Album Covers.

Ms Dynamite tends to have dull album covers in gritty places but wearing brighter clothes. We think that she has created this mise en scene because she wants to maintain the look of coming from a run down area as she did not have much whilst growing up and wants to show that she is real and therefore make her audience relate to her. She has also made the background look dirty as she can sometimes be classed as a 'grime' artist, a sound that came from the london underground music scene, so she has used the metaphor of being 'grimey' to represent this particular music genre. On most of her album cover she is wearing some sort of tracksuit with trainers and this is because she is sort of a tomboy and makes her appear more androgynous to appeal to a wider market of both males and females but it also goes with the whole concept of her being an MC and the typical style of dress that is associated with this profession. With our album cover we went for a different look by dressing up in funky clothes of very random colours but keeping it feminine, we did this to help specifically market her recent change from grime music to funky house, so we made it fun and flamboyant and exciting. There is no example of how Ms Dynamite herself would have represented this change as the songs on our album were only released as a mix tape after Dynamite lost backing from her record company, however we seen this as a positive as it allowed us to be more creative with our own album cover without taking too much inspiration from her, hence making our idea more original. We used a bike path as the location for our album cover because we thought that it represented the song correctly and we thought that it gave an urban out look to the song, as it had multi-coloured graffiti already on the walls we used this for some shots as we thought it looked raw and captured the urban essence but we also used some shots with blank walls as we knew that these shots would give us more possibilities to play around with them on photoshop and easily add anything that we wanted later on. We tried to use many different shots such as a low angle shot, to show her dominance of the cover as she is the main selling point. We also played with a choice of long shots and mid shots as we felt that our mise en scene of clothing and key props was very important to our shots, we felt that we should use long shots to see her whole body so her total outfit could be seen so all colours were incorporated, however we also wanted to use mid shots so key props such as her multi-coloured nail varnish and the headphones she was wearing could be clearly seen,we used these as headphones are commonly referred to for listening to music in your own world, so we wanted to make t seem as if Ms Dynamites music was in its own world, different, fresh, new and in a league of its own. It turned out rather lucky that we used this prop as our original idea to create our own graffiti spelling out Ms Dynamite using photoshop could not work as it looked quite tacky when being created by hand as neither of us are very artistic and we could not download another font as the mac computers would not allow us to download it or convert it from PC, so instead we had to improvise and decided to carry on the headphone wire to spell out or text. We used a specific font as many of them were either to swirly or very small and hard to read so did not stand out enough, we then joined it together to make it look like a flowing lead. Although our covers did not look completely professional we are both quite proud of them as during this project was the first time either of us have attempted to use photoshop, so we had to learn from scratch and use a textbook to try and work out what we would have to do to try and make a certain effect.
We don't personally think that Ms Dynamite has very interesting album covers because most of the time it is just a big picture of her and not anything else in the frame so when we were doing our cover we tried to show the mise en scene aswell as the artist. Our pictures were very good and clear photo's and so luckily they did not need any editing done to the original photo in terms of contrasting etc. This was a huge advantage to us because it meant that we had less work to do when it came to putting the cd together. we had good lighting and the colours that we picked stood out so it made the picture vibrant.
we kept ms Dynamites theme of it being urban and gritty but we added colour to it. The fact that the location is gritty and grim but the artists is in bright colours adds contrast to the picture and makes the mise en scene more interesting. The good thing about our main character is that she dressed how she normally dresses which is diferent and unique and very colourful and so it was easy to pick the right clothes to wear which was also to our advantage as it meant that she then did not have to impersonate anyone. we think that in a way we were lucky in terms of who played the main character because certain people would feel embarrassed to do certain things but Haleemah was not as she is an out going person who does not care much for what people think and so this helped a great deal.