British Music Experience Neg 2

A difficult one in some ways this one. Mainly as I generated too many ideas in order to find a way of answering the brief which really ate in to production time.  One of the requirements was that we find a way to communicate the richness of the British Music experience to get more poeple through their doors. For me though I’m not sure that was the right way for them to go about it. The idea of richness is an abstract one and trying to find a way to connect abstract themes associated with British popular music, with popular means of delivery or commonly understood messages had plenty of problems. In terms of my thoughts, promoting a populist shrine to music lead down certain trains of thought, which didn’t really lend themselves to ideas of musical richness. The British music experience (museum)  its self has a very electronic feel to it with state of the art displays etc… and having that set against the associations most people would hold in their minds about great British popular music from the sixties and so on has difficult contradictions if your going to try and sell something with a degree honesty. Another problem is copyright and using images or music from come of the big bands is difficult as they cost lots of money to use. Copyright free images are pretty much impossible to find of any bands anybody would recognise any way. In the end it was a toss up between ideas around memories of musical connections to their own lives and a simpler idea to visualise, evolution. I went with the memories theme and used a series of abstract visuals of relatively mundane scenes with the hope of them triggering certain responses once people had made the connection with music. They communicate some level of richness but looking back at them now the link with music is too distant an abstract to connect with unless you’re a captive audience looking in a magazine with some time think. The visualisation of evolution idea, communicates more clearly music, but has less in the way of richness. My limits on time for a number of reasons but including generating too many ideas before developing, caused problems on this one. I’d make more efficient use of my time in future and commit sooner to an idea and then the following concepts. I’m not sure if the done thing to question how a brief is written, but I do think that the brief is perhaps asking for the wrong things or in a manner which doesn’t lend its self to a cohernent response. I do then ask myself if its my job to second guess what they might really want and dismiss what they are asking for or just go with what they say they want. There are also some typographic issues on what I did produce in that the text was too small to be read on a poster on the go it would be okay on a full page magazine print.