re-creating the back cover

When we were told to change our ancillary tasks due to the plagiarism, initially we tried to stick to our original plan. As cally is a photography student we felt she would be the best individual to try and take these photos, she got her mum to buy her a rose and a bottle and she tried to take images which we could possibly edit to still keep the main features of the back cover the same but with photos we had actually physically taken. several different angles were attempted but the bottle just didn't look right and there was no images which we felt was strong enough to be able to edit as our back cover. these are some shots of some of her attempts.

After having no luck with the bottle just being by itself, she then attempted to take images with the rose in the bottle similar to the computer generated image that was found on our previous back cover.

This is a second attempt

Even though they are good pictures they just didn't look realistic or ‘dramatic’ enough for our back cover. With the second attempt cally tried to control lighting by placing a black background behind the shot.The technique worked, as you can see the light which is being held behind the camera illuminates the rose making it look theatrical and full of meaning, however the shot didn’t work with the bottle so it completely ruined the whole image. Consequently even though we were under a lot of pressure as the deadline was looming over us, myself and Cally felt it would be best to change our design in order to achieve a better quality photo and a better quality back cover.

 Planning 

Before we completely started again, we went back to our research to try and find some new inspiration and ideas that would work better this time around, we looked especially at the John legend back cover of roses and the drawing we did and expanded upon it, we thought that maybe instead of it being a a bunch of roses by it self, we could have one rose which symbolises the mysterious young girl next (as flowers especially roses are very feminine) and they also connote fatality and death with the red colour of it signifying danger but also signifying romance which is hinted at throughtout the duration of our music video and ancillary tasks.  to a candle which could symbolise the hope that the male character has that one day he will stop thinking about this girl, and make himself better by not drinking anymore. To further plan our work, I did a sketch of four different images so that we could get an idea of how we wanted to set out our work.

As you can see the first picture on the right hand side is similar to the first layout we did, the second links back to the rihanna back cover research where her text is behind her writing, the third came from some new research we did, however because we only had 10 song titles at the time, it would only be able to go in two columns, however in the research we did on the artist 'The Weeknd' he uses three columns so I thought it would be a good idea to maybe add 5 more song titles and see how that would turn out. 

new photographs

As you can see this image is far more successful than the images with the rose in the bottle, the rose and candle link together in a theatrical way to portray the messages of fatality and hope, whilst the darkness around the image represents the depression the male character is currently in, however the candle is illuminating the darkness, indicating that he still has hope. There was many problems that occurred whilst taking the photos for example because the lighting was so bright the camera tended to not be able to focus properly, when it did focus it would focus too much on the light and over-expose the candle light, because of this control of the camera lens needed to be very specific.

research

construction

Using Photoshop I placed the image on to a square shaped canvas, and transformed the scale so it was a perfect so it was a perfect size, similar to the size of the main image on the above back cover. The image was perfect, so there was really not much editing to do apart from cut Cally’s hands out of the picture, and correct a few anomalies on the picture. When compared you can see how we have used our research and taken inspiration from it, the only features being illuminated are in the middle of the page, making it look like it is being consumed by the darkness, giving it a dark and eerie feel.

I tried to re-create the same layout which we created on our old blog by moving the image over to the left side of the page and keeping all the writing to the right side of the page; however myself and Cally felt that it just didn’t look right. It looked too overcrowded; the writing seemed too big, nearly touching the bind so it just gave the back cover an unprofessional looked, we could see that it needed to be changed. 

After I changed the layout and added 5 more song titles, we began to look at the colour scheme, at first we were worried that the gold colour text wasn't working with the background, however, our previous research and planning ensured us that gold text works with the black background, whilst researching we found it was a conventional thing for rap artists such as Kendrick Lamar himself, Rick Ross, Jay Z, to incorporate gold with a black background, as it’s a sign of the wealth they have. For us it also shows that before the fatality occurred love was once vibrant and rich between the male and female character. 

I then went on to add the final touches to the back cover, I added on the excutive producers information but left out the record labels information because it would have looked too crowded, however we ensures that it was on the inside pamphlet and on the cover of the CD. Even though I didn’t add the writing about the record labels I included the trademark signs of the record labels, and re-created the spine. Once the text had been moved over slightly to stop it from almost touching the spine of the CD, we felt that we had achieved a professional looking CD back cover