Second Digipak Draft

This is the second draft of my digipak. I decided to use images that I shot. I like this image as it has the rainbow colours in the background as well as hiding the girl's face. It creates a mysterious tone. 

However, I feel like this won't be my final creation as I don't particularly like the look of the typography. It's too gimmicky and gives a childish look to my digipak, which is something I do not want to resemble.

First Digipak Draft: Evaluation

I don't really like the first digipak that I have created, as I now like the idea of using images that I have shot.

However, what I have learned in the process of creation is that I will want to keep the dark colour theme that's juxtaposed by a rainbow of colours. This is because it'll stand out on shelves and catch the eye of the audience.

First digipak creation

This is the first draft for my digipak. As you can see, I haven't used any of the photos from our first shoot. I wanted to use just graphics for the digipak.

It contains the rainbow colours that I want to keep as a consistent theme. Also the 16-bit typography follows the 80's vibe we're wanting to achieve. 

80's album art influence

Since i'm wanting to achieve an 80's feel to the album cover, I started to research album covers that were released during that decade. What I learned is that they use funky typography and cool visuals - this is exactly what I want.

For example, the images below use centre aligned images with very bright typography. The typography seems to be the most dominating factor on these two album covers as they're unique styles and also catch the eye immediately. This is what I will take influence from as the eye-catching colours could act in my favour as it'll draw people to my album as well as representing the bright emotions of my music.

More over, I really like the visuals that were produced during the 1980's. They're very quirky and really represent the start of the digital era. They also use bright rainbow colours against black backgrounds, the two juxtapositions work completely well together. Now I will take ideas from that. 

Ideas For Our Digipak

A digipak is an inventive and creative way to ensure an albums success, so planning of  the design needs to be thorough and well thought out.

For our digipak I want the house style to be all black which is slightly ironic as our album is about vivid colours that represent key memories. However, we are planning to use a girl on our front cover and not include the artist himself. Firstly because the artist's appearance isn't one of our selling points, we are initially focusing on SPCTRM's music. Secondly, I love the idea of a teenage girl because I like the "innocent" look.

For the front cover, we are going to have the girl face her back towards the camera with a projector shining an image of a rainbow onto the girl's hand. So the rainbow against the hand will stand out against the black background, it adds an ambiguity to the artist and puts the main focus on the rainbow. The darkness in of the room will also add an intimate vibe to the album art and having a rainbow exposed on the girl's hand is like she's allowing you to enter her life. An album in some cases represents the artist's life. Lastly, having her back to the camera with her head slightly facing the camera implies a sort of vulnerability and innocence to the girl which again, an album is very personal. We are allowing the audience to be exposed to our emotions, vulnerability and personal experiences.

On the left and right panels, I want to have the girl's face make the first appearance. From the left panel, I want a right perspective of her face and the alternative side on the right panel. The reason behind this idea is because once you've bought the album, open it up, you're again exposed fully to this girl from all perspectives. The CD will be in the middle, representing a front-facing perspective of her, the main one, the music. A 360 degree perspective of this girl.

Digipak Analysis

Second Test Shoot - need editing

For experimentation, we went back to the whole projection process but took a different approach, to create quite distorted photographs for our Digipak, and perhaps footage for our music video. 

We googled, VHS gif that we wanted to project on to our actor's body. The VHS reinforces the 80's feel we want from our music video.

 We then used another photograph of which I typed into Google 'Rainbow light' and came across this photograph of candle flames. The juxtaposition from black to the vivid rainbow colours is something we want to keep a theme throughout our entire artistry. The rainbow colours amongst our actor's body looked very nice: 

First Test Shoot

For our first test shoot, mentioned in the blog post previously, we wanted to find a room that's very dark where we can play with the lighting. Below is the setting where we shot our first shoot. The projector on the floor is an idea we came up with where we can project a rainbow onto the wall - a rainbow is something we want to have as one of our recognisable themes. 

Below are other images we decided we liked from this shoot. 

This is the reflection of the rainbow on the hand we wanted to achieve. It didn't work out to be really successful as the rainbow didn't appear very clearly and there are marks and chippings in the wall which proves to be distracting. 

I like this image because the background is purely dark and there are no hints of a wall or any other distracting objects. Although I wouldn't use this as part of my digipak because she looks slightly awkward. However, I could use this as a tour poster or of some sort due to the amount of space around her.

This is a really nice image as you can't really see her facial expression, adding that curiosity to this image. The silhouette is really nice and I like the bokeh circle at the bottom.

This is the favourite shot of mine from this shoot as you can't see her face which adds an ambiguity to the mood of this photo. I'm debating whether I like the lights being apparent in this image, later on I might edit it so all you can see is her head.



What I found successful from this shoot is that, I think the foundations of our ideas for the digipak is structured; but we just need to spend more time on perfecting the image we want to convey. Especially with the rainbow image. I like the silhouettes in the images which is something I'd like to keep as a factor to our final image.

What I didn't find successful was the rainbow image as we used a CD to reflect the rainbow onto the wall, the overhead projector proved to be too much of a hassle as it kept overheating and glitching. What we will do next is find another light source and find another way of projecting the rainbow onto something. 

Production Log: For First Test Shot

We will be practising our first test shot during our lesson time as we're working around the fact Taylor, my partner is going abroad.

The concept we're wanting to achieve is a very dark image that's illuminated by one light - either using colours like a deep red, green or blue as with the study of semiotics, they all represent certain emotions. Red portraying love or anger. Green is envy and blue has a poignant coldness about it. With post-production of these images, we want to add a grainy effect to have that 80's disposable camera feel to it.

For our lesson tomorrow:

8th October, 2015

1:55 - Finish lunch

2:05 - Hire out camera equipment: DSLR, SD Card, Tripod and lighting equipment and ensure it's all working, battery is full and SD card has sufficient amount of free space.

2:15 - Find a room that is free and we're able to shoot in - preferably a dark room in Drama; as they include performance lights which is something we're interested in playing around with. 

2:35 - Review pictures taken so far, see if we should adjust: the lighting, positioning or camera settings. 

2:45 - Begin to pack up and take the equipment back to media and start to upload the images to our users on the iMacs.