Ancillary Tasks

We have been given two tasks to complete. We were given a few options but quickly came to a joint decision where we decided create an album digipack and also a poster promoting our Album/Artist. After looking at a number of different images we decided that we needed to advertise the artist in the Album cover. This is typical of most R&B Albums, where the album cover features a large picture, normally focussed on the Artist themselves.

Task #1

Album Digipack

For our digipack we have to design all the album artwork for our Album. We used Adobe Photoshop on the MacBook we used. None of us had previously used Photoshop so we found it really hard at first getting used to the software, but after a while of some trial and error we finally got used to the different tools that are available. This was our first draft.


We decided to go for the star, as this has a direct link with the lyrics "I'm that star up in the sky" in our main video, which is the main song on the Album itself. We had a picture of the same boxing gloves that we used throughout the video and we also used some effects on Photoshop to create what we thought was a "cartoon" effect. We thought this would go well as R Kelly appeals mostly to young males. If he was trying to attract an older, more serious audience we wouldn't have used it. We have also used boxing gloves, as most this is quite masculine and would appear to more males. It also shows that the artist is quite masculine and this fits in well with R Kelly's profile.

We had some positive and negative feedback from people when we showed them the Album front cover. Some people thought that the Font worked well, as it stood out, you could clearly see R Kelly. It is at the top of the cover and this is getting the message across about the album. They thought it was good that we included the star and the boxing gloves. But everyone we asked wondered why we didn't have a picture of our main character Toby on the front cover. We went back and re-designed the front cover and this is what we came up with.


We were happy with the final cover, as we got to include everything we wanted. When going back and asking the people about what they thought of the changes. They thought that the inclusion of Toby as the main picture was a good change. They also thought that keeping the cartoon effect on Toby's picture worked well.

This was the main cover, but we still had to complete the other 3 sides of the cover to complete.

Here is the first inside cover..

Here you can see we have decided to use another picture of Toby. Here you can see him recording the track. It is also a screenshot from the music video. We this would be good to use as it promotes the artist performing his track. It shows Toby singing and performing an action of pointing to the sky. We have also used the cartoon effect as we are trying to create a consistency throughout the album artwork.

The other inside cover.. (This is to go behind the CD)


This is the artwork that goes behind the CD. We have looked at a number of album's and the artwork that they have, and more often than not, the cover on the inside behind the CD is blank, or it is very plain. We have decided to put an image of Toby with his boxing gloves and hoody for training on. Although we have used the cartoon effect in this picture to keep continuity between the other images in the artwork. We thought this would be a good image to use, as this is the final shot in music video, where we zoom into a still image of Toby.

The back cover..


This is the back cover of the album artwork. Once again we used an image from the video. It shows one of the locations that we shot in. We used the cartoon effect once again to keep the consistency amongst the overall artwork. We have also used a similar colour for the font when we list the songs on the current album. We had a look at some back covers in the R&B music genre. They are all fairly simple and just show a list of the song titles. We have used this approach and have just slightly moved them as we have gone down. It's quite simple, but we think it works well.


Task #2

For our second task we were asked to create a poster that advertised the artist and the music video we had just created. We used Adobe Photoshop once again to create the poster as we thought it would be good as we all had some experience and quite a lot of success when we used the software to create our first ancillary task, the album artwork. Although we didn't have as quick success as before, we had tried many different designs, different images in different positions. The main problem we had was that we were trying to inflict more than one message on the poster. In our initial copy we were trying to promote an upcoming tour aswell as the artist and the album. This meant that none of them really stood out. After talking to a few people to see what they thought about our poster we decided to go for a simple effect. We had the picture of Toby on the page. Then we also included the front cover of the album. We decided to mention the tour, but as it wasn't the main feature of the poster.

Here you can see we have kept the cartoon effect throughout both ancillary tasks. We have also used bold yellow font to stand out. The album is also on the poster as the creates a link with it and promotes the album so people know what to look out for and can relate to the album cover when it becomes available to buy.