A2 Media - Research

Me and James have begun to look into videos and album artwork at the moment we are planning to look at advertisements later on, but here are some of the album covers we have found which we think we can use and take ideas from in order to create our own which fits into the style of the genre:

This album cover from the band Mutant is quite a simplistic one, at least compared to the others, the background idea and the small picture is a good idea for us as it would be a lot easier to do rather than actually producing our own concept art which could prove alot more difficult to create and produce. Also the idea of the band name at the top and the album/EP name at the bottom is something which seems to be very common on the front cover of the album something of which will be quite easy for us to do. Furthermore what is very obvious with tihs album cover is the futuristic feel that is given to it by the colour scheme, looking at this we have established the importance of the colour scheme of which gives it the futuristic feel. We now know when looking at this how powerful the use of colours can be without a doubt we must ensure that with our album cover we think over carefully what colours we want and so considering what effect we want the album cover to have on onlookers. Demonstrated with this is the "sciencey" feel with is adressed through its colours and so we must think whether we want and angry, calm, or neutral feeling to our album.

This album cover taken from Metallica and their album Death Magnetic, this album cover again in comparison to some of the other albums does not consist of massive amounts of artwork, in fact in our research we found that the coffin on the fron was actually a hole leading into the digipack which could perhaps be and idea we could incorporate into our project for our digipack. However overall the album is a good influence for is once again it is not massively complicated and so would be promising for us to be able to do something like this. A difference is the writing being in the middle of the album, this is something different to many of the other albums and obviously influenced by the type of artwork that the album shows. From this album the colour scheme perhaps has a less obvious effect than the prvious, but clearly the colour scheme has been thought of in relation to the actual artwork on the screen being that the white space around the outside is clearly used to draw emphasis upon the piece of artwork situated within the centre of the album. The dark colour scheme is done as a representation of the band itself being a thrash metal band their music is quite dark and so is a representation of what the album actually consists of.

Evile's album cover for their second album Infected Nations is a design which we would like to replicate being that it suits the genre perfectly. However, producing artwork of this level is not anything me and James would be capable of creating, and so it would require us either finding someone who could or commissioning a professional to do it for us. While this would give us a brilliant final piece it may not be the most practical idea for us to go by, being that it would be time consuming and due to the tight deadlines we work to it could mean that producing something this complicated and detailed would not be possible for us. However when looking at this we had the idea of maybe combining this with the other albums maybe getting some artwork on a smaller scale and blurring it out around the edges rather that using the full album. This album shows us again the idea of the band title at the top and album title at the bottom which is something that seems increasing popular in the genre.

This album from Metallica is one that me and James think we could really work with. Rather than actually using the whole album front full of artwork we could use a smaller part of the album and simply place the name and titles at the bottom of the screen in order to fill the cover and make it seem professional. For this we originally had the idea of using a theme of one of the songs and doing basically the same as this album cover as something like that would like to imitate being that it is a more simplistic version of an album cover which would be a lot easier for us to produce, not only this it would allow s to produce something while easier but it would be a lot better than if we tried some really complicated piece that would consume our time and perhaps put us behind on the project.

Slayer's album world painted blood, is another album which would be one of the easier ones to produce due again to it not being massively coated in artwork, and so would not require us to spend copious amounts of time to produce it while still looking very effective and very typical of the genre. This album shows us a new way of placing the titles with the album title behind the name of the band, however this can sometimes make the album title difficult to read and so this may not be a choice that we would consider. However the style of writing in this album would be very good as it is very typically "metal" which would be a good influence for us to base our style of writing on.