For the final draft of our digipak we decided to change the font of our band name ‘VICE’ to something a bit scruffier with the devil tail as we felt it makes it easier to tell the difference between the album name and band name, as well as fits with the theme of a fallen angel. We also found that a scruffy looking font is rather conventional of the alternative rock genre as bands such as red hot chilli peppers use it on the covers of their albums.
Here is the third draft for my digipak. I have made a few changes to it, including the font and font colour on the front cover, the tint of the feathers on the inside pages, and have added some more feathers to the back to make the middle pages match slightly more. After creating this draft, I have then printed off the pages for the digipak and inserted them into a CD case to see how they all fit together and have asked my peers for feedback on the outcome.
To see how this draft could be further improved, we have printed off sheets of paper for our peers to annotate, allowing for them to tell us what parts of it they like and dislike. This will make it easy for us to know what we need to focus on for our final draft as we know what exactly need improving.
After asking our peers for general feedback on our digipak, we wanted to know if the genre of alternative rock is conveyed strongly and if the star image we wanted is obvious to them, so have created a tally allowing people to answer these questions. Everyone that we asked believe that the genre was in fact alternative rock and the two adjectives that got the most votes to describe our digipak were rebellious and mysterious which was the kind of image that we were going for so we believe that the image we have created is reasonably successful.
After completing each of these tasks, we have decided that our future aims for the digipak will be to work on the targets for improvement that people gave us, such as improving the photoshopping on the feathers and colour of the inside pages. Since the genre and image of the digipak seems to be clear to our audience we don’t feel that we need to try and make those more obvious to them.
These are the four different panes that we have for our digipak. One of the main things that have edited on the front cover is the font used for the name of the album. We chose to do this as we felt the font we had previously used was too girly and did not represent the album to be as edgy as we wanted it to be. We also did this as it was hard to differentiate thee name of the album from the name of the artist. We also gave the background a radial blur to make it appear as if a bright light is shining from behind the wings.
Here is the first design idea that we have created for the left inside page. We took a close up of lots of feathers and then added a blue tinted filter over them. After doing this we changed the levels of the feather layer and made parts of it see through, allowing the darkness of the background to seep through.
For the right inside pane we used a slightly more zoomed out image of feathers and used a similar layering effect. For this one however we used the image of a feather and curved it around the place where the CD will be put.
Finally, we have used an image of a feather that we have taken for the back cover. We have also given the pane the two spines for the digipak with the name of the album on and re positioned the names of our songs to be better framed with the curve of the feather.
Once we had created the very first draft of our digipak’s front and back covers, we looked through the mark scheme and self assessed ourselves on how well we believed we fit within the mark scheme. I felt that doing this really helped me understand what I need to do to improve upon this first draft as I have been very critical of what I have produced. It has also taught me how things as seemingly unimportant as the song names all have an impact to the how the digipak is presented to my audience so I need to think carefully on everything that I include on it. Now that I understand how my work will be marked, I believe I will find it a lot easier to improve upon the use of photoshop, mise-en-scene and DTP.
For our digipak shoot we were able to acquire all of the photos that we had been planning to take and use for our digipak as well as a few extras in case we may need them. The main aim of this shoot was to get some images of black angel wings that we could incorporate into our digipak to tie to our alternative genre. We decided that we should also take some images of a model wearing these wings in case the idea of the wings on their own doesn’t work out, preventing us from having to go through the effort of booking another time to have a shoot.
The first photos that we took were photographs of our model sat on the floor with her angel wings on. We went through a few different outfits while doing it and decided that the lighter outfits helped create more of a striking star image as it contrasted with the black of the angel wings. After taking a few shots like this however, we decided that the wings were too small, made her hair messy or were not at the correct angles in the photographs that we had taken so decided to take pictures of the model without them on and thought that we could use Photoshop to edit the wings on separately. To make sure we could do this, I took some photos of the wings at lots of different angles to allow us so variety in editing and put them against a white background, meaning they will be as simple to cut out as possible.
Looking back on a lot of the images we had taken, I have realised that it would have been a lot better if we had spent the time to get the flash photography equipment working for our shoot as some of our images turned out rather dark with low quality to them.
After looking back through each of the images that we have taken, these are my favorites:
Our aims for the graphic design was to create a starry sky background that gives off a mystical effect to the viewer as well as to create a moon that we could place on top of this background. I believe that we managed to be successful in reaching these aims as both of these images have ended up looking how we want them to, conforming to the typical conventions of an alternative rock digipak.
Completing the graphic designs didn’t take too long as for the starry sky we followed a tutorial which explained the process of creating it very well. One thing we found however when making it was that some of the sky seemed top be too bright and looked unnatural, looking like this:
We then realised that we could fix this by changing the effect on the background from colour dodge to divide which we found gave a more natural and soft look which we thought would fit a lot better on our digipak.
For the background of our digipak we wanted to have a mystical looking starry sky as we found this type of image rather conventional of alternative rock and gives off the kind of feeling that we want our digipak to. Since we could not get this type of image with the camera equipment that we have, we decided to make this in Photoshop by following this tutorial:
This was a very simple and easy tutorial to follow that allowed us to customize our colours as we coloured it in ourselves. This meant that we chose to make the image more blue and green, rather than the bright purple shown in the tutorial which we thought would be better as it contrasts with the pink and purple of our font. Here is the final image that we ended up with:
We also made a created a graphical moon in Photoshop as this was also something that we could not take a high quality photo of. We were able to do this by creating a circle in Photoshop and filling it in a light pink. Then we created another circle that was slightly off centered to the circle and deleted that area to make the crescent shape. After this, I added a few effects onto the moon and copied a brighter one beneath it to make it look like it is glowing and ended up with this:
These are the pictures that we took at our digipak shoot. We feel that we got some good shots of the model to use as a back up in case our main idea does not work, however some of them ended up blurry and the lighting may have been a bot dark and would need brightening in Photoshop. We went through lots of different outfits on our model as we weren’t initially sure what style would work best with the wings. The first outfit we tried was a black lacy blouse with a black skirt which we thought could represent the dark side of a fallen angel, however we ended up not liking this look as all of the black drowned out the eye catching effect of the wings which we wanted to be the main point of the image. We then gave the model a lighter outfit with a white shirt and jeans which we found made the wings stand out more so we preferred that look.
However, we then took some photos of the wings without the model as we quite liked the idea of using the wings on their own and using interesting effects on Photoshop with them. We also took photos of an interesting pattern on my dress as we thought that we could possibly use that in some way by adding an interesting effect.
Here is the production meeting agenda and risk assessment for my digipak shoot. The main aims for this shoot is to get some images of either a woman kneeling in black feathered wings or just the black feather wings on their own that we could include on the front cover of the digipak. We chose to do our shoot at school and use the white studio as we thought it would be best for our genre as then we could cut out the images we take and put them on an interesting looking background. We also knew that by doing it here, we would have all of the correct equipment at hand and wouldn’t have to worry about travelling with it or the health and safety risks that might come with this
A lot of the costume and makeup that we chose to bring with us consist of the colours black and white which we chose as we believe they represent the idea of light and dark and represent a fallen angel well. We made sure to include a lot of different outfits so that we had a wide range of variety when choosing our final pictures for the digipak.
Here is a collage and a hand drawn mock up that we have created for our digipak. For the collage we followed a theme of pinks, blues and oranges and made a very rough and messy piece of paper with our ideas on. We came up up with a theme of the night sky with the sun and moon looking over some mountains. By doing this we decided that we could go with a magical and pretty front cover with a bit of a cosmic theme surrounding it.
Then when we got around to creating our hand drawn mock up, we were able to uses the themes that we had gotten from our collage and draw it out more precisely to what we would want our digipak to look like. Our first plans where to have a mountain with wings and a moon coming our of it and decided that to follow with this them we would call it ‘Euphoria’. After some discussion and debating we finally concluded that with the skills our group has available this wouldn’t be very easy to do and we probably wouldn’t be able to execute this concept. We then redrafted it and made a new front cover using a model with angel wings the we could cut out and photoshop stars around it. Then, to link our back cover to this theme we planned to have a fallen feather from the wings in a pool of water with the names of the songs next to it.
After doing this planning we have decided that we will take forward from this the ideas of the space and fallen angel theme. The starry background will be purples and blues which we will create in photoshop and cut our our model and put her onto that. This will mean that we need to do a photo shoot with a model using some of the angel wings that I have so that we will acquire some images to use. We may eventually decide to change the feather in water on the back image as the water no longer follows our space theme so that may be replaced by a feather in space instead.
To find some inspiration for my digipak, I have looked at other images and album covers that are a part of the alternative rock genre. I have then annotated them so I can make sure I understand what makes each image effective so that I can include features of these into my own digipak and follow the typical blueprint of alternative rock. One of the features that I like the most from creating this moodboard was the starry skies creating a cosmic and magical feeling to the images and I think I will use this feature within my own digipak. I also have looked at a few fonts and I have discovered that the most conventional fonts are usually messy and handwritten.
By doing this exercise, I have influenced my ideas for my own digipak in the sense that I now want to incorporate the ideas of using a starry sky with a mystical effect of blues and purples as well as the angel wings that are shown in some of the images. I will also try to use edgy photoshop effects that I have seen in multiple pictures to make the cover more intriguing.
