Building a promotional campaign

Whilst working for the band more recently I have been working on brand new press material that will be featured inside many of the newspapers around the county and the music magazine Rock N Reel. These adverts will be promoting up and coming gigs as well as the availability of the up and coming debut album. Whilst planning the promotional material there we certain aesthetic features that I had to consider, the first of which was that there had to be a consistent house style throughout all the different versions of the adverts. They also had to be eye catching to maximise the campaigns effectiveness. The last thing to consider was what content will actually be featured as I did not want to overload the piece with information so that the viewer did not take in the full extent of the information. Also the budget must be considered before the designing and production of the advertisements as the cost is related to how big you want the feature inside the publications, for example a bigger feature would cost more money. After deciding on a price and size I started to design the advertisements for the various different publications.

I first started to look through the promo shots that had already been taken of the band in the past but I felt many of them had already been over used, looked out dated and often not to the best quality. I eventually decided that taking some brand new promo shots of the band would be the best course of action. As I was working on a tight schedule I decided to only take pictures of the frontman of the band Ken Bonsall as he had the ‘image’ sporting a big Mohawk, I chose to do this as he is instantly recognisable and therefore would make the adverts instantly recognisable.

On the day of the photo-shoot we were hit by heavy snow however we chose to continue with the shoot anyway despite what would be difficult conditions. This shoot turned out to be one of the most challenging on location shoots I have ever done mostly due to the weather. Ever picture had a slight blue tint to it which made it harder to touch up in Photoshop. Also because of the falling snow in front of the lense it made the focusing very hard even with manual focus. However with some pictures the snow and slight blue gave the pictures a different but very effective look. Below are some of the pictures taken after they were touched up using Photoshop