make-up research

ancillary task : early album artwork ideas

research into the artist of our chosen song

KENDRICK LAMAR 

• Kendrick Lamar, Born June 17, 1987
• Signed to independent record label TopDawg, 2012 he joined a joint venture deal with aftermath and interscope records. 
• His major label debut studio album good kid, m.A.A.d city, was released October 22,2012 to widespread acclaim. The album spawned the Top 40 hits "Swimming Pools (Drank)", "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe", and "Poetic Justice". Swimming Pools being the song we have decided to use for our media video.
• The album, which debuted at number 2 on the Billboard 200, was later certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). In early 2013, MTV crowned Lamar the No.1 Hottest MC in the Game, on their annual list.
• BET awards 2013 Kendrick won best new artist.

I then went on to research Kendrick's influences so that I can look at their music and compare, this also widens my knowledge of the genre of music and how to target our video to the audience we are going for.

Kendrick's Influences include:

• 2Pac, The Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, Nas and Eminem are his top five favorite rappers. Tupac Shakur arguably his biggest influence as he has not only influenced the style of music but Kendrick's day to day lifestyle. 
• In terms of subject matter and technical ability, Kendrick Lamar has often been compared to Tupac, Eminem, Nas and Jay-Z.
• Kendrick also gave Lil Wayne credit for influencing his style. He has said that he also grew up listening to Rakim, Dr Dre and Tha Dogg Pound.
• He also cites rapper DMX as an influence "DMX really got me started on music." 

ancillary task: very early general research

Created with Padlet

This general research is useful as it helps to visualise and understand different designs used throughout this genre by lots of different artists. It’s important because it helps us to decide what we like and we don’t like, and take ideas where relevant. By looking at these album covers we also got a general idea of how the images of men are used on their album covers, we then took from this and came up with some general ideas about how we wanted out male model to appear on our album cover. You can see that the males appear looking quite depressed, looking like they are in really deep thought about something, for example in the 2Pac album cover, they’ve used quite a dark, sinister background with him standing with his hand on his chin like he is thinking about something. This is very different to the image of the female model where she looks very gentle, clutching her body like she feels vulnerable. It is important to note that this was only a general mood board just to help us to start gaining some ideas, however from this general research we noticed that there was a reoccurring theme on the cover of rap albums of men looking depressed often isolated and smoking alone, looking at the camera or to the floor like they were in deep thought.

research into other music videos by Kendrick Lamar

research into other music videos by Kendrick Lamar (2)

research into other music videos by Kendrick Lamar (1)