Our work so far, and plans for the future

Our finalised star persona is that of a slightly more down to earth personality. We hadn't based the band or star on anyone in particular, but more based around the indy culture surrounding the music. This involves a less flashy lifestyle than what the conventional stars may have, and keeping to a relatable and friendly attitude. The appearance side of this culture involves slightly less stylish or perhaps old-fashioned clothing, as well as looking somewhat unkempt. This gives the impression that the stars are more like the regular young people who might listen to the music, which is significant as not a lot of popular music has that kind of relateablility with their audience. In terms of the attitude, we try to show a friendly, laid back and possibly lazy looking youth which I feel is relevant to the rest of the indy scene. Our star shows relation to the possibly more introverted majority of the indy culture, by appearing slightly more restrained than his peers, who would sit back in a dignified manner, while everyone else dropped where they stood. However, he also relates to the crazier side of the youth culture, shown drinking in excess and having fun at a raukus party.

The way in which we will ensure continuity between our three products is to keep each image down-to-earth and minimalistic, yet clearly related to youth culture. The way we will do this is to include things that we feel represents the band the best, and at the same time keep within the theme of simplicity. For example, one of our ideas was to have a tatty armchair (like the one in our music video) with maybe a few alchohol bottles surrounding it as the digipack cover, and for the magazine cover, have one of the same bottles as in the video or digipack cover, but perhaps in shards on the floor, or with the band name written on the label. We want to keep a sense of a disorganised and untidy lifestyle, along with the party and drinking culture element, so these ideas fill the role well.

My own first idea for the magazine cover was to have a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey dominating the page, and upon the sticker, have the name of our band and album in the same style as the brand's name. As a group we also had the idea of having for either the magazine or digi-pack, a picture of us four walking in line facing away from the camera. Our idea for the digi-pack was also going to be the picture of the tatty armchair I mentioned before.
In terms of costume, we planned on a very youth orientated, low maintanence style that would be relatable to younger generations, and although it would appear that our style has little thought put into it, there is method in our lack of style, something which one may call a "hipster" style.
Lighting in our main product is dominatly dark red. We found that this is the most effective way of showing a party scene as the shade is dark enough for the obscurity of a party, and at the same time assimilates the kind of atmosphere you would have at one of these parties. We will use lighting a lot to show what tense the scene is in, the party being dimly lit in dark red, and the present brightly lit with the sunlight. This contrast was very useful to us, and easy to show.
Makeup for us wasn't such a big deal, as we weren't exactly acting a KISS concert, nor were we indulging in a lot of close-ups with glamerous appearances. Also, we are all males, and wouldn't portray the stars as men who would usually wear makeup.
We are going to use photoshop to mainly give a darker tone to everything to keep the image of humble and down to earth-ness, as well as add depth to the photos. An example of this I can use is this idea for the magazine cover: