Evaluation

During my researched I learned a lot about the representation of different genders in music. For example when we worked on the ITV documentary 'hip hop honeys' we talked about why women were used in music videos and why the were presented how they were.  Women are mainly used in music videos as eye candy and artists believe that no matter how bad the song is, if the video contains a lot of sexually promiscuous women then the song will do well in the charts.  An example of this is Robin Thicke's 'blurred lines'. The song it's self may be catchy but overall it isn't a very good song. However the video contains three sexually promiscuous women walking around barely clothed, following three men. Also in music men are represented as being very dominant. For example in many rap videos it shows men walking around their massive houses full of half naked women. They then proceed to throw around lots of money whilst wearing very expensive clothes and lots of jewellery. They also have lots of fast, sports cars that they drive. In most rap and hip hop videos the male to female ratio is very much on the womens side. An example of this is 50 cents music video of candy shop. In this video there are only two men whilst there appear to be over 50 women. In this video the women all follow the men around. This connotes that the men have controll over the women.

We planned to use adobe photoshop to make an album cover. I intended to include as many gender representations and conventions of an album cover as I could. We also included different types of typography and we used different colours to convey different emotions to the audience. Firstly to help plan we did reviews on two album covers of our choice. We did this to not only help us with the different conventions of an album cover and see what was good and bad about them, but also to help give us an idea for our own personal album covers. We then sketched out ideas for what our album covers could look like. Once we were happy with a design we started to make that on Photoshop. We had to take pictures of ourselves or other classmates to include in our work. We used a green screen to take the photos then we added them to our design.  Once we had made it on photoshop we helped each other improve our designs. 

For my own album cover I planned to have a man in a prison mug shot. I believed that this was a good idea as it incorporates a lot of the things that are included in male music videos. It shows a mischievous man, getting in trouble with the law, and in his mug shot not really caring about it atall. Also using a male in a prison mug shot it conveyed that the audience for my album was mainly males. also on most album covers they include an image of the artist, the name of the artist and the name of the album. i decided to follow these connotation in my own album cover.  For my back album cover i used an image of a prison cell. i used this as i believed it resembled my front cover. i used several tools on photoshop when making my back cover. i again used text boxes to write the name of the different tracks on my album. i also used the burn tool again to make the image of the prison cell darker and more gloomy. this is because i wanted to make it look scarier and more threatening. i also included a bar code in the bottom left of the cover as this is where most album covers place their barcode. i also included a parental advisory logo. this is to how that some of my tracks contain profanity and people should be warned about it.

the main inspiration for my album cover was an album cover from one of my favourite bands 'you me at six'. i decided to try and mimic this idea that they used as i though it looked really good and was very effective.

Whilst making my album cover I had to use a wide range of skills on Photoshop. I used the burn tool to make the man on my cover look beaten up and damaged. I also used text boxes to write the name of my album, and the artist.  To get different font styles I had to go onto www.dafont.com and download different fonts to use. I also had to drag my background onto my image and edit it so the image would go behind my photo. I also had to use the eraser tool quite a lot as I had to rub out the background of my photo so you could see the image behind. Finally I used different font colours to help make my text stand out from the background.