The Process

With every new project we're handed, I immediately feel a range of emotions towards it–excitement, yet intimidation, eagerness, yet hesitance to tackle it. My first ideas come to me during the first discussion of the project. This includes words, symbols, visuals and moods relative to the subject. I tend to leave the project at the back of my mind for a few days to allow for random inspiration or thoughts that may come my way.

Following this original thinking, I returned to the project, the Humber Jazz Studio Ensemble CD, needing to understand it as thoroughly as possible. I reviewed all the information given to us, organized the necessary elements in one location and began to research, research, research! I researched the meaning of the word 'prologue' (the title of the album) in relation to music and Jazz as well as its meaning in literature, drama, etc. to fully comprehend it. My research sparked brainstorming about appropriate visuals for 'prologue' which proved fairly difficult at first. My research also included other album covers, both personally owned and online, the Jazz music genre and the Humber Music program itself.

When I felt I had a strong grasp on the theme of the album, I began to sketch thumbnails on paper. I always sketch out every idea that comes to mind, horrible or not, as it helps to distinguish between the strong and weak concepts. From my thumbnails, I selected a few ideas that I felt had potential to be developed further and moved to the Macbook. Here, I am faced with a world of distractions–Facebook, MSN, Weeds, music, surfing and so on. My procrastination can take over for hours on end, until I find the motivation to focus on this one thing. I explored different ideas on my computer, until I found the one that worked best when executed. Once I had a concept and design direction to follow, the rest fell in to place with much time and stress over the typesetting and image placement. And music playing. Always music.