Thriller poster ideas

After having a few tutorials on how to use Photoshop, we have now begun to develop ideas on making our own Photoshop creation. I want to make a poster for 'Sealed', I started brainstorming some ideas as to what deeper meanings or icons our thriller could have, for an example, I looked at the idea of the balled shoe laces, or the scarring of skin from ballet





Here are some of the ideas I begun to develop:

Here is my final creation. I chose the idea of using a piano as this touches on the classical element of the piece, this keeping the poster in sense with the genre. The addition of the ballerina shows that the film is about ballet, and the dirty background reveals this film will touch on the dark side of ballet. I used the 'magic wand' tool a lot to select parts of the image I disliked and remove them, so that my object of interest was standing alone. I changed the opacity as well as flow rate of the different images to make them look more realistic. The 'clone and copy' tool was very helpful in duplicating useful images and saving me time. Working with different layers and adjusting the settings of an image gave me a better understanding of Photoshop and helped me create a more interesting, unusual image.

Keith Negus - Organic & Synthertic ideologies

This is about different ways of promoting artists in the way they appear to the audience and how their career is developed to appeal to target audiences. Negus divides music acts into two parts:

• Organic acts
• Synthetic acts

Organic:-

The idea of an organic act has a more 'naturalistic' approach; their music is more pure and not manufactured by effects. Their success comes from themselves, and their image is a clear reflection of their actual personality, the record company only influence and tweek the act in order to increase audience appeal. The audience for an organic act are usually more sophisticated.

An example of an organic act is Adele:

Adele has a pure, natural, amazing voice, which is never enhanced by computer effects. She never tries to be someone she is not, and she doesn't give over the top extravagant performances, they usually consits of Adele, a mic and a piano. This way all the focus on the organic sound of her voice and her talent.
Below is Adele's performance at the Britt awards 2011 which is a prime example of her organic, simplistic, enjoyable style.

Synthetic:-
A synthetic act is more of a constructed act, an artist is created in a certain way that targets a particular audience. There music and style rarely matches their true personalities and their voices are often computer edited, hence they appear to be fake or synthetic. These kind of acts tend to be enjoyed by less sophisticated audiences like teens and young kids. The also focus more on single-sales as opposed to album-sales.

An example of a synthetic act is Will.i.am:

Will.i.am's music sounds both robotic and hugely edited, relying heavily on computer editing, changing the style of his voice in order to target a certain audience. He has been manufactured to appeal to the audience with unusual hairstyles and clothing. When in concert he makes a huge show to make the piece more thrilling and exciting and less about the music.
Below is Will.i.am performing on a chat show, you can see he puts on a big show with crazy lights and techno effects, making the performance synthetic.

Star Image

Music Campaigns

Now that the AS thriller course is done and dusted, we have begun to look at the A2 music video course and our first topic of interest is campaigns.
A campaign is an organised and structured series of elements designed around the same purpose. For an example, a public health campaign, like trying to get people to stop smoking:

A music campaign is a promotional campaign to launch a new artist. A successful music campaign will have high key performance indicator (KPI) statistics, these can be:

- Number of youtube hits
- Number of iTunes downloads
- Number of Twitter followers
- Number of CDs sold

These elements all help raise awareness about the band/artist so they become more popular

For an example, a music campaign that has been hugely successful is 'Baby' by Justin Bieber, the youtube video as over 860 million views, Bieber himself has 40 million twitter followers. This is a prime example of a triumphant music campaign.

Star Image

The band/artists themselves (the star) plays an important role in reaching the target audience and making the campaign successful. A star image is very carefully constructed in order to make them original and interesting, the image can be constructed through various elements such as the digipak, homepage videos and media appearences.

Some star images are created to be semi-mythological, to make them seem more unusal and mystical thus they are more appealing to the audience, for an example Lady Gaga, she has a beyond natural star image, with weird, abnormal styles, and she even has a male 'alter-ego'

She is aimed at and cosumed by as specific audience which is her fan base.