Monday 11 October 2010

the cd cover is here!

I was delegated the task of creating a CD cover to go with the track that we chose to make a music video of. As a group we decided that we wanted to create the cover so that it would fit in with our theme. Some initial ideas were to Incorporated some kind of optical illusion to tie in with the 'trippy' feel that we wanted to create within the film itself.
I therefore began by doing some research into optical illusions on the Internet. what i found was that a lot of the more effective illusions seemed to use two similar geometric shapes or patterns that were layered on top of one another to give the optical illusion effect.

This is an example of such an image, by simply changing the pattern from horizontal to vertical the image creates a strange effect.
To create my own optical illusion for the CD cover i started by finding an image of many dots set out in horizontal and vertical lines:
I then imported this image into photoshop, enlarged the dots and colored them red. after i had done that i put a copy of the original image onto a new layer and put this on top. to create the title of our fictional album i then erased the layer on top to reveal the layer below, giving the effect of an optical illusion:
The next thing we discussed as a group was what should make up the rest of the CD cover. in the end we settled on the idea of making a representation of a sheet of LSD tabs. We felt that this would fit in nicely with what we wanted our end movie to be about, and it would also hint to the narrative.
To create this effect i went onto a website that provides free, non-copyright, stencils for public use and i put them above the title on the CD cover, i then added dots between the images to give the effects of perforations on the sheet of tabs... then it was done!!!


 During the time time i created this CD cover i encountered quite a few problems. Firstly trying to create the title of the CD as an optical illusion whilst also making it legible posed a slight issue, to solve this i made use of colouring the dots and making them larger to make them stand out.
Initially the idea was to have the word 'pirana' between the images rather than just dots, however this made the cover as a whole look too crowded and once i had tried using dots instead i found the more simple cover to be more effective and essentially 'easier on the eye'.

1 comment:

  1. This is coming along nicely Louis. It is clear that you have put a lot of thought into the creation of this and how it is in keeping with the music video that you are planning to create. One thing I feel that this part of the art might be more suited to, is as an insert to the digipack. I am thinking of the way the group Spiritualized creating a whole package with this product: http://sleevage.com/spiritualized-ladies-and-gentlemen-we-are-floating-in-space/

    Keep up the great work

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