poster for Lanmou

Use of technology and Photoshop in my Ancilliary tasks

Photoshop is a useful creative tool that I utilized to create the ancillary tasks for my A2 year. I used it to create an album digipak and a poster campaign advertising the band and their new album launch.

The Photoshop process was fun and incredibly creative, it allowed me to experiment and create a new media product.   To create this digipak I critically evaluated our band image and attempted to recreate this in a campaign whilst trying to stick to conventions of alternative music. To create an image suitable for this I altered pre-existing photos by adapting the contrast and then blurred the blobs. I then using layers on Photoshop added a cut out of a Photo that I took to layer over the blurred balls. Thi slayering process would not have been possible without the Photoshop technique.  It added a creative element to the process of production.

The next stage to creating the poster and digipak was creating the writing for the band, this is crucial as it is how the band name will be seen by all people.   To do this I experimented with different writing style and borders to the letter type, I even tried to draw out different ways of writing the name, in the end I turned to the group so that we could discuss what we wanted for the band and we decided that due to them being alternative that we would make it seem that they where trying to have a poke at a writing style that we see all the time, this came in the form of Time New Roman

[THIS WRITING STYLE]

The end product looked like this.

After having come up with this idea I experimented with the writing further taking it through different stages using thin and fat borders in an attempt to make it stand out further. In the end we decided to keep it as simple as possible as this kept to our idea of them making a stance against the normal by being normal.

To incorporate the band members I used photos that we had of them from the shoot day. To these I copied the original image several times over and placed them through a filter called “Threshold” this is an adaptable filter that I played with to create an easily recognizable “stencil” of all of our band members. What I did to create the stencils was copy the original four times. I then adapted the threshold of each image except the fourth. After having adapter the threshold of the first three I layered them one by one erasing through the top layer to reveal lower layers so as to keep parts that I wanted and remove the darkened areas that I had not wanted. After having layered the three layers with threshold adaptations I then looked at the original image to see if this was as close as I could get it whilst still maintaining a realistic stencil outline that and that is how I have come to creating these stencils.

[INSERT STENCIL FACES HERE]

This is how I have used Photoshop creatively in my media project.