A2 Advanced Portfolio: Reflective Evaluation on CD Cover

Question One

Outside design of our CD cover

Inside design of our CD cover

Kimya Dawson's Album - Alphabutt (Front Cover)

Kimya Dawson's Album - Alphabutt (Back Cover)

Kate Nash's Album - Made of Bricks (Front Cover)

Kate Nash's Album - Made of Bricks (Back Cover)

From looking at the existing media products by Kimya Dawson, the 'Made of Bricks' CD cover and our own CD design, we can tell that there are clear links between aspects such as font and layout. The title on every front cover is at the top as this is the first place we look so we can identify the artist easily. The font used on Kate Nash's album cover is very similar to the one we have used (Beautiful Every Time) as it is very quirky and looks as if it has been written by a child. This gives a very light hearted effect representing the artist as fun which is good as Kimya Dawson does not take herself too seriously. On the cover of 'Alphabutt' the design on the back cover is the same as the front however the animals are not there. This is similar to  our cover as we have the same back cover as the front, just without the model present. We liked this idea as it showed continuity in the theme. After receiving some feedback from our teacher telling us that the model was too small on our CD Cover, we looked at a few other CD Covers such as Kate Nash's album cover and saw that the model on there was also fairly small, so we have decided to keep it like this.

Experimenting With Editing on iMovie

After filming some of our music video then importing it onto iMovie, we've noticed that the colours and light are very dull and dark. Firstly, we tried with increasing the saturation of the video. By doing this, it makes the colour more vibrant and shows a better distinction between the different shades. Although we will not be having it as saturated as the second image, we want it to look fairly vibrant as it brightens the image and makes the colour more visually appealing. Also, to make the video seem more like autumn, we will add a slight sepia tint however not too much as we want it to look realistic still.                          

Finished website

This is our website. The background is a doodle that we have drawn ourselves then scanned into Photoshop. We sharped the image to give the drawings more definition as they were originally drawn in pencil. This doodle is used as Kimya Dawson tends to use animation a lot, for example on her album 'Remember That I Love You' and on her website kimyadawson.com, she also has animation as her background. The title 'Kimya Dawson' at the top is also hand drawn then scanned in. As the background was white, we had to cut out the letters which is why they have a slight white ridge to them. We couldn't find a font on iWeb which was as quirky as we wanted which is why we drew it. As Kimya Dawson rarely comes to the UK, we decided to have 'New Year New UK Tour' on the home page to make a big deal out of it. Also, Kimya Dawson is a very friendly artist, and definitely one to keep in touch with her fans so we had her twitter feed on the front page. We feel that the idea of animation and autumn is continued throughout both our website and CD cover and this works effectively to presenting Kimya Dawson as an artist. The links on the page have actually been linked to the actual website pages, for example when you click on the twitter icon, Kimya Dawson's twitter page will come up. 

Final CD cover

After many problems with the back cover not properly matching up (the fence on the front was not symmetrical to the fence on the back) we finally decided to just take one extra long shot then place it over the whole of the CD cover as this meant the fence was completely lined up. As the bottom part of the image is slightly busy we decided to put the track list in the sky and we feel this works very well. By decreasing the opacity of the image, it softens it slightly and also because we added a yellowish background, it has a slight sepia tint to the image. The font is very idiosyncratic to keep to the usual conventions of Kimya Dawson and how she uses animation and quirkiness to express her fun personality. Overall, we are happy with our CD cover as it is how we expected it to be. The only change is the back cover as we originally had the girl on the back cover as well as the front, however we tried it and it didn't look as good because there were houses in the background and had no room for a track list.

This is the inside of our CD cover. On the right is where the CD will go, and we really like the idea of placing the CD over the acoustic guitar. The only problem with this image is the fact its slightly out of focus, however we do feel the shadows inside the hole work well. On the left is a collage of photographs of 'Kimya Dawson'. Originally we were going to have a newspaper here, however when we were on our photo shoot, we felt a whole page collage would look really good. Once we'd tried to have lots of images covering the page we realized it looked disorganized and a bit too crammed. To keep the continuity of the theme, we used the background of our website as the background on the CD inside cover. The board is to keep it stereotypically quirky and it seemed a very typical thing for Kimya Dawson to have on her own media. Instead of putting all of the images we had taken on there, we decided on the best ones and used 'tape' to stick them on. This will appeal to our audience of females as it's very feminine with the doodles and having the girl to relate to on the front. The doodles also will appeal to the slightly younger audience which we're aiming for.

Todays filming

After taking the photos for the CD cover we decided it was the perfect time to film part of our music video. We found an empty classroom so that we could film the scene of the girl doing some maths. We came across several problems while filming as although we had set the camera up correctly, the white paper we had on the grey/white table was too bright and blended in, making it look as though the girl was writing on the table. But eventually we solved the problem and were able to film. Below is one of the clips we shot (it won't be 7 seconds in the final video)

After this we also decided to film the scene in the office, we used the media office as there was a computer with the phone right next to it which we needed. Before filming we had to move several objects out of the shot, things such as Bilborough College ID cards were nearly in the filming.

CD cover photoshoot contact sheets

 

 

As we needed to retake the photos for our album cover with our new actress, today we took time out of lesson to take advantage of the bright day we had. We plan to use as many of these images as we can, as for the inside cover we're having a collage of images. Hopefully these images capture all sides of Kimya Dawson, with her fun and creativeness as well as her seriousness with her music.

Our New Actress

 

After loosing our previous actress we then had to start again and rethink who we could use, ideally we needed somebody from college as the times in which we are all free to shoot fall into college hours, however it seemed that everybody in Year 13 were too busy with their workload, so we decided we may be better off to ask an AS student; we came across Rosa Dolcimascolo (a girl from my secondary school) who is known for being very confident and not afraid of the camera. She was very happy that we'd asked her and it turns out that she has a lot of free periods at the same time as us giving us obvious chances to film and take the photos.

We went into the photography studio to take a few sample photos (not of the costume or makeup) of her as seen above. I also came across a photo of her wearing something very similar to our chosen costume.