History of Album Covers

An album cover is the front of the packaging of a commercially-released audio recording product, or album. The term can refer to either the printed cardboard covers typically used to package sets of 10" and 12" 78 rpm records, single and sets of 12" LPs, sets of 45 rpm records (either in several connected sleeves or a box), or the front-facing panel of a CD package, and, increasingly, the primary image accompanying a digital download of the album, or of its individual tracks.

The cover serves three main purposes:
1) To advertise and identify the contents of the music product.
2) To convey the artistic aspirations of the original artists (see Cover art and Alex Steinweiss).
3) In reproductions of the artwork, to serve as a primary image in the promotional efforts surrounding the product, as an identifiable image associated with it.

In addition, in the case of all types of records, it also serves as part of the protective sleeve.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album_cover

There is also plenty more detail and information into the theoretical and business plan behind an album cover. It also develops and describes the importance of aesthetics to the cover, whereby it is crucial to target a certain audience and attract as many people as possible.

Another important note would be:

With the increasing popularity of digital music downloading service and the inflating cost of conducting business, the purpose and prevalence of the album cover is evolving. While the music industry tries to keep up with technological and cultural shifts, the role that packaging (and thus the "album cover") will play in consumer music sales in the near future is uncertain, although its role is certainly changing, and digital forms of packaging will continue to surface, which, to some degree (and to some consumers) take the place of physical packaging. However, As of 2008 should be noted that physical music products, with a physical "album cover", continue to outsell digital downloads by a substantial margin.[5]

In August 2008, album cover designer Peter Saville, responsible for cover art on albums by New Order and Roxy Music, suggested that the album cover was dead.[6]

One digital solution is the iTunes LP format for interactive album artwork introduced by Apple on the 9 September 2009.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album_cover#The_album_cover_in_the_age_of_downloads

This shows how despite technology has progressed, the need and desire for people to have music and the art in their hand is still very important for most. Whilst admittedly software, as mentioned, such as iTunes is becoming increasing popular - it still isn't enough to disrupt the demand for a personal, and physical copy.

Album Cover Research

Your cover is your calling card to the record industry and to the consumer...how well you design it and the other graphics for your release could well determine your success or failure as a musician.
Now that I have your attention, I have put together the following guidelines to help you realize the importance of the graphic design stage in preparing your music for the marketplace. A well designed and attractive cover, along with other detailed information you have included in the packaging, may well determine if the gatekeepers in the music business ever bother to listen to the music contained on the record, and if a music consumer is turned off or on by your graphics. It is the best advertisement for your music.

So, go through the following questions and evaluate the design, graphic images, text (title, credits, etc.) and concept of your release by answering the following questions thoroughly and carefully. Then critique your cover in a professional manner, suggesting any improvements you think would help make the graphic design a more effective introduction of your music to the industry and your fan/customers.

Source: http://www.musicbizacademy.com/knab/articles/cdcover.htm

Filiming Canceled

The filming for today on the 12th of October has been canceled due to the technician being away due to illness. Because of this we may not have a chance to re-book the Drama Studio as it has already been booked up for the next couple of weeks. We will have to think of another place to film just incase we need to change the location.

We will be prepared to film tomorrow, in case the technician comes back but the school cameras may be booked out so we might not be able to film anyway.

:(

First Part Of Filming - Performance part.

Performance part of filiming
We have done a basic story board to choose what shots we want to include in this part of the filming. We’ve also got the lighting sorted and the equipment that we needed to borrow from the school and the other equipment that we needed to bring in. We will also bring in the lyrics to the song with detailed timings written on them aswell as a laptop which we can play the song off to just help the actors with remembering how the song goes.

Props List
• Amps
• Guitar
• Bass
• Microphone
• Drums
• Lighting
• Smoke machine


Equipment List
• Camera
• Trolley for Camera
• Tripod for Camera
• Lighting
• Smoke machine
• Another camera (for behind the scenes filming)
• Monkey Outfit

The Schedule for filming goes like this:
We Have the Location booked for 3:40 to 5:00
3:40- 4:00 – Setting up set and getting cameras into positions
4:00 – 4:30 – filming various shots 2 or 3 times without any smoke being included in the shots
4:30 – 5:00 – filming various shots 2 or 3 times with smoke from the smoke machine included in the shots.

Shots that need to be included:
Close up shot of instruments to show skill
Close up shot of singers face to show lip syncing
Long shot to show entire band

We feel that the amount of performance we include in the video is extremely important. We have decided to have about 20% of the music video with performance, this may change due to any problems we may occur during editing.
We are worried about how the footage is going to look because of the fact that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are extremely famous and have a certain look about them and we won’t be able to replicate this exactly. So we might have to do some more filming based around a different idea for the performance part.

( Note: We have tried uploading our storyboards, moodboards etc but we have had problems uploading photos to the blog, so this will have to be uploaded once this issue is sorted out)

Monkey

We have bought a monkey suit for our music video. The reason for having a monkey in our music video is because the monkey is called "Charlie" and the monkey has escaped from the local zoo which will be shown at the start of the music video via a newspaper article being in the shot that will say something along the lines of "Monkey Charlie escapes from local Zoo."

We will update our blog soon with the moodboard, story board and with the treatment so that we can start collecting some footage for or music video.

All the filming must be completed by the 5th of November and the construction of the music video must be completed by the 26th of November.

Actor Selection

We had two different actors for the role of the lead singer and we couldn't decide which one we wanted to choose. So we decided to show two 10 second clips of the stop motion of both to a group of year 12 media students and asked them to vote on which one they thought fitted the part better. Below you can see the pictures of the two actors aswell as how the votes were cast:

Alex Elsworth: 80%
Alistair Shearing: 20%

The vote was out of a group of 20 people and 18 people chose Alex Elsworth while 2 people chose Alistair Shearing, this gave us a clear majority.

This is one of the shots of Alex Elsworth from some practice shots:

Stop Motion Idea

Stop motion is now seen as an obsolete technique because of CGI. However, as shown by the video below, it can still be used to create a stunning piece of media:



This is Oren Lavie's music video for the song Her Morning Elegance and was posted on YouTube on January 19, 2009. The video is directed by Lavie and Yuval and Merav Nathan and uses stop motion. It has achieved great success with over 15 million views, also earning a 2010 Grammy Award nomination for "Best Short Form Music Video".

As shown the stop motion idea is still extremely popular and this video shows that it makes a music video stand out as people refer to it as being “that stop motion video” as it is different and isn’t like any other video. And when thinking about it in that type of format, we thought of the previous Red Hot Chili Peppers music videos and how different they are to the rest of the genre as they are trying to make it stand out in some way of form. So we came to the conclusion that having a stop motion element in our music video would fit the song well.