FRONT COVER TO SCALE 

BACK COVER TO SCALE

Having decided that my first set of album cover designs were too busy and not realistic-looking, I decided to take a more conventional approach to my album artwork. I used the previous image in new ways, and compared them to real Taylor Swift album covers. The one with a lavender background didn't really match Taylor's iconic profile so I decided to take some images outdoors with nice scenery - an look some of Taylor's other albums have. These can also be seen above. Although these were definitely a step in the right direction; they still weren't quite meeting the purpose and targeted audience's requirements and criteria, and therefore wouldn't be successful.

The design I have chosen to go for is the final one. It focuses more on the artist - Taylor's main and emphasised part to her album covers. I made sure to still achieve something a little bit different at least, so I added a granulated effect. I also used an unusual way to present the artist's name; leaving the buyer with something more interesting to look at and work out. This should gain more attention and respect, and ultimately please more fans = more customers. The title stands out, with a bold, yet more fancy font at the bottom of the cover, so that if a buyer is focused on the album's title, they don't want to be spending a long time searching for it; it's plain and simple to read. The artist's name would not have worked in this position very well. It would have looked odd, by extension; as if the artist almost had a name tag! This would be far too simple for a twenty first century album cover.

I'm incredibly unhappy with this set of designs. The more I rearrange parts, alter colouring and add new artwork; the more cluttered and childish it becomes. It isn't even close to what I'd originally pictured in my head. Eventually I even managed to make a rough capital E, for Emma Lang, although it still looks awful. I plan to start afresh, and go for a more conventional design. It seems conventions really are there for a reason!

Text/fonts

Merging the images together to form the cover

When I came home from school, I took photographs of my sister (pretending she was Amy Rushmer); to use as a part of my album cover - as Amy was unavailable.

I found a plain cream coloured wall as it is the easiest to edit I find, and arranged my sister's body language.

I forgot put the memory card in! - So the only images that saved were these:

In class today I confirmed tomorrows plans with Amy, Sophie and Kelsie and answered questions about details I'd thought about and worked out at home. Everything is good to go! We just need to collect the camera tomorrow, I need to sort out my costume tonight so that it's ready to put on and go through exactly which parts we need to film.

This lesson we also looked through our video so far and tried to add a bit. None of the footage so far had an ideal clip for the extended "woah" before the final chorus, so I suggested filming a close up/extreme close up there and then in the lesson so that we'd have that and nobody would know that it was spontaneous as my uniform wont show if done correctly.

I went to the technicians and asked for a camera, they then refered me back to my teacher who needed the camera for ten minutes so we started to set up our Myspace page. When she'd finished with the camera me and Sophie took it outside whilst Amy chose to continue with our Myspace page. I grabbed my iPod from my car so that anything I'd mime would be in time with the actual music, guessing the timing probably wouldn't be a very good idea and would be difficult/verging on impossible to get insync when editing. Sophie asked if we should go to find a spare classroom, which we could have done, but I figured that it would be time consuming. The weather was idealic and we were surrounded by greenary so I suggested that the mise-en-scene would be more interesting and suited to our genre where we were. So, we settled on some green bushes which could be decoded subconciously by our audience as jealousy. I then said that perhaps we should record the entire song incase any other lines haven't worked out for us so we did this. I had a bright blue, summery scarf on so i wrapped this around my school shirt's collar to make sure that it wasn't showing. I checked with Sophie that the shot was close enough for it to not notice and she reassured me. We then recorded the whole song, including the "woah" part three times to be safe.

Finally we went up to our classroom and transfered the videos to our 'editing station' whilst Amy showed us what she'd done to our Myspace page. She didn't know how to edit the profile as it has all changed since we used to use the site, but I managed to work it out quite quickly and showed her how to do it. We then watched through a tiny bit of the footage me and Sophie had produced. The colouring was very bright and summery, with well-suited mise-en-scene and animated facial expressions, however I'm worried that the filming wasn't zoomed in quite enough and some of my uniform shows. It does seem quite subtle though, so we can study this in more detail in Wednesday's first lesson.

Today we found out that instead of Friday as our showcase deadline, it would in fact be Wednesday period three, so we only have the one hour on Wednesday to edit! I plan to ask Amy to simply transfer whatever we record tomorrow onto our computer during her morning registration to save time, and I might try to work on editing throughout my period one free, depending on how the room is being used.

Once I got home today I got stuck into editing my album artwork straight away. I completed what I set our to do on Picnik and added a black "wall" in Paint - which goes with the diary/girly/animated theme I'm going for luckily. (Finished image: right)

This is of course not the completed album cover, I have to add the other half first, as well as the text and the diary/cartoon style scribbles. It will also have to be the correct size of an actual album cover, and I'm going to have to design the back cover and an optional spine too.

This lesson I also found out roughly from Sophie and more acurately from my teacher, that the album cover is not supposed to be for Taylor Swift, but in fact for our fictional singer's name, which we hadn't realised at all. This entire time we had been pretending that I was Taylor Swift. Luckily nothing has to be changed, other than my name in the album artwork and Myspace page. My actual name is Emma Langschied, which is quite long, complicated and in no way catchy, so we've decided to shorten it to Emma Lang. This is the new name we'll refer to the music artist as.

I focused on my album artwork again today and decided to get the ball rolling.

Firstly, I put on heavy makeup and the white dress I'd bought previously for Taylor's iconic look, and found my camera. I found a large heart shaped velvet box and some large scissors with orange handles - the closest to red that we had which I'm sure I can alter the colour of when it comes to editing. I found a plain cream wall in my mum's room (closest to white, again; I can edit this), and sat in the position I'd planned in my rough drawing designed in Paint.

I couldn't take the pictures of myself as it's supposed to be a mid-shot, so I got my sister to help me. I explained to her in detail what I was after, and after roughly a hundred attempts, gradually adapting the body language and facial expressions, we found the ideal one. I then uploaded this to our home computer and began to edit it in a free online programme called Picnik, as I don't have Photoshop at home unfortunately so I had to make do. It's now getting late, so I'm going to continue editing tomorrow.