As my original picture of my article for evaluation question 2 didn't zoom in far enough to read the writing, I have posted the transcript of the article here as well to make it easier to read:
"For any album to sell, it has to have a good
marketing campaign behind it. It’s that simple. You can create the best album
in the world, but if no one hears about it or finds it, then obviously, no
one’s going to buy it. Now obviously, working with a band like Danse Macabre,
it’d be pretty hard to hide a new album from the world, but we still need to
promote it to get it to as many fans and new fans as possible. Everything has
to connect to do this. The songs, the lyrics, the album name, the album
artwork, the music videos, the advertising, etc. etc. You get the point. It all
has to become one living, breathing organism, as corny as that sounds. So
working together with Thorn and the crew, we’ve all tried to keep the same
themes throughout…you know, horror, death, fear, and all that. And you know, we
all feel it turned out pretty well in the end.
Our main artist for the project was
Alyss Redetta. She was so much help, and had the right twisted, morbid
fascination that we were looking for the album artwork. We were very insistent
that the album artwork and the advertising design matched. We wanted people to
be able to connect the album with the advertising posters just through the
artwork. For a while, we played with the idea of using the crucifixion image
that featured on the inside of the digipack, as the main image to base the
advertising around. This quickly vanished as Az pointed out how it had “the
subtlety of a cat in a blender” or something along those lines. We also came
across some trouble with Interscope Records publishing the album with such gory
advertising. They were happy to publish the album itself as long as the image
in question only featured on the inside of the digipack, which was a rare
concession the band were willing to make.
In
the end, we all decided to focus the advertising on the main image people would
associate the album with; the front cover. This was an obvious idea, but with a
band like this, you always put off giving them the obvious answer as long as
possible. We got Alyss to draw up a full version of the half body shown on the
album’s cover and then we based the advertising campaign around that. I loved
how the album and adverts connected together through this simple image, whilst
still being different enough that you weren’t seeing the same thing on both.
Damien was adamant from the beginning that he didn’t want the advertising to
match the album exactly, but I think he was happy with the final result, just
like the rest of us.
The first music video we made was for the song ‘Evidence’
from the album. We were using this as the main promotional single for the album
and felt that we really had to get across the main themes of the album in that
one video. We tried to stay away from the imagery used in the album artwork for
the video, and make the horror more psychological and less gore focused. The
main narrative came in a brainstorming session with the band and it’s really a
mash up of a lot of different ideas. The whole red-riding hood imagery, and
that hunter and hunted premise; it all came together pretty quickly. We wanted
to create fear. Whether we achieved this is still up for debate.
A
major decision Damien and the band decided, was to not use any photos of them
anywhere in the album. This is quite unusual, even for the metal genre, but
they were really keen on pushing forward the horror in this album, and felt
this could be achieved well through the use of illustrations. It obviously
weakens the connection between the band’s image and the album itself, but we
minimised the amount the band featured in the music video as well, so we hope
to put the focus more on the feeling of fear rather than the band themselves.
It was that faceless fear that we were definitely going for."
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