Print Productions

I decided to use the "light trails" in photography theme already discussed for the main part of my CD's front and back cover (which will therefore also be used in the magazine advert). I also wanted to take a photo showing a very urban theme, so to fit in with the theme of the video even more, so I set out to try some long exposure photography in the city. Norwich has no areas of sprawling skyscrapers for an epic city shot, but there are some smaller buildings and roads which I thought would serve the purpose. I was also inspired mainly by the three albums covers shown below (although there are many others which contributed to the results), and I find these had a major impact on the finished works.

It was mainly the minimalism of this which appealed to me, as well as the bold, powerful and modern, yet simple font, which

This cover blends use of a very similar light trail to mine in with a cityscape photo which also uses long exposure photography. The entire composition of the image is made out of light, which I find creates a very modern effect, which is fitting to the electronic genre of music. The light gives off a dynamic feel, due to it being raw motion, captured, which heavily inspired me in my cover.

This cover is much less dark than the other two images, using empty space in a different way to the others, giving a much brighter, more positive feel to the image. However, the simple minimalistic style of the cover, featuring a ring made of light reminiscent of the ring in the book/film/various remakes of the same name. This combined with the girl in the foreground, who's shadowed eyes and bright clothing clash, and the character seems to have no relevance to any part of the song combine to give the cover an eerie feel. Or maybe thats just me. Either way, I also really like the font, which is probably how the under/over-lining on the "Muse" logo ended up in the "Helsinki" part of the text for many of my designs, including the final one.

Using my brothers Nikon D40 camera set on a long exposure mode (15 seconds), using auto focus settings, I found areas at night time with heavy traffic and used the lights of the cars to create light trails. I took several photos from different areas with varying traffic, angles and zooms to give me a large range of photos to work with. I deleted those which were blurry (It is hard to keep the camera perfectly still for 15 seconds, especially with my families tripod, so some images blurred). I then experimented with simple image manipulation in photoshop, resizing, tilting and cropping images. I used the same program to add text, mostly using fonts downloaded online, sometimes tweaking the fonts with the paintbrush/eraser, or the blending options or layer options. These are the 14 images I created. There is a clear progression of ideas over the set, and the final cover is easy to recognize from some of the images.

These are the results so far. What I like about them is how they give the image a sense of motion and are quite dynamic without being too exciting. The effectiveness of the photos also fills up most the canvas space well, leaving very little to have to be filled with other elements.

From here, the two favourite images were chosen, using my media class as a sample, to be front and back covers. From there they were slowly improved with my own and other's opinions until reaching the final designs.

Most reviews from the public were positive, after asking people around school whether they liked the design. Criticisms were mainly along the lines of "too much empty space", "font for the band is dull" or "back cover is lacking band information and other elements"

These were the next set of images.

The main changes are the font and size of font in the front cover, which were done to make the band name much more important, filling more space.

Based on these designs, I created my first adverts. I created them using the same style as the front cover of the album

It was then suggested I change the font for "Temple Scene" back, as people claimed it was too bold, distracting the eye from the single name, which I have clearly tried to make more important anyway. The style of the font, I found, also gave the image the wrong style, more dynamic than I wanted, and in a different way to the background image, which freezes the dynamism of the photo.

It was then also suggested that I make the advert into a portrait orientation instead of landscape to make it less crowded, so I redesigned it for a standard A4 size used most commonly in magazines for full page adverts. Another advantage of doing this is that it is very much the industry standard, which would be important if I were to publish into a real magazine.

This video shows the final images.

A deep analysis of the prints will follow.

The magazine advertisement was targeted to be placed in Q Magazine. I considered the following magazines before settling on Q due to being major British magazines with a focus on bands similar to Temple Scene, however, with a bit more research it became clear that they were not perfect for the band:

Kerrang! - This magazine is devoted to hard rock music, although recently has moved with the trends to emo-rock music, featuring bands such as "My Chemical Romance" regularly. The magazine also often showcases artists such as Enter Shikari, Rammstien and Prodigy, who all use the electronic genre in their music, much like Temple Scene. However, Temple Scene are much more mellow than these bands, so maybe not entirely appropriate for the magazine.

MOJO - This magazine focuses primarily on Classic Rock and Britpop, featuring articles even today on bands such as Led Zeppelin and Oasis. Therefore, Temple Scene's more modern sound may not be appreciated by the sort of people who buy the magazine. The bands featured give the image of an older reader who was brought up in the time of these older bands, and would likely be older than my planned target audience, so advertising here would be a risky move, and may not appeal to many of the readers.

NME - NME focuses on indie rock bands prominatly, such as Coldplay, The Arctic Monkeys and The Libertines. This is well suited to Temple Scene's genre of music, which is fairly similar to the style of Coldplay. I believe that NME could be associated with the band, so this is one of the magazines which could be used. Wikipedia claims that "In May 2008 the magazine received a re-design, with the magazine being aimed at an older readership with a less poppy, more authoritative tone". This older audience could be more similar to my planned target audience than the older audience which I remember as being a younger audience of mid-teens to early 20s.

MixMag - The magazine focuses on dance/electronic music, featuring artists such as Deadmau5, who I thought would be an appropriate artist to create a remix of a Temple Scene song, as written on the CD back cover. Although this magazine does not cover the more alternative rock style of the song, it showcases a very large range of dance/electronic music, from Trip-hop to Dubstep. Due the the magazine's flexibility, I would consider it for advertising the band, especially as my poster has features that would be well suited in the magazine, such as the lighting effects. Many dance/electronic artists use interesting lighting effects such as light streaks on their advertisements as they relate to the complex lighting used in clubs.

I think that Q would be the best magazine to place my advert, as the magazine covers a fairly wide range of music, showcasing new and old artists, many of which cross from traditional rock/alt rock into a more modern sound in a similar way to Temple Scene. Examples of this similarity can be seen regularly from the magazines "Q50" feature, a list of the magazines favourite albums, with bands such as Gorillaz, Tunng and Goldfrapp in the top 10.

UWE project essay (constructed using my comment on "German Pussy")

From my viewpoint, what is the greatest creative challenge the media industry is currently facing and why?

The Internet has revolutionised the media, creating new ways to work, play and socialise, which has led to a massive increase of users worldwide. Although the Internet is a very positive new technology, just some of the problems it has created include piracy, identity theft and a generation gap. However, the issue that is not being given enough thought to is regulation of content.

The Internet is constantly expanding. Thousands of tweets are posted a second, an estimated 200,000 videos are posted on Youtube daily and as new users join the online communities, these numbers continue to grow. How can this amount of content possibly be regulated?

OFCOM and the BBFC are examples of the UK's media regulators, checking suitability of media content before it is released on mediums such as TV, games or radio. However, why bother to create laws preventing minors from watching 18 rated films when they can watch them online by simply filling a box telling the site their age? Even more worrying is the content on sites which would never have been approved at all by an official regulating body, such as real violence, child pornography, even death, simply by typing in the right phrases, and yet only one of these seems to be taken seriously by the government, who I do not expect are that prevalent at tracking offenders, and are worryingly unjust even when they do arrest someone. Recently, a teenager was convicted of downloading child pornography using Limewire over a year ago, and even though he claims it was an accident, and to have deleted the file as soon as he realised what he was seeing, he has been given a prison sentence and a sex offenders record. It has been brought up in court that even art of naked children should be made illegal, which would lead to the removal of hundreds of church statues of angels and famous artist's works being made illegal. Australia, in a similar venture are trying to make pornography featuring models with breast sizes under a certain limit illegal. Is the government too, trying to frighten the world into submission, as with the desperate record labels, suing millions from select people who downloaded music illegally? Either way, the overall effect on the system is minimal. Given how it is impossible for a body to regulate the millions of Youtube videos, would the government prevent illegal footage from being shown by removing the entire website? I would say we have reached the point where this would not be possible, even for the law, given the protests that would break out, defending human rights and the masses of important and informative works that exist on the site. The system continues to spiral out of control for the official bodies, and soon we will not even need ISPs to get us online, breaking the last tie to the legally governed world.

So if this means that power will continue to be stripped from regulating bodies, who will govern the new media world? Will it be possible? There is no class system online, no kings or queens, so the only ruling body online is the users, who are the only people with the power to restrict what gets uploaded or removed. I think the users are the solution to the question which will become more and more important as time goes on and the government realises how much of an issue it faces. 

However, when I hear naive things like this:

"It is great to be able to download programmes from the Internet but there is clearly a very serious gap in the regulatory framework which must be closed if such programmes are currently outside the oversight of Ofcom."

it becomes clear that it could be a while before they start searching for any form of answer.

CD Cover drafts

Note that the figure in the smoke was an image taken from the Internet for draft purposes.

This was an experiment to test how I could use brushes to create a more dynamic image. However, it isn't a very exciting or relevant image, so will not be experimenting further with this.
I quite like this image, as I feel the use of light create a very abstract and new effect, although acknolege that it is too dull and empty to consider any further.
This is the same image as the one above it, only not inverted. Although I like the use of colour and lighting, it is very simple and has no depth to it, which prevents it from taking on a professional CD cover look.


These rough images were created with a similar technique to how the bands album cover was created, by creating unnatural lighting effects and inverting the image. I thought this would create a bond between the single and album covers, but really they look too different. Even if I changed the fonts and colour schemes (which I expect to have to), I don't think they would look similar enough due to the original album cover's striking simplicity, which makes it stand out. I am also not a big fan of the artwork, although I do appreciate how well the idea of light trails fits in with my overall idea. To create a more relevant work, I could replicate the same method, but change the pose of the people to reflect freerunning, or create my own light streak in After Effects, and invert the colours of a screenshot, which would create a link to both the video and the album cover.

I inverted the cover to show you how simple the technique is, although the photography is quite complex and very well done, which may be beyond me.

Given how this post has shown how restricting the original CD cover is to the creative aspect of my work I have chosen to ignore the design for the purposes of this project, which I have been told will not loose me any marks. However, I would like to stick with the concept of interesting lighting, as this ties in with the music video, which is part of the mark scheme. I will discuss how heavily influenced my CD cover will be on a later post.