After deciding to re-start my music magazine advert because the last one was not up to the standards of a real advert, I decided to get some advice from my teacher to avoid making any mistakes in the photo taking stages. She suggested taking an image that was within an image, such as having a music magazine avert of a bus stop advert with a bus and such in he background. This seemed like a really good idea to me because my issue with the other advert was composition and content rather than editing, so making a good start with the imagery itself would make for a better end product.
I started by taking photos of frames in numerous places on numerous backgrounds - I wanted to use a photo frame (that would then be filled in with an image during editing) because it has a personal feeling to it such as my music video, and I then wanted to give it a rustic background in order to link some meaning ti the photo frame and the image inside of it. I decided on this brick wall background as they have many connotations of being, being in your way, resulting in you having to go the long way round to get what you want. These kind of things all reflect the identity of the character in my music video because they feel trapped within their own identity, and the only way to get round that is to take the long way round - finding and accepting your identity is much easier when you know you are the gender you are assigned at birth as it is the 'norm', and people tend to dislike anything outside of the 'norm'. This is ultimately all down to current hegemony - dominant ideas in society that women are suppose to have beautiful hour glass figures and men should be built like a machine. Not only are these ideologies unrealistic when you are identifying with the body you were assigned with at birth, but it is near impossible for trans* people wanting to pass as the opposite sex to apply these ideologies and physical expectations on themselves without the aid of hormone therapy and surgery, and this simply isn't an option in most cases.
I ended up deciding on this image of the frame in front of a wall because it has plenty of space at the top and bottom to allow for text to be used. After choosing this photo, I then needed to elongate the frame to be more rectangular than square by using a few different editing methods in Photoshop (mainly the patch tool and the smudge tool to refine any imperfect edges). Once I had perfected the base photo to accommodate the image that needed to go in the frame, I then inserted said image into the photo and adjusted anything that needed adjusting such as the internal edge of the frame which needed to be neatened up. The image in the frame is a still from my music video - I really liked it for this advert because it tied in well with the message of the wall in relation to the expression on his face - he is dressed as a woman, which is who he wanted to be and yet he is still not happy - there is a wall in his way (hegemony) stopping him from perusing and accepting his identity.
When I got to the stage of the previous image, I thought that the walls were a little empty around the edges, so I created a colour burn gradient on the top and bottom of the image to give the subtle implication of the darkness of the wall engulfing the image in the frame. This not only enforced the message that the poster is trying to portray, but it also added some colour and a little more dimension to the advert.
My next step was to include some text - after looking at more music magazine adverts (online as well as in my existing product analysis on the blog) it seemed to be that they mainly include the artist/band name, the name of the album (digipak) that is being advertised, a hit song from the album and it's release date.
I ended up making the album name and hit song name in blue to tie in with the blue hues in the image in the frame of the advert - this also helps it stand out and contrasts the red of the wall so that it lifts up from the page. I also decided to call my digipak "Breathe" because after looking at the conventions of more serious albums from my digipak analysis and the 'how to title my digipak' post I did not long ago on the blog, I decided to go for something simple yet meaningful to tie in well with the video. The word 'breathe' has connotations of being a statement - someone telling another person to breathe if they are struggling to breathe. This can be linked in with my video due to the distress that the character is going through, it shows that the entire album could have these kind of connotations and meanings, therefore portraying the entire album as serious, which it is.
I left the artist name in white (I changed the name of the artist to avoid copywriter issues, but also to something that I felt fit the style of all 3 products better - I asked my peers for their opinion on the name and they all thought that ti fit well). This is because if it was blue then too much blue text would be on the page and it wouldn't be as noticeable. Also, the artist name is the only bit of text at the top of the advert, so the white helps lift it from the dark gradient, and looking back at what my audience had said previously, colours often used for text in music magazines are white, black and red, and white fit the best with this particular colour schemed imagery.
I named my artist Cassidy Blake as I wanted a name as interesting as Mac DeMarco, so I looked at where the use of 'De' before a last name came from. After searching online for a while, I discovered it came from irish roots, so I looked through some Irish last names as well as first names. For the first name I wasn't too concerned with how interesting it sounded as Mac isn't exactly extravagant, I was more interested in the last name. I simply saw Cassidy in a list of irish first names and Really liked it.
When I came to searching for a second name, I couldn't find one I liked to much in irish translation - I liked the sound of DeBlaca the most, but it didn't seem to fit with the theme of the video and the advert, and then I noticed it was translated from the name Blake, an I thought that Cassidy and Blake did sound good interesting together as though it could be the name of an artist, so I stuck with that.
For the bottom right corner of the advert I included the cover of my digipak because that is what the advert is advertising, The imagery of the digipak cover and the advert are similar because this means that if the public saw this advert in a magazine and took just a quick glance at it, they would have a good idea of hat to look for of they were attempting to seek out the digipak to buy it/give i a listen to. This is something that music magazine adverts do with pages adverting a CD release.
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