the image I added.
I needed to add a website address to my advert, for listeners to find out more about the artist, I decided to make it simple after researching other R&B artists website addresses.  

The majority tended to feature the artists name and 'online' or 'official' etc. I decided to go for something similar "www.aliceclarkofficial.co.uk" and added it the bottom of my advert. I tried to achieve a similar effect to the title of the artists name, but used a less fancy font in block capitals to avoid making the whole image look too busy. 

I needed to add some information e.g. the release date and the price. I browsed on iTunes for some prices of R&B artists albums. My results showed that £7.99 was a common price for albums by artists similar to my own, therefore this is the price i chose. 

I used a very simple font for this and again, stuck with black. I also decided to mention the name of my track "You've got nerve" as albums and magazine adverts tend to state priority songs that are featured (usually ones with music videos.)

  

I wanted to keep the magazine advert simple, as the examples of R&B artists album covers i found, don't have a lot going on. And if I am going to create something similar for my digipak, my magazine advert will need to correspond to that! This is my final result....!

First day of filming!

Today was my first day of filming! Alice agreed to film during our free periods so we had 2 hours of solid filming! I decided to start off in the photography studio with some basic shots to get both myself and my actress a bit more confident with the lyrics and rhythm etc. and the space and lighting around us! I managed to achieve a pink effect, similar to the Pussy Cat Dolls music video which had inspired me, by adding coloured filters to the lights! This is shown really effectively in my footage and makes the location appear a lot more interesting! I plan to either repeat this or maybe even add different colours for each different costume?! I filmed Alice lip syncing to the beginning of the song and the chorus several different times, capturing her from different angles and positions. I found that filming an extreme close up of her lips was really effective! I plan to maybe film her singing the whole of the lyrics with this effect so that I can add it in at various intervals! I only filmed her in one of the costumes today, but I am really pleased with the outcome of my footage and ready to crack on!

Survey results!

After receiving input from my classmates, and coming up with various artist, song and album names, i decided to put together a survey and asked 20 people interested in the particular genre I am focusing on, what names they thought would suit my artist and her music best! These pie charts show the results...

It is clear from my results that there were particular Favorites and this survey has really helped to narrow down my overall decision. The most popular name for the artist was Leah B, the most popular name for the song was You've got the nerve and the most popular album name was Stride. I will take advantage of this feedback and use these three names to include in my ancillary tasks! 

Artist, Song and Album name?!

Now that I have started working on my ancillary tasks, I need to come up with a name for my artist, her song AND her album so that i can apply these onto both the digipak and magazine advert! My classmates have helped me come up with many... Now I will need to make some sort of survey to narrow the names down to one!

Photoshoot!

After researching album covers, I had a clear idea of how I wanted my digipak front cover to look. As I am also going to be designing a magazine advert to promote my artists album I figured that I would use the same/similar photos that I use for the digipak, this will be beneficial as it will help make the artist (who isn't very well known) more recognisable, as familiar pictures would be seen in various different places! I had also found this to be a trend for female R&B artists whilst researching for the ancillary tasks.  
I decided to shoot some photo's in the school's photography studio, where I will be filming the majority of my music video, that would be appropriate for both my digipak and magazine advert. I bared in mind the research I had done previously, which allowed me to figure out which angles I needed to shoot from and positons for the artist etc. Alice, my actress, has a friend who is very talented when it comes to makeup! She kindly agreed to do Alice's makeup for the photoshoot, and helped me to achieve a makeup look inspired by R&B artists! I now have picked up a few tips and tricks and feel confident about doing Alice's makeup when it comes to filming!

I was really pleased with the outcome of my photo's, however some of the full shot (long shot/medium close ups) made Alice look a bit more 'Rocker-chick' rather than an R&B artist which is the look I need to achieve! The outfit i chose to use is one that I am planning to use in the music video, I found this to be quite a popular style for R&B artists, but i think the red lips gave her the wrong look. I have learnt from this and know now not to include the red lips when filming! On the other hand, the extreme close ups of Alice's face are really effetcive! They are similar to the examples I found of R&B artists and with a bit of editing etc. I feel they will work really well for my ancillary tasks!