Hello and welcome to my blog for A2 Media Studies.
My name's Alex Sheldon and I hope you enjoy looking through the work I have done during this project to create my final music video.
You can navigate through my blog with the labels on the right hand side, to take you to any posts you want to see.
Thank you,
Alex
Friday 11 January 2013
Thursday 10 January 2013
Tuesday 8 January 2013
Evaluation Question 2 - Article Transcript
As my original picture of my article for evaluation question 2 didn't zoom in far enough to read the writing, I have posted the transcript of the article here as well to make it easier to read:
"For any album to sell, it has to have a good marketing campaign behind it. It’s that simple. You can create the best album in the world, but if no one hears about it or finds it, then obviously, no one’s going to buy it. Now obviously, working with a band like Danse Macabre, it’d be pretty hard to hide a new album from the world, but we still need to promote it to get it to as many fans and new fans as possible. Everything has to connect to do this. The songs, the lyrics, the album name, the album artwork, the music videos, the advertising, etc. etc. You get the point. It all has to become one living, breathing organism, as corny as that sounds. So working together with Thorn and the crew, we’ve all tried to keep the same themes throughout…you know, horror, death, fear, and all that. And you know, we all feel it turned out pretty well in the end.
Our main artist for the project was Alyss Redetta. She was so much help, and had the right twisted, morbid fascination that we were looking for the album artwork. We were very insistent that the album artwork and the advertising design matched. We wanted people to be able to connect the album with the advertising posters just through the artwork. For a while, we played with the idea of using the crucifixion image that featured on the inside of the digipack, as the main image to base the advertising around. This quickly vanished as Az pointed out how it had “the subtlety of a cat in a blender” or something along those lines. We also came across some trouble with Interscope Records publishing the album with such gory advertising. They were happy to publish the album itself as long as the image in question only featured on the inside of the digipack, which was a rare concession the band were willing to make.
In the end, we all decided to focus the advertising on the main image people would associate the album with; the front cover. This was an obvious idea, but with a band like this, you always put off giving them the obvious answer as long as possible. We got Alyss to draw up a full version of the half body shown on the album’s cover and then we based the advertising campaign around that. I loved how the album and adverts connected together through this simple image, whilst still being different enough that you weren’t seeing the same thing on both. Damien was adamant from the beginning that he didn’t want the advertising to match the album exactly, but I think he was happy with the final result, just like the rest of us.
The first music video we made was for the song ‘Evidence’ from the album. We were using this as the main promotional single for the album and felt that we really had to get across the main themes of the album in that one video. We tried to stay away from the imagery used in the album artwork for the video, and make the horror more psychological and less gore focused. The main narrative came in a brainstorming session with the band and it’s really a mash up of a lot of different ideas. The whole red-riding hood imagery, and that hunter and hunted premise; it all came together pretty quickly. We wanted to create fear. Whether we achieved this is still up for debate.
A major decision Damien and the band decided, was to not use any photos of them anywhere in the album. This is quite unusual, even for the metal genre, but they were really keen on pushing forward the horror in this album, and felt this could be achieved well through the use of illustrations. It obviously weakens the connection between the band’s image and the album itself, but we minimised the amount the band featured in the music video as well, so we hope to put the focus more on the feeling of fear rather than the band themselves. It was that faceless fear that we were definitely going for."
"For any album to sell, it has to have a good marketing campaign behind it. It’s that simple. You can create the best album in the world, but if no one hears about it or finds it, then obviously, no one’s going to buy it. Now obviously, working with a band like Danse Macabre, it’d be pretty hard to hide a new album from the world, but we still need to promote it to get it to as many fans and new fans as possible. Everything has to connect to do this. The songs, the lyrics, the album name, the album artwork, the music videos, the advertising, etc. etc. You get the point. It all has to become one living, breathing organism, as corny as that sounds. So working together with Thorn and the crew, we’ve all tried to keep the same themes throughout…you know, horror, death, fear, and all that. And you know, we all feel it turned out pretty well in the end.
Our main artist for the project was Alyss Redetta. She was so much help, and had the right twisted, morbid fascination that we were looking for the album artwork. We were very insistent that the album artwork and the advertising design matched. We wanted people to be able to connect the album with the advertising posters just through the artwork. For a while, we played with the idea of using the crucifixion image that featured on the inside of the digipack, as the main image to base the advertising around. This quickly vanished as Az pointed out how it had “the subtlety of a cat in a blender” or something along those lines. We also came across some trouble with Interscope Records publishing the album with such gory advertising. They were happy to publish the album itself as long as the image in question only featured on the inside of the digipack, which was a rare concession the band were willing to make.
In the end, we all decided to focus the advertising on the main image people would associate the album with; the front cover. This was an obvious idea, but with a band like this, you always put off giving them the obvious answer as long as possible. We got Alyss to draw up a full version of the half body shown on the album’s cover and then we based the advertising campaign around that. I loved how the album and adverts connected together through this simple image, whilst still being different enough that you weren’t seeing the same thing on both. Damien was adamant from the beginning that he didn’t want the advertising to match the album exactly, but I think he was happy with the final result, just like the rest of us.
The first music video we made was for the song ‘Evidence’ from the album. We were using this as the main promotional single for the album and felt that we really had to get across the main themes of the album in that one video. We tried to stay away from the imagery used in the album artwork for the video, and make the horror more psychological and less gore focused. The main narrative came in a brainstorming session with the band and it’s really a mash up of a lot of different ideas. The whole red-riding hood imagery, and that hunter and hunted premise; it all came together pretty quickly. We wanted to create fear. Whether we achieved this is still up for debate.
A major decision Damien and the band decided, was to not use any photos of them anywhere in the album. This is quite unusual, even for the metal genre, but they were really keen on pushing forward the horror in this album, and felt this could be achieved well through the use of illustrations. It obviously weakens the connection between the band’s image and the album itself, but we minimised the amount the band featured in the music video as well, so we hope to put the focus more on the feeling of fear rather than the band themselves. It was that faceless fear that we were definitely going for."
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