Postmodern Album Covers: The Clash - London Calling And Elvis Presley - Elvis Presley

In today's media class we continued to talk about postmodernism and how nowadays media texts can be seen as postmodern. Today we were discussing postmodernism in album covers and looking at some postmodern album covers. I thought I would post this to my blog and later I could compare and contrast some of these postmodern covers with my own album artwork. 

The Clash - London Calling

Firstly this album cover is very traditional when looking for the conventions of an album cover. The album art has the typical album name, artist/band name and a main image that you would expect to find on any album cover.

The main image is of a man, the lead artist, smashing a guitar on the floor. This shows a sense of rebelliousness and aggression. It is also a stereotypical image that we associate with the rock genre, smashing instruments and objects to pieces. The shot also looks in action/in motion, we know exactly how the image would turn out if it were a movie still a few seconds later. This shows the energy coming from the image and the blurring effect also adds to the illusion that the image is in motion. The image is also in black and white which gives us that feeling that the album is serious and also not entirely happy, we also feel the conviction and the classic feel to the past from the image not being in colour.

The font is a complete contrast to the image. For a start the font is colourful, bubbly, loud and playful compared to the seriousness of the image. The image and the font together is a juxtaposition. This use of juxtaposition pulls the audience in and holds their attention, once you look at the cover it is difficult to look away from it as it is so involving.

This album cover is different to any album cover I have come across however what makes it postmodern is the fact that it is a homage of Elvis Presley's first album.

Elvis Presley - Elvis Presley

As you can see both album covers are pretty much the same apart from the obvious changes made to the album cover and main image. The reason this is a homage of Elvis Presley's first album is because of the seriousness of the photo and the layout of The Clash's artwork. They are not mocking the original album artwork idea they are simply celebrating the original text.

Further Researching An Artist - Lily Allen

Below is a video that was shown on Sky Arts 1. It is a one-to-one interview with Laurie Taylor about the life of Lily Allen and how she has grown up wanting to be a singer. She also discusses the lyrics in some of her songs and how she uses some of her personal life and issues in some of her lyrics and her music videos.

Half Term

Unfortunately during half term I was away and therefore we did not have the opportunity to film more of the narrative or the performance. Tomorrow we will be discussing what we can next shot and also look back at some of the clips we have already edited and our storyboards.

My Website

Below is a download link if you wish to view my website in it's full multimedia form. I have uploaded it as a .zip file as I was unable to upload the HTML to a proper internet server for a number of reasons.


My website is full of multimedia that I have created myself and uploaded to the website. The process I took to make all the parts of the website can be seen earlier in the blog.

Steps when downloading the website:

• After downloading the file it will be a .zip file
• You will then need to double click this to unzip the folder
• A new folder will be displayed
• To view the website, double click on the PRESS ME.html file

Download My Website!

Putting Together The Website

I knew before I started making the website home page that I wanted to make a multimedia website that takes advantage of all the elements: text, images, videos, and audio. Below are the parts of the website that I have uploaded to the website which you can see live soon.

Above is the video which is in the website. I wanted to add a video to the website to make it much more interesting and eye-catching for the audience.

This is the title that is placed on the top of my website. It fades in and out and also flickers slightly as I believe this makes it a lot more suitable for the website and the whole product set.


I also have a large selection of images that are placed around the website. Plus an MP3 of the song that plays automatically when you enter the site, this also has an option to be turned off and on using a player bar situated underneath a small thumbnail of the album cover.

Editing The Music Video

Today we played about with the narrative clips and video transitions with the audio clip of 'Bring Me To Life'. We looked at the storyboards we have created and placed some of the narrative clips onto the Final Cut Express timeline. Overall we managed to put together approximately 20 seconds of the music video finished with video transitions and speed changes. Video transitions we used were a 'cross dissolve' as we believe it fitted well with the beat of the song and exaggerate the distressing nature of the narrative. We also made some of the clips run at 50% of the speed for the same reasons.

Meeting

Today Elliot was still unwell so both Faye and I decided to continue to convert the MP4 files to MOV in order for them to be ready for editing in Final Cut Express. We wanted to have all the narrative clips converted by the end of the week so we could focus on the filming, converting and editing of the performance clips next week.