Studio Practice: Studio Brief 01 - Secret 7" - Development - Production

Development

Creating ideas, one of the brief deliverables is to create at least 30 thumbnail size design thats would show experimention thought out, I felt this would be good way to start of coming up with ideas for my chosen song. I made this mistake of watching at listening too the music video before coming up with ideas as I feel that the most of my ideas have been influenced by someone else creative view of the song. This is not bad thing as I am then taking that and creating something that I see, but I believe that it would have been better if I had not watched the video.

These are the first design that I created for the brief after watching the video, they show many visual elements from the video. But all of the ideas are trying to tell the story of the song in the cover, wen creating these I had the mentality that they would be used for a real cover but I soon understood that the covers are more like a piece of art and that they don't have to conform as much as a normal album cover would, so this is when I realised that the possibilities were endless.

After looking through videos and many different visual references of Tame Impala and other bands that related too this I started to sketch out ideas that had relevance too the song. I like the idea of making it simple but still a bit difficult to understand what the sleeve might be so I started by looking at small lines from the song that would be turned into an illustration or just small parts that could easy relate to the meaning of the song.

In the music video, there is many basketballs, flying paint and fruit. So i took these as soothing to work from, I could take a picture of a basket ball very close up so that you can see the finer detail etc.

The flying fruit with paint is something that i wanted to recreate, but not just in the form of a illustration wanted to actually get a studio and pour paint over different objets and then photograph these making them unique. Some of these below are ideas of what obscure objects that I could use, this relates to the song and the overall theme of the band music which is psychedelic music which involves many odd colours and patterns.

Some of the ideas show below are taken from the video, which I feel makes me look like I have cheated as I am not thinking for myself it doesn't show that I have thought of the idea myself it is someones else creative thoughts. But I feel that they could still be used if I was to crete them in a non digital media, for example with the basketballs flying I could draw them and then use the drawing to create an interesting pattern. I a lot of what I am thinking of is very experimental as is the music so I am trying to be as free as possible and not limit myself to one particular media.

While looking at Tame Impala I was also thinking of things that I could do for other songs, for example I looked at Chvrches - Clearest Blue, I felt like this would be very free to come up with ideas, the main idea I had for covers for this was to take minimal pictures of blue objects, for example the sky, sea and every day things as the song title could suggest anything to the listener.

Production

To create some of my responses I booked out the photography studio, so that I could photograph some of my ideas that needed to be photographed. I used fruit and paint, like in the music video to create some interesting outcomes, almost all of the fruit I dripped paint over and shot pictures of them, but for one I dipped it in paint the night before so that it would dry and have a slightly different effect.

These are some of the pictures that I took, I took around 500 too make sure that I had every angle and possibility that I could get. In the shoot as well as taking the pictures I was directing the shoot so that I got what I was looking for, so I had the help of two friends that were both hand models and assistants helping me with lighting and changing lanes etc.

I also created some of my ideas into computer rendered outcomes, again they take aspects from the video. But I feel that they are still communicating the idea and story of the song well and at the same time the are still visually interesting.