R&P Post 22: Planning my Promo Shots

For our digipak and website we would need to have a photo shootso that we had material to edit and include. We therefore decided to draw some promo shots - some with the whole band and some individual shots.

This is a standard promo shot of the whole band standing and is very common within the indie genre, such as bands like The 1975 who are all seen standing in a line with the lead singer, Matt Healy, standing in the middle and slightly forward. This then inspired me to try and include a range of shots in this format, including..

The 1975

1) A traditional shot with us all in a straight line and blank facial expressions.
2) A shot of us in two staggered lines, possibly pulling different expressions to one another however we will have to experiment on the day to see what works best.
3) A shot with Luke standing slightly infront of us to demonstrate that he is the lead singer of the band. I think this shot will be the best when trying different expressions as we can create a contrast between Luke's expression and the rest of the band members.
These shots will be crucial for our website as it is the most generic and familiar to our target audience.



This shot will be much tighter so that it is more personal and allows our target audience to see our facial expressions more clearly. This will allow us to portray our different character personas via our expressions and style, for example Luke's messy hair connotes playfulness and my winged eyeliner has flirtatious connotations. However our positions have changed so that we are now sitting on the floor.

Catfish and the Bottlemen

We will make sure to try out multiple different expressions, a definite would be moody expressions, as seen to the left, seems to be a common convention and would also reflect our band's image well. We will also have shots where we are all laughing and smiling to use on our website or possibly for the inside of our digipak as it is much more intimate and creates a differrent perspective for our band.

Having our band sitting on the floor is another common convention for indie/rock bands as it often portrays their moody,

Tonight Alive

care-free nature. The change in the band members' sitting positions also reflects their different characters.

My only concern is that shooting these shots against a whit backdrop may pose difficult to get us looking like we are slumped and tired as we can not lean against the back drop. However I think that if body language is right this won't be an issue.


We then decided to create profile shots of the band as in the early weeks of production Alistair and I were looking at the Gorillaz album cover and thought this could create an interesting effect if we were to replicate it.

Side profile & face on

Gorillaz - Demon Days