This is Video for Busted,'What I Go To School for' that we compiled as a class to emulate there style and camera shots.
Finally I pasted in a barcode, copyright logo and DVD symbol to make the final product look more professional and like the ones you can buy. By the copyright symbol I wrote a paragraph about the record label and artist rights. In conclusion, I didn't find producing a DVD cover for 'cry me a river' that difficult as long as it was planned before.
Our chosen song was 'cry me a river' by Justin Timberlake, released in 2002. After listening to the song and analysing the lyrics the video helped us imagine the plot in the song. After this we wrote a list of possible suitable locations to take pictures for the DVD cover that were easily accessible from college.
We came to the conclusion that a river would be the most suitable place as it ties into the song title. The song is about a lost love so we thought because both of us are going to be in the pictures, one person should be looking into the camera (missing someone) and the other person should be walking away from the relationship. Our poses for the photos were quite natural because we wanted to show emotions without physically looking to artificial.
Our initial idea was to take a picture of Mel with sunglasses on and show the reflection of me in the sunglasses, as if that is what is in her thoughts. However this didn't work out to well so we used to sunglasses as a prop to give a mysterious aspect and make her look depressed. We took images from different angles of my eye to blend into the image of Mel. I thought this would tie into 'crying' and also make the image look more complex. By taking numerous photos we ended up with a few we liked and others that we couldn't fit into our ideas. Because it was a sunny day, our lighting was natural so we didn't feel the need to use the flash on the camera. We thought natural lighting would add to the realistic image we were trying to create.
We already had an idea of what we wanted to final product to look like after editing but by playing around we found new techniques that looked effective. After changing the dimensions on Photoshop to that of a DVD cover with a spine I started to put images in place. I wanted to put a close up image of Mel on the front with a blend of my eye by adjusting the transparency. We sharpened the image of Mel to make sure she was still visible and also added a contrast to make the picture look more high quality.
Now that the basic background of the front cover was done I focused on the back. I used an image of me taken by Mel walking away (like our first idea). By putting each person on separate sides it shows that breakdown and distance between them; like the song states. We kept the image the same because the background was of The Wrekin so it looked intentional. But to make me stand out from the backdrop I highlighted myself and make the section look brighter. At this point the back looked simpler than the front and the two didn’t really connect. We looked at our still images of the river and cropped them to take out any trees; so just the water remained. Then we made the contrast on the image about 20% and stretched it over the whole image- front, spine and back. This made all of the cover have a water ripple effect as if it was under water to tie in with 'river' and it also added continuity too the whole cover.
At this point the only thing not completed was the spine, all we did to it was add contrast to the river image so it was more noticeable and acts as a background. All the major image effects were completed and overall I didn't find Photoshop to hard to use after having a look at the different effects available.
To finish off we needed to add text (title, DVD logo, copyright etc) to make the cover look more official and resemble others that are around. We wanted to keep the images the main focal point so we kept the writing in a simple 'Lucida handwriting' font as it looked italic and fitted into the theme. I chose to keep it in black to look simple and not to animated and so people can easily see it. I chose to put '...cry me a river' instead of 'Cry Me a River' so it looked less formal and appealed to the teenage target audience and the '...' give connotations of a story.
After looking at other DVD covers I saw that there was a track list. Instead of making one up I went on the internet and found the track list for Justin Timberlake’s album 'Justified' with the song 'cry me a river' on. To make the track list look different I faded the coloured on each song from black to white to give the impression them were fading like the relationship and due to the water.
