Practice Cover Art: eXtaticus (A Dance Album)

In keeping with typical "dance music" styling, this cover art is a picture of the artist, but put through multiple lighting and colour filters to make it appear radiant and colourful; this is to give it a distinctly "rave"-like aesthetic, almost as though the picture was taken at some sort of party. The blue colour gives the artist a "cool" appearance, and the glow and bloomed lighting makes him stand out from the plain white background and accentuates the edges of the logo. The electric, neon-like blue highlights also give the cover a sense of technological advancement; it's a clean, noise-free and entirely artificial-looking photo - and this is what is expected of electronic dance music.

The lens flare is present both to add a degree of realism to the lighting, and to emphasise the angle of the shot.

Practice Cover Art: Scumbag (A Punk Album)

To practice for my final piece of artwork, I decided to create a mock-up of a piece of punk-style album artwork. The high-contrast, monochromatic image is typical of a punk album cover; usually, they consist of a threatening-looking shot (sometimes a medium or close-up, and often at a canted low angle) of the artist. It is deliberately "low-fi" and under-produced to give the "raw" aesthetic that punk artists usually seek; the subject of the shot has unkempt hair and a bruise on his lower lip, denoting that he's been in some sort of brawl (and the canted angle almost gives the impression that the character is drunk).

The logo is bright fluorescent pink to give a sense of harsh contrast to the rest of the image, but also as an allusion to the Sex Pistols (as is the mismatched, newspaper cutting-style lettering). I added a neon glow to make it reminiscent of the glowing signs outside of seedy urban strip clubs, which gives the piece a darker, more suggestive undertone.

Preliminary Task: Never Gonna Give You Up - Music Video Analysis

Link to Music Video: Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up

Never Gonna Give You Up employs various shot types; the most used is the medium shot, which shows the dance moves of Rick and the girls - though they rarely appear in the same shot together. Multiple locations are also used, to show a variation in the music video’s narrative, and to give the video a sense of flow. Shot length is usually quite short, with each shot lasting little over a single line of vocals - and this keeps the pace of the video high with the tempo of the music. Occasionally, there is a close-up shot of a part of a character (for example, Rick’s face while he sings, or his foot in the video’s establishing shot) - and this is usually concurrent with the progression of the music (for example, dancing and singing are accentuated by accompanying camera shots).

There are also a few shots of some acrobatics; in a long shot, a man runs up a wall and backflips off it, and in a medium shot, the bartender performs a straddle jump, somersaulting over the actual bar later on in the video. These characters are seen dancing to the music, which suggests that Rick himself is a talented, genuine musician - and this is supported by the variety of shots and different angles depicting Rick singing into a microphone on stage in the restaurant.

Rick himself is presented with a distinctly “cool” demeanour; his clothing was trendy for the era, and the fact that he’s surrounded by girls and is the focus of most of the shots in the video means that the audience is supposed to perceive him as being desirable. He’s the typical “boy next door” character - although it’s worth noting that none of the girls are actually dancing with him, denoting that he is still single and available. Despite being surrounded by dancers, Rick is performing to an empty restaurant, which lends the video a sense of loneliness; it’s almost suggested that the song is actually a kind of an invitation to the listener, as if he’s singing directly to them - and that the song is about a prospective future romantic partner as opposed to a current one. This links back to the singer being presented as being desirable; he’s open, available, talented and cool, and this is designed to make audience members want to have a romantic relationship with him (giving a sense of voyeurism).

Analysis of Album Front Cover: DragonForce - Ultra Beatdown

Analysis of Album Front Cover

DragonForce - Ultra Beatdown

The front cover to this album presents it with a distinctly futuristic tone; the background is covered in stars and planets, signifying an element of space travel. The blocks, pixellated effects and angular shapes imply artificiality; a sort of cyberpunk fusion of digital and mechanical elements. The main subject of the picture - the cyborg girl - is covered in augmented machinery and body parts; this is a fusion between artificial and natural (human). Her hair is very animé-like in its color and form, clearly an unrealistic and unnatural coloration - and the fact that it takes the shape of a graphic equaliser symbolises music.

The bright colours are especially unusual for the front cover of a metal album, and makes it stand out as being particularly atypical - the bright colours clash with the dark, grungy, metallic greys of the cyborg’s mechanical elements. With that much colour, it wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a dance album - and this sense of ambiguity surrounding the fact that the front cover doesn’t conform to genre stereotype is instrumental in creating a cross-audience appeal for the music. While the traditional mechanical grunge reels in the metal-heads, its futuristic, technological and electronic stylings appeals to geeks, sci-fi fans and dance music aficionados - audiences who wouldn’t typically be interested in this sort of music.

What’s also interesting is the fact that band are not present on the front cover (though they are depicted through a blurred, pixellated filter on the back); this signifies that they don’t want their own image interfering with the representation of the music, instead using artwork to depict the album in way that doesn’t involve them. It’s worth noting here that most DragonForce songs are almost like stories - and while they inevitably involve some sort of first-person content, it’s exclusively from the eyes of a created character, not from the actual band members. In effect, the band are discarding their own image, as it is effectively inconsequential to the abstract lyrical content of their songs. The imagery represents the songs more than the band themselves ever could, in terms of both the meanings of the lyrics, (which are hardly the height of deep introspection) as well as the distinctly “super-hyped electronic metal” aesthetic of the music itself.

Finally, the band’s logo also depicts a sort of brand identity, sporting dragon wings (congruous with the name “DragonForce”) and an angular, emboldened typeface with ornate, tail-like embellishments adorning many of the letters (in particular emphasising the D, F and E).