Iconography-Lupe Fiasco

Iconography is the way that symbols and images are used to identify and represent individuals through art such as album covers and music videos

We looked at the case study of alternative hip hop rapper Lupe Fiasco and his album Food and Liquor, which features the song 'Superstar'

The album cover for Food and Liquor was designed by Chuck Anderson and Righteous Kung Fu, the items surrounding Lupe Fiasco were chosen as he said he carried them around every day and also he parodied drive by shootings by replacing guns with books and liquor with milk and cookies.

The album cover

The album artwork in relation to song and genre 

-Food and Liquors album cover suggests an upbeat tempo through the bright colours and lights shown behind and around the artist relating to his superstar status, this also suggests a futuristic element and superiority to others. The songs beat and style is shown through the cover as his clothing and suggests stereotypical artist of this genre and, the use of the background suggests something is different to what would normally be expected of the hip hop genre.

Album in relation to lyrics of the song

 -The lyrics featured in the song mainly focus around the idea of being famous and materialistic objects this is represented in the cover as he is surrounded by different objects such as Nintendo DS.

-'And the lights are on and the want a show'- bright lights and holding ghetto blaster album cover start of the show

-'Did you improve on the design, did you do something new?'-different design in comparison to previous album cover

Typography

- The typography for this album cover does not represent Lupe Fiasco very well as it mainly connotates a Bollywood style

-Hip hop is not represented through this typography 

MTV Dance Logo and Music Video

The last thing we had to complete our music video was put a music channel logo on our sequence. In order for our music video to look real we decided to put MTV Dance logo in the top left hand corner of our music video sequence, this feature makes our music video look complete.  We decided to use MTV dance as we think our music video genre is best suited for the existing target audience that have an interest in dance music.

-We had a few problems uploading our music video as our Mac, Sean had a breakdown. This meant we had to get a technician to put onto a hard drive so we could upload it to youtube from another computer.

Our music video......



Letter Boxing

We chose to letter box our music video because we saw from our research that a lot of other dance music videos use it, this suggested to us that it was a convention of our genre that we should follow, it would also make our music video look more proffesional. Letter boxing took a lot of time as we had to do it to each clip individually and then had to change the aspect ratio because some of the visuals were cut off in the shot i.e. peoples faces so we had to move the shot up or down to fit the whole shot in.

Editing

When we imported our sequence some of our shots hadn't been colour graded. We had to go back through our music video and find the shots to correct them, after we had corrected them we put the shots back into the final sequence.

Colour grading

After looking at our final sequence of our music video we decided that we needed to alter the colour of the shots so they would all be consistent with each other. We used colour to do the colour grading of our shots as some of the paint powder fight scenes were to grainy, the studio was too dark, and the lip sync and smashing plates were sharp but needed to be brightened, at first we didn't know how to use the program and eventually figured out how to use it. We changed the colours, contrast and lighting and had to alter each clip by clip, this took a lot of time. We then sent the sequence back to Final Cut Pro to see if the sequence needed to be edited any further, the colour grading made our sequence more consistent with each of the other shots.

Editing

This day was quite stressful because we needed to finish our sequence and didn't know if we would do it, although we did not follow our storyboard exactly because some shots didn't turn out as well as we thought, however the shots have still worked out and the music video looks good. We need to colour grade our music video now so the lighting and colour are consistent

Importing everything

We have now got to import our remaining footage (smashing plates and lip syncing) from our shoots, all of our powder paint and fight studio footage is already on the Final Cut in our sequence. Once we have done this we will be able to start finalizing the sequence.

Filming the smashing plates

We decided to use the dark room to shoot this scene in. It was pitch black and we put black paper on the floor, we used the light on the camera to get the same lighting as we had in the other scences. We used different heights to drop the plates from to get different smashing effects, and used different camera heights. We put powder paint on the plates so when the plate smashed it would link to our other paint scene as there would be an explosion of colour. The shots we got during this filming session work very well.

Second scene shoot

Our second shoot went well. We had 2 hours to shoot in but ran over abit, as a result some of the shots weren't as good as they could have been. We were unable to shoot the plates smashing at our location so we have decided to use the dark room and put powder paint on the plate so when they smash they create a good slow motion effect. When we put the footage we had on to the macs we edited it and put in the sequence although, we will need to colour grade so it matches the other shots we have.

Second scene location

Our initial idea was to shoot our second scene in the drama studio but, we were unable to get this location as other people were using it as a result, we have decided to use a photography studio this would also give us the opportunity to have better lighting and other facilities to use for our shoot. We think our set up will look something like this