Construction of the Magazine Advert...

As my group and I were happy with my initial plan for how I hoped the advert would look I decided to create a template of how the wording would be arranged on the advert. The template is inserted below:

This template is very similar to the plan that I came up with, as I stuck to the colour motif that we had chosen (blue, white and black) because it helps to create a connection between all three of the media products that my group and I are producing - the magazine advert, digipak and music video. I also included the reviews from prominent Indie magazines as these reviews would help to sell the album due to the fact that they are from well trusted sources. The shift towards new media technology, such as programmes like iTunes, has also been included, because it reflects our target audience's needs and desires as they largely download their music online rather than going out an buying a hard copy. Thus, by including the information about it being sold online we are trying to encourage people to download it online, via iTunes, as well as advertising the digipak, so that whatever our audience's preference they know that they can get our album in either format.

As a group we then went through all of the pictures that we had taken on the photoshoot and picked the photograph that we wanted to appear on both the magazine advert and the front flap of the digipak. However, in the image that we all thought was best one of the band members, Laurence, was pulling a funny face, so we decided to cut him out of the image and then place another picture of him into our favourite photograph.

This is the photograph that we all liked and the one that Laurence was pulling a strange face in:

This is the photograph that we took the image of Laurence from:

How I turned the pictures above into our magazine advert and digipak front cover:

After copying and pasting Laurence from one photograph to another, in Adobe Photoshop, I also boosted the colours in the image on iPhoto in order to make the photograph as eye catching as possible. Then, I cropped the image so that you couldn't see the trees on either side of the photograph and used the gradient tool on Photoshop to make the sky more blue. After this, I also used a tool called 'Content-Aware' on Photoshop to remove the lamp post above Laurence's head (the male on the left hand side) and remove the houses behind Anthony and Erick (the two males on the right) so that there would be absolutely no possible distractions when our target audience were looking at the magazine advert. I then carefully arranged the text that carried all the information neccessary, making sure that the colours I used went with colour motifs used in our music video (black, grey, white and blue) so as to create continuity between all of the media products my group and I have created. Lastly, after this I had to copy and paste the top of the image over and over again, as the orginal image was too short to fit into an A4 page in a magazine.