Much as I wished this project would go die since I got so overtly stressed out over it, there would be one more week of fanatic-related work.
But this time I was a little more relaxed I think.
Basically we had to create a product from our obsession. I already knew I wanted to do something with the overlapping drawings of Gaga and thought to do a full-sized long length replica of the jumping drawings to sell as a poster/booklet, but found that there wasn't a sufficiently long enough piece of paper to reprint the images, and sewing or sticking pages together looked kind of clumsy and tacky.
So I decided instead to scale down the images by scanning them onto the computer, combining them all together into a continuous image, and then having them printed onto A4 paper.
After trimming down and choosing the best paper weight for the job, this is the result:
The phrase 'GAGA'S GOT IT' has been used because that's how I felt when I watched the film from where the still shots come from. Like, she ruled the world or that she knows what she's doing.
20or so editions were printed, and each pencil-signed and numbered with my main blog (
conglats.blogspot.com) written in the back, so that when I'm famous, people will be so happy to have bought one of my super old pieces of work, duh! About 15 of these editions have badges attached to them in order to add value to them (a premium product perse). These badges were created when one of my tutors brought in a professional badge-maker and so I tried it out with the picture (which was chosen as you cannot mistake the picture for anyone but Gaga) that you can see on the badge, and the badges came out looking super-awesome! For some of the badges, I decided to colour in parts of Gaga's face/hair in orange and yellow (those colours as they were the only ones I had at the time!) which added extra impact to the greyscale badges. The number 15 wasn't chosen specifically, but just because at 15 badges, there weren't anymore badge-making materials left and I'd have to buy them from the German manufacturer in Germany and I didn't have time to do that. Initially I wanted to have badges on all the booklets, but this restriction worked to my favour, being able to charge the with-badge booklets a premium price than those without.
The neutral-colour string was used to cleanly keep the booklet folded before purchase, as well as to give the booklet a more attractive and professional-looking feel.
So this booklet was simply printed using an inkjet printer. The combination of premium paper and inkjet gave a more screenprint feel even though it wasn't, which also upped how professional the product looked.
The pictures show the first side of the folded out booklet.
I like the blank space to content ratio, which I think gives the imagery more impact, more vivid even though they are simply line drawings.
This is the last page on the first side.
The booklet was made with a concert programme in mind: lots of pictures, fewer words, simply a souvenir of being there. Fortunately, Lady Gaga's concerts in London coincided with the Fanatical Product week, so I kept in mind that I wanted to make this for the fans and then take the booklets I don't sell at college to the concert on Friday in order to resell/give them out freely
and to give to Lady Gaga personally (I was standing 5 metres from the stage!). For this reason, I typed the London tour dates on the reverse in order to make it into a souvenir booklet of being at the gig.
The reverse page was made by simply reversing the front side of the booklet and sending it through the printer once more.
I felt that I couldn't keep the reverse page blank, so I added the 'slap' images onto the back as they were the second best images in my opinion.
In addition to the images and unique signing of every copy, I added the lyrics for some songs at the top of the booklet:
The lyrics, in my opinion, gives the booklet a more functional role as fans do crave for the lyrics of their idols. I wanted to have 5 copies of each of the song lyrics heard at the concert on diferent copies of the booklet so the booklets could be collectable and/or exchangeable, but copying and typing and manufacturing would take too long to do, so I whittled the song numbers down to some of her most iconic songs:
- Just Dance
- Poker Face
- Bad Romance
- Dance in the Dark
- Glitter and Grease (few of these copies were made as not very many people have heard of this song)
That is the product run down!
(simulpost on
conglats.blogspot.com)
