I think my best work so far have been the pieces involving Photoshop drawings that I have made from photos I have taken. I also enjoyed using Premiere pro to animate these drawings as well as after effects to help with these animations. For My final piece I want to make a final piece advertising a series of albums by the same artists instead of just one album. I plan to incorporate photoshop drawing as well as animating using photoshop and Premiere Pro. My client will remain as Spotify for this Final piece but I will pick a new Music artist to look at- I would like to find someone who has a large range of album art to look at. 

For my first final piece I want to look at the range of album art that has been created for the albums of Hip hop artists MF Doom. The Artworks were created by a range of artists and photographers

Jason Jagel is the Artist behind the Doomsday Cover. He took a lot of in inspirations from comic books for the style of this cover, which is especially clear when looking at his typography, where he uses distinct comic style lettering. The mask that MF doom would wear in public was inspired by the mask worn by a comic book villain, so a lot of the art on his albums has a distinct comic book style. The Picture on the left is the cover for the original release of the album and the right is an updated version for the 2011 reissue of the album.

MF Dooms other album covers are very different. The MadVillainy cover is a dark and gloomy photo that is quite minimalist in terms of text and Colour. The King Geedorah Cover is also minimal but have more of a paper origami style as everything appears to be made up of 2D surfaces. 

MF Doom's Music is often written from the point of view of a character he has created, and the King Geedorah Album was released by him under a fake name. I like that the artworks reflect these huge differences in his music which is why I think a video showing the different styles of art on his covers would work well to advertise his wide range in Discography. 

The cover of Doomsday features tall looming buildings, and music videos and posters surrounding the release of the album featured 1950s style urban metropolitan areas. To create this kind of scene I Added more tall buildings: for some I just cut out buildings from other photos I had taken but for the three yellow cubic towers I just lifted and reshaped the main building in the original image. Using the brush tool I traced over the buildings to create an outline, and then on a new layer adding colour to the image. Jagel adds line patterns to create shading, so I added some of these to my buildings using the brush tool. I also used a dotted brush to add some more texture and shading, which I thought fitted in well with the comic book style. Finally I added some lightning using the pen tool, and the clouds and dots were drawn with the brush tool.

Animating The Dots

I wanted the dots to float away in the video - to do this I could have simply moved a dot upwards in a straight line using premiere but then they would have stayed the same size and same distance apart, looking quite unnatural. I wanted them to change size and distance and look energetic. To do this I drew each dot individually, one frame at a time. I created a video group for each collection of dots, and set the layer durations to 2 frames. I turned the onion skin setting, which meant I could see a faint outline of the previous frame, which helped to draw the movement of the dots. To make this animation I had to make 475 layers, which made a total of 2044 of these dots which had to be drawn individually.

Animating the text

To start the text I wrote the word using the text and raised the end slightly using the 'warp transform' tool. Next I selected the text, and using the stroke tool creating an outline of the text, setting the width of the outlines to 20 pixels and then deleted the original text layer. With the brush tool I Wrote the text in red then in yellow. I added a boarder around the yellow text with a slightly lighter shade of yellow to mimic the effect of a real pen being used and leaving behind a faded edge. I also added a thin pen line in blue to create the effect of the sketch lines, like it was hand drawn like old 1950s comic books. 

I didn't want anything to remain completely still in the video as To animate the text I went into the timeline window and created a new video group for each part of the text. I duplicated the main black outline and duplicated it 5 times. I moved the first copy on pixel to the right, the 2nd one pixel up, the 3rd one to the left, and so on so it rotated one pixel in an anti-clockwise motion. I then duplicated these 5 layers about 20 times so I had a looped animation of the layer wobbling slightly. I repeated the technique for many of the text layers but changes the direction they rotated or the direction they started on so they were all slightly out of sync. When I looked at examples of Comics from the 1960s there would sometimes be small ink misprints, which is why I wanted to animate the text with this slightly misaligned look

To make the Doomsday mask I drew the outlines using the brush tool, then built up layers of colours on new layers to create the shadows. I exported the head as a PNG which could be placed behind the buildings when compiling the animation in Premiere Pro. To animate the head I created key frames on the layer timeline and set three different positions so it would start below, then rise, then sink back down. I then looped this animation so it would happen continuously.

Adding movement in Adobe After Effects

I didn't want anything in the video to stay completely still- for most a lot of objects I could move them around or redraw them frame by frame. To avoid having to redraw the buildings multiple times I added movement using after effects. To do this, I first imported the buildings into After Effects and created an "adjustment layer". Then in the effects panel I added the effect "turbulent displace" to the adjustment layer, which creates a distorted and rippled effect on the image. The evolution dial in the settings panel of this effect changes the direction of the images movement. I created six key frames where the image wobbles to 6 different degrees and selected the "toggle hold key frame" setting which makes the image jump between positions rather than fade between them. I then looped the 6 key frames which creates the effect of a constantly moving image.

I then compiled all my sections together: The moving buildings, the animated text, The Masked person, and the animated dots. I made a GIF for the lighting, flicking between two drawings of the lighting back and forth. I also made a similar GIF for he red clouds, slowly cycling through a series of different versions of the clouds.

To create this mask I imported the previous mask into a document and used its silhouette as a base for the new one. I used a brush with a sild edge to draw the eye holes and the nose, but then used the brush tool with a textured edge to add the shading. I stacked up layers of shading while I looked at the original cover until the mask was finished.

The mad Villainy Cover uses dark contrasting lighting and no colour. To create a similar moody look I first put my image into black and white using an adjustment layer and lowing the saturation. Then secondly I added a curves layer, drawing a winding curve which inverted certain sections of the image, and creating more contrast, giving a darker gloomy effect to the drawing. I then Added the mask behind the buildings.  

I recreated the text from the original Album in photoshop using the selection tools- This font is mostly perfectly straight, but pixilated on Diagonal pieces, which I made by arranging multiple small squares. I wanted to create an animation of the letters being typed because I thought that would work well with the obviously digital & pixelated text. To create the animation I made a long rectangle to act as the screen curser and duplicated 4 times, then in the time line panel I placed a short gap between the 4 copies so it flickered on and off. The I had another 9 copies that briefly flicked on in front of the letters as they appeared, like they were being typed. I arranged each letter in the timeline panel so they would each appear in a sequence at the same pace of the rectangle, so they looked like they were being typed on a computer. 

To create the Pixel effect on the MF Doom Mask I applied the Mosaic Effect in premiere Pro to the Layer with the Mask on. This effect pixelates n image into several small blocks. I increased the amount of blocks slightly in 11 increments, which makes it seems like more detail is being formed. I thought this effect fitted well with the pixelated text in the MadVillain Cover.

For the third poster I wanted to create an animation of the three heads looming over the buildings. The outlines of the heads were drawn using the brush tool- I drew the left half then duplicated it and flipped it to make the full symmetrical head, which I then duplicated twice. Next I drew their full bodies with the pen tool and coloured them in with the brush tool. I also changed the perspective of the heads to using the Transform Warp tool to change the direction they were looking. After that I inverted the black outline so only the red sections were visible. 

The text was typed using the text tool but then I added a worn texture to it using the brush tool. To animate the text I created a layer mask and removed a little bit of the right end of the text, then duplicated the layer and removed a little bit more off the end, and repeated this until I had a copy with only small piece left. I then Put these layers onto a timeline in Photoshop  

The style used in the King Geedorah Album cover has no outlines, and all the shapes are made from red blocks. To make my image fit with this style I coloured in the original outline in red using the brush tool and then inverted the black outline, so it appeared as though the image was made of separate 2D surfaces, fitting with the paper look of the album cover. 

I wanted the heads to have some movement so I redrew them multiple times, again using the onion skin tool. I then coloured in each copy using the brush tool and then made a video loop of cycling through the copies so the heads wobbled slightly. Each head was exported as video and Premiere Pro I added key frames to their positions, making them slowly rise over the buildings during the video.

The planes were drawn in photoshop- for these I drew the first half with the brush tool, duplicated it, and flipped it horizontally to make the symmetrical plane. I then also added position key frames to these layers in Premiere Pro so they moved across the scene. 

I wanted my video to begin with a drawing of a phone playing music on the Spotify app and have the camera travel inside the phone to see the pictures. To create this animation I first took an image of my phone surrounded by objects to act as a guide for the drawing. Once I imported the photo into photoshop I traced the outlines using the brush tool, and then coloured them in on a new layer. For the shading I  used a brush with a halftone texture because I thought it worked well with the comic book style of the doomsday cover.

Before I exported the image I cut a hole in the phone where the album would go, then Exported the image as a PNG so that section was completely transparent when imported into Lightroom.

For the word Spotify I used the same methods as I did for the "Doomsday" lettering- stacking multiple layers and then shifting each layer by one pixel to create movement. For the word 'now' I just created a simple gif where the text rotates back and forth by using the transform tool. For the "available" I used the same style that had been used on the word "operation" in the first poster - this was made simply by redrawing the word multiple times and cycling through the copies to make the text wobble.

Finally I put all the short videos, Gifs and images together into a new Premiere Document. For zooming into the phone screen at the beginning I used a similar method to the album frame in the LOUIE video but in reverse- where the scale increases so much that the hole in the phone is bigger than the size of the entire Premiere Pro canvas.

The song I used had a long opening but I cut and removed some parts to make a shorter version, and I timed the transitions in the video to line up with the song. 

My aim was to show the large variety and a range of MF Doom's discography, and I think this is presented well through the variation of art styles I used to make the video. This links to my theme through the different varieties of Typography used to pair with different styles, for example using modern pixel type with more photo-realistic image, and 1950s comic book lettering to match with the more graphic novel style of the Doomsday cover. I liked Jason Jagel's use short lines on the buildings in a doodle-like pattern creates a lively, youthful look, which contrasts with the darker monochrome cover. If I had more time I would love to add more movement to some parts of the scenes, possibly some people on the ground to make the scenes more lively, as well as being used to emphasise the large scale of the intimidating heads and figures and could react to their movements.