Final Digipak - Panels 1 and 2 Construction

I designed panels 1 and 2 at the same time for this idea. The reason for this is that I think they need to flow nicely together as they are both on view (eg on a store shelf) and because when the digipak is opened they can be seen together.

For this idea I wanted to include a black and white theme to the piece. This was because this colour scheme is a common trait in digipaks of the same genre (examples to the right). I also wanted to include the idea of the dove images but with less focus given to them and more on images of the band itself.

Firstly, we produced a penciled sketch of what we wanted it to finally look like. This pencil sketch acted as a guide throughout the creation of the panels and although many things were changed up to the finished products, the resemblance is still visible to it.

We used an image that included all of the band members looking at the camera. We played around with a few different photos but we decided to keep with one using the same layout as in our plan. We chose this one as the photo was well shot, the band members looked well set up and it fit on the panel in a way that allowed us to create a good composition.

After cutting out the photo and positioning it, I added the band's name and the title of the album. I used the same graphics that I'd already made for my other album cover designs so this was a simple task.

Next, I added the doves. These were also taken from some of my previous designs as I could easily access the doves, one by one by selecting the individual layers for each one. I then used cmd+T to transform each dove into the position and size that I wanted. Originally on the sketch we'd planned to have the doves above the band members but when I tried it on the final draft, it didn't look very good as the band members already took up most of the cover and moving them down looked odd. Instead, I put the doves on top of the band members. This effect worked well and we decided to leave it like that.



For the back cover, in order to keep with the conventions of other CDs, we had to include a contents list for the songs that appear on the album. We already had the name for our album, 'Letting Go', so we had to choose songs that work well with that title so that it can be justified. Luckily, most song titles are vague and may not even make sense so this was not a difficult task. I used the same font as what I used on the album title and band name on the front cover. This was to promote a synergising look across the digipak.

After the contents were made I positioned them to the side of the panel in the same way as the sketch. The next part that I had to work on was the copyright text. I looked at a number of existing CDs to see what kind of information appears in this section and wrote an appropriate passage for our particular song and band.
I then found the company logos for each of the companies involved in the product and placed them on the cover.

Magazine Advert - Research and Planning

As we are working on the digipak we have some time to also do some research for the next ancillary task, the magazine advert. We are doing this as it will save time and it will allow us to create a closer synergy between our products (since we are doing both around the same time). As with any research, the first thing we had to do was to look into were existing products. We looked at some music magazines that we had from last year's project (Kerrang!, Q and NME) and searched the internet for examples. The following image shows a few of the examples that we found that were particularly useful for us:

From these and other covers some of the conventions of magazine adverts were made clear.

• Use of black and white is frequent and appropriate in many situations.
• Another colour can be added if it suits the particular image or album being shown.
• Large text is used to outline the album and band names (more than anything else).
• Icons and web addresses are added when appropriate and at the bottom of the page.
• The image dominates the page.
• The image that dominates the advert can be different to the front cover of the CD being advertised although an image of the CD can be added to the page.

These are our first designs for the magazine advert. We made the designs with close attention to the examples of existing adverts and featuring images that we already have. In keeping with the established forms and to synergise with our digipak, both of the adverts are planned to have a black background and include white text. The second idea will have a splash of red in the colour scheme as taken from the red of the guitar. Both adverts use large fonts to outline the band name and the album title, as well as an emboldened release date which does appear on the Bob Dylan advert shown above. In the second advert, the image dominates the page but in the first it is a bit small, this will probably be changed when we finalise the designs on photoshop.

We chose to use different shots from those we used on the digipak as they seemed more fitting but we also included an image of the digipak cover on the second advert.

Digipak Designs - Vector Imaging

Now that we have the photos from the our secondary shooting time I have begun to put some more digipak ideas together including some interesting artistic designs.

I wanted to experiment with an artistic style called vector imaging. Since I had not tried anything like this before I decided to make the first cover using a non-human image. After looking through some pictures that we took at our second shooting I chose to use a picture of the lead singer's guitar. I chose this picture as I thought I could make an interesting effect with it looking like it continues into infinity.

To make these images is fairly simple really. The only equipment I used were background images and a few simple Photoshop tools. Firstly, the background images were cut out and altered using adjustment filters to look bright and vibrant. After that I began to select areas of block colour with the polygonal lasso tool and fill them with the fill tool using colours taken from the background image. Most of the image is done in this way giving the image its cartoony look. I made a few changes to the final image that weren't on the original such as the shines both on the lower left of the guitar and on the black plug of the guitar.

In the end, we decided not to go with these style of designs for the digipak as it doesn't effectively reflect the genre of music that we are trying to promote.

Music Video - Final Cut

Secrets - Final Cut from Jamie WGSB on Vimeo.

15th Feb - Third Shooting, Finished!

A couple of days ago we went back to the church and using the feedback that we received from our rough cut, we did some re-filming in order to get the shots that we need for the final cut. The day was another success and we now have the footage to complete our video. We also got a wealth of photos to use for our ancillary tasks.

Digipak Designs

Using ideas from my mind map I have begun to make some possible digipak cover drafts.

On the right are my first 6 attempts and combinations. The photos I used of the cello and candle were taken at the church when we filmed there and the doves are a custom brush that I altered in order to fit my requirements.

In order of completion:

• Middle right
• Bottom right
• Middle left
• Top right
• Top left
• Bottom left

The doves cover (middle right) was my original idea and I experimented with it across the other ideas. Check my previous post to see the specifics of how I created it. For the other ideas I used photos that I'd taken whilst we were at the church for filming. To make these ready for use on the covers I cut them from their original backgrounds and adjusted vibrance/contrast/brightness/saturation levels to optimum levels.

For the original candle cover (top left) I overlayed the dove cover on top to create the misty effect and to see how it would look. For the second candle cover I wanted to make the doves look like they are flying out from the candle. To do this I used the brush again and transformed it so that I could change the direction of the birds. I didn't really like the end product of this attempt and it didn't really create the effect I was hoping for.

The cello covers are much more conventional and I decided to leave them fairly simple. The title of the album rests on top of the bow of the cello as if it were underlined and it's white text contrasts with the dark gradient that I added to the top and bottom of the image. The bottom right and top right images are similar but for the top one I had made a few adjustments to lighting in order for the cello to have a greater effect and presence. I also overlayed the doves onto this cover (middle left) which I do like but I think I prefer the non-overlayed ones.

This is an idea that one of my team mates drew up after he saw my original dove cover. It includes ideas for the whole digipak and keeps consistent with the doves theme. However, we do not yet have the photos that would be necessary so we are going to have to wait until we do our secondary filming to get these.

Doves Cover for Digipak - Creation

In this post I will explain how I created this cover without the use of photos.
First of all, I created the background. This was a four step process:

1. Setting the canvas dimensions to the average digipak dimensions and filling it black with the fill tool.
2. Leaving the foreground colour as black and setting the background colour to white, I went to filter--render--clouds to create a cloudy effect and then pressed ctrl+J repeatedly to re-render until I was happy with the result.
   
3. At this point I created a layer mask on the cloud layer and then filled the mask with a gradient at the top and bottom of the screen in order to mask out the clouds gradually and leave the misty effect in the middle of the image.
4. After finishing the clouds I wanted to add some rays of light coming through. To do this I made a box using the rectangular marquee tool and filled it with white. Then I used the eraser tool with hardness at 0% to shave the edges down into rays of fading light. Then I used ctrl+T to transform it and turn it into position. To create the other rays I copied the original ray's layer with ctrl+J and used transform to move them into place and adjust size.

After the background was finished I moved on to the doves. I didn't have any good photos of doves so I searched online for some brushes that I could use. The only one I could find online is from a DeviantArt user, LithiumStock. The brush set included only 3 brushes with realistic brushes of doves but I decided to give it a try anyway. I imported the brushes into photoshop and begun to add them to the image. At first, the brushes looked a little odd so I blurred and added a glow to them to give them a shining effect that worked well. I made it look like I had more than 3 brushes by subtly changing them with the use of opacity, orientation and use of the paintbrush tool.

Lastly I needed to create the title. I made a separate document for this as I will be using the title graphic across all of my designs. I used a free font that I found on DaFont.com called Headline Two. It was adapted from a newspaper headline font that was used in the 1920s and 1930s and looks perfect for One Republic to continue in the themes of their previous fonts and fitted well on the cover.