Completed Advert

Changes made due to feedback

• We changed the title from being underlined to not being underlined due to the feedback from the teacher saying that it did not look appealing.
• We also decided to make the artist's photos black and white due to the feedback from the teacher.
• Another important change we made due to feedback given was the size, position and the colour of the availability date of the album. It was changed to being a different colour, made bold and large and at the top of the page next top the title which made it more clear to the viewers.
• Another impact that feedback had on our advert was from the suggestion to add the Itunes text on there to make the advert seem more authentic.

This is the completed final product for our Holy Grail album advert and I believe that it was a successfully made advert that looks professional thanks to all the detail put into the text and appealing due to the colours and images used. 

The photos used in the advert are of the two main artists both looking at the camera and both facing slightly to the opposite side. when taking these photos we realized how we wanted to set them out and how they would look and I believe that the vision we had in our heads were expressed in the final product. They both look proportionate to each other, giving neither power over the other and they are both in black and white which matches the album cover and gives the whole project a clear togetherness and it helps make it look like a complete project. This black and white imagery carries on over to everything on the advert except from the colour of the release date of the album which is in another colour and bold which helps it stand out and it attracts the audiences attention to the important information. 

The text featured in this advert was given lots of thought and we took inspiration from other adverts to see what we could add to make it seem more professional. The details that we added were things like the website at the bottom which was very common on adverts and the "available on Itunes" text accompanied by the logo to ensure people that it will be available on the most popular format to download music. The title of the Album is placed at the very top to give it more importance and make it on of the first things that the viewer sees. The names of the artists are just as important and is in a big, bold and sophisticated font over the artist's photos and it helps the audience to identify the artists and glorify their name.  The use of white on most of the text was important to match the whole style of the album.

Images such as the album cover at the bottom left is a common thing to add on hip hop album covers to ensure that the audience know what to look for when they are making their purchase. The record label is also a nice addition to make it seem even more professional. 

Choosing the right font

We traversed the web looking for the perfect font for each section of the advert. It took a while to find the right fonts but in the end I believe that we found the fonts that matched our expectations.

We used the website Font squirrel to download the fonts. It had a variety of fonts to choose from and it was very useful for giving us many options and possibilities.

Holy Grail Title Font Suggestions

The style we were trying to go for was a traditional and sophisticated font that would match the title name. 

This was one of the suggestions. We felt however that it was too bold and it didn't match our expectations. It was too curved and bold, it looked quite childish and that was not the look we were going for.

This one was better but still quite similar to the other one. This one had a hint of a Gothic nature to it which we didn't feel matched the look of our album advert.  

This is the font that we finally decided to go with. It was exactly what we were looking for. It was sophisticated, sharp and quite dynamic. It was very appealing and it suited our advert perfectly

Artist's Names Font Suggestions

As we were looking through the fonts, we had a clear idea of what we wanted. A signature, hand written style font which glorifies the artists and gives them a sense of style and sophistication.

This font was nothing like what we were looking for but it was a suggestion from our teacher and we implemented it to see how it would look. It wasn't well received by the group and our teacher disliked it as well because it just didn't look right. It looked too gritty and out of place on our advert.  

This is the font that we felt was perfect for the artist's names. It was exactly what we were looking for and it gave the advert an injection of finesse and style which freshened it up and made it look more appealing. 

Advert planning (first draft)

In the advert we will be including photos of both artists:

Although the background for the photos are white we decided that we would make sure that the background of the advert would be black to match the style that we carried over from the album digipak. This allowed us to have a ongoing theme that made the album much more complete and defined. It allows the audience to define the theme of the album easy and give it a specific character.

This is what we started of with when were editing the advert, we decided to add some shading on to the photos to make them seem more engrossed in the darkness and make the advert seem more professional. 

Advert Mind map

As we were discussing what the advert should look like and what it should include, we came up with this mind map for our ideas and it helped me to draw out the first draft. It helped make our ideas clearer and have a record of them to reference to whilst making the advert. We made sure that we thought about our ideas clearly and related them to our target audience and hip hop advert conventions. 

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Completion of official Digipak

First stage

The skills that were learnt from experience and guidance from YouTube videos helped to get the basic layout for the album cover. The images were blended effectively and shadowed well to suit the black background and the parental advisory is there as a warning to the explicit language on the songs which is very common on hip hop album cover. The pictures seem proportionate and to the right scale to give the sense that both artists are equal in this joint album.

Completed cover

 We felt that the abbreviation of Holy Grail is a statement to people that says that it is going to be a popular and recognisable title and people will recognise the abbreviation. This is a demonstration of power and fame which is very common in the hip hop genre. The font was kept simple but defined to make it looked chique and contemporary. The addition of the strip of the playing card symbols again references our video.

Record label

This was a feature that we thought would be very important to add to make the album look authentic and professional.

 The back of the album digipak took more time because of all the detail placed into it. The artists are featured at the back exposing their torso's which expresses their dress sense and gives the audience an idea of what their characters are like. It also makes them look quite powerful and dominant. List of the songs are featured and displayed in a creative way matching a symbol that is over the photo in the background. Other small details added to make it look even more authentic are the album producer's names, bar code and the compact disc logo. The spine features the artists names to make it clear who features in the album and the the full name of the album.

We were inspired to include 7 tracks from Micheal Jackson's album thriller as it is unique to have that amount of songs on our album and it is iconic due to the legend using the same amount on his album. 

We then moved on to working on the inside of the digipak. As we were making the inside of the digipak we had an idea to make the whole of it a play card back to maintain that poker card theme going through out but we felt that it didn't work with the album as it looked too messy. above is a photo of us using Photoshop to achieve a professionally designed digipak.

This is the finished inside of the digipack. The images from the front cover are featured again in the inside however they are facing towards each other in the side where the CD will be placed which will mean that when the CD is removed then that is what is revealed underneath. We also included the Fleur-De-Lis which is a symbol that has been used throughout the digipak. It is a very sophisticated and artistic symbol that has been around for many years which gives it a nostalgic value as well. It fitted very well on the inside of the digipak and with a little shading on the top of it, it looked very appealing. We researched many hip-hop digipaks which also didn't feature any texts on the inside but rather images of actors and other symbols, so we took this into account and decided to match the hip hop convention of not having texts on the inside of the digipak but rather miscellaneous images.

Album digipack draft/idea

This is the draft for our album cover and back of the album cover:

Front Cover

On the front cover we felt that we needed the main artist's faces to be presented to glorify themselves which is a very common thing to do especially in this genre (Hip Hop). The reason for the one of the artists faces to be above the other and facing the other way is because we wanted it to have a resemblance to a playing card layout which links to our video. We emphasised the first letters in 'Holy' and 'Grail' to help enforce an abbreviation to allow audiences to easily recognise the title from those two letters alone.

Back Cover

This was the draft that we created for the back of the album and it features the two artists (Ahsan on the left and Muzzy on the right) displaying their torso. We thought this would be effective because it would portray the contrast between the two. One is sophisticated and stylish and the other is more ghetto and casual which suits their personalities perfectly and we feel that this would be expressed well with this image. The back will also display the songs that will be on the album and the Record company that produced it (we used platinum records as an example).

This is a picture of me and Muzzy using adobe Photoshop

Seeing as we had not had much experience using Photoshop we had to use very useful YouTube videos to guide us. Videos like the one below were very useful for our particular task of blending images together on our album cover. Video was not created by me but it was used by the group and shows the resources that we used in the process of completing this digipak.

History Of The Album

Albums have been around for many years. It used to be the only form of listening to the music that you want to listen to, that was until digital music became available. The first format for albums was the LP records which were albums that were on a vinyl disc. The LP vinyl records were introduced in 1948. Then the Compact cassette was introduced by phillips and it became particularly popular in the 1980's with the release of the Sony Walkman. In 1982 the compact disc was commercially available. This format replaced both the vinyl record and the cassette as the standard for the commercial mass-market distribution of physical music albums. Then in 1995 the MP3 format for music took over and it quickly became the easiest and cheapest way to download and listen to music thanks to websites like Napster. Then later on in the lifecycle of the MP3 format youtube came along (2005). Youtube became the ideal place to stream music from the internet and listen to it freely without charge. All these components contributed to making the traditional album redundant because people found streaming or downloading digital versions of their favourite songs and listening to them whenever they want, for free on their phones, laptops or Ipods much easier and convenient. 

I never purchased an album before but my parents have and they always had them around all over the house. Even when i was listening to the songs on the album, I hardly ever wanted to listen to the whole album because not all the songs on the album are good. When you download your own music you can pick and choose specific songs that you enjoy and experience music in that way which is much more convenient. All this information accumulated shows that Digipaks are no longer relevant in todays society.

Album Cover Idea

 This is our drafted idea for our album cover without the text and other information that usually accompanies the album cover. This was hand drawn and based off of a playing card.

We got the idea of using the king as a symbol on the album cover from the cards that was used during our filming. However the idea became more relevant when we made the link with the queen card that features in the video burning. The queen symbolizes the girlfriend that gets kidnapped in the and the king represents the boyfriend that rescues her. This gives the main artist power and a larger profile (King status). This portrayal of power in album covers is very common. We also saw that the heart symbolizes the love that the couple have for each other.

Digipak analysis

Eminem - Relapse Album Digipak

Eminem - Slim Shady LP Album Digipak

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Album cover analysis

I chose to analyse this album cover in particular because it has similar connotations that we would like to create for our own Album cover.

Codes and conventions

Song Lyrics analysis - Holy Grail

These are the Lyrics for the song that we will be using on our music video (Jay-Z Ft Justin Timberlake - Holy Grail). There are some annotations on the lyrics below that show how we represented certain lyrics in our music video.

Lyrics Mind Map

As you can see, the lyrics feature an abundance of the use of the word 'Nigga'. This word is featured in the song heavily and is only coming from Jay - Z as he is rapping. He also uses a range of explicit words as well, this is to make himself seem more intimidating.