Thursday, November 17, 2011

Photoshoot Inspiration

As we are shooting our album artwork tomorrow, we decided to look at some of our favourite magazine photoshoots from the past few years for inspiration.


One of our ideas came from this shot of The Vampire Diaries cast for Rolling Stone. We liked the idea of using a rope and tangling it around us, as it shows a unity between the band members, but also shows that we aren't such a 'clean cut' girlband, and have a fun and rough side. We thought that we could recreate a photo similar to this as there are three of us in the band, and this could give us a theme for our album, perhaps calling the album something similar to 'Tangled Up', but not actually 'Tangled Up' as this is the name of one of Girls Aloud's albums.

Another photo we really liked which we thought we could get inspiration was this photo of The Saturdays, from their photoshoot in Fabulous Magazine.



We liked this idea as again it would show us as a more rockier, rebellious band, and would work well with our current black/white/pink colour scheme. However, instead of holding police signs like the girls in this photo, we could hold three signs saying 'X', 'Y' and 'Z', emphasising the branding of our band. Again, similar to the first idea, this could give us a theme for our album, calling it something along the lines of police, jail or rebellion.
However, after discussing this idea we realised that we didn't want to do this as quite a few artists have already had the police idea as their front cover, such as Busted and You Me At Six.


Another idea we quite liked was the use of mirrors, as seen in this photoshoot of Leighton Meester and Blake Lively from Gossip Girl, for Entertainment Weekly.


In the pictures we can see one of the girls writing on the mirror in lipstick, and we thought we could recreate something like that for our album cover, perhaps with the name of the album written on the mirror. This would carry on our branding as the logo for The XYZs is a pink scribble which looks similar to a lipstick mark. We thought that this could be a really nice idea as on our shoot day we took a few mirror shots, which we all liked.


Another photoshoot we looked at was Kristen Stewart for Interview Magazine, as we thought the photos for this shoot were really different and striking. In particular we looked at these two shots, where Kristen is seen with ripped paper and transparent plastic across her mouth. We really liked the idea of ripped paper as this gives us the edgier rough look, and it would provide us a with lot of opportunities to play around with real paper or Photoshop (i.e. using ripped paper brushes and making our album cover look like it has ripped paper edges.)


Finally, we really liked this photo of Nina Dobrev, Sara Paxton and Jessica Lucas from Glamour Magazine, which is much more simple, classic and glamourous than the others. This photo just shows the three girls sitting down in outfits of the same colour; something we can easily recreate, and make look professionally taken. We really liked how the girls were positioned so that their faces were all on different levels, and the fact that they are placed against a plain contrasting background means all of our focuses are just on them. 


After discussing all of the options, we decided that the last idea would probably be the best idea, as it would show us in a more classic and glamorous light, contrasting from the painter outfits we wore for our video for Stripper. This would also be the easiest to take and the easiest idea to make look effective and professional, something we can use for a front cover. At school we also have plain backdrops which we can use to take photos with, making this idea the most practical too.

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