Construction- digipak

How I made the digipak

I then decided after discussions with my group that the snow shoots would make a better front album cover because they reflect scenes from the video more and reflect the genre of pop and indie well. 

The front cover needed minimal editing to the photograph, all I did for it was to crop the photograph down slightly (shown below in Photoshop) to make it closer to the artist as in general pop artists have very close up photographs of just their face for their album covers. I then also added the title and artist name in a girly font in a natural colour (green/brown) to match the indie theme of the song.

For the back cover of the album cover I used a photograph from our first day of filming in the studio. When I took the photograph I purposely made the camera take the photo out of focus so that the lights became noticeably blurred as well as the artist. I like this technique, it adds a magical feel to the image. I also changed the colour balance of the album cover in Photoshop, this is shown in the screen shot below. I wanted to give it a hint of green to reflect the natural, indie style of song.

I then added the song listing to the back cover to match the conventions of existing album covers sold today. This is shown in the screen shot below, i chose a font that is quite soft and girly to match the delicate nature of the song. I also added the bar code and company logo so that the cover again reflects conventions of existing albums and is a believable product to be sold.

The next step to making the album was to make the two inside covers for where the CD itself actually goes. I wanted to keep these quite simple and to match the existing back and front covers. For the first panel I used a photograph taken on the day of outside snow filming. It is a photograph of the couples hands held together with the snow in the background. I used this photograph because it matches scenes from the music video and hopefully people will recognise this. I wanted to keep it plain and simple so I didn't edit the photo in anyway apart from cropping it down to the right size for inside the album cover. (Shown below in a Photoshop screenshot.) 

For the second inside cover I chose to match it to the back cover so that each inlay matched the outside cover. I used another photograph from the inside filming day, this time one of just the lights. For this photograph i used the same technique when I took it so that it gives the same blurred, mystical look. I also edited the colour balance again to the same subtle green tint to reflect the Indie style of the song.     

Back cover

I then experimented with the back cover of my album cover. I wanted to keep it quite simple with just the track listing, a barcode, small logo and photograph. From the start i wanted to use a photograph that had the fairy lights from the indoor filming day so I could blur the image on photoshop and make it look magical to reflect the theme in the video. 

Below shows some of the photographs I took for the back cover on our day of filming. I purposely made the camera out of focus when taking them to make them blurry and mystical.  

I then edited the colours of the image to either black and white or deep purple using photoshop. I then added the track listing of the album in the same yellow colour as the album cover. 

First draft

 I used photoshop to edit my first front cover of my album, I felt the photo didn't need too much doing to it as I wanted it to look quite natural and simple. 

I started off by cropping the photograph to keep only the important bits of the image and get rid of the background so it focused more on just the artist. This is shown in the screenshot below.

I then used the editing software to increase the saturation of the photograph along with the brightness to lighten the image and make the artist look more vibrant, this is shown below in a screen shot.


 I chose the text to be in a light colour to match the natural look of the cover and didn't add anything else to keep the album cover looking simple but original. Below shows the finished piece. 

Test photos

My music video comes under the genre of a pop song. From comparing album covers in past research of existing pop artists I found that conventions include minimal text and a large close up photograph of the artist. 

So I used the filming time to take lots of photographs in our different locations to edit into an album cover. Below shows a few examples of my photographs before editing. 

Logo Designs

A logo and information about the copyright of a song are important and necessary to be featured on an album cover. For my album cover I am going to include a logo i make myself. I want to keep it quite simple, in plain black so that it looks proffesional. I'm going to include the initials of everybody in the group as a starting point.

Below shows some initial designs....

Digipak drafting

A digipak is an important part of an artists work. It is given as a whole promotional package to the audience: Music video, Album cover with inside and back panels and a magazine advert. 

Within my digipak I want to create products that all look like that come from the same artist, by using similar colour schemes, fonts and photographs. This will make sure that my digipak looks professional and reflects conventions of existing pop artists digipaks such as having logos, colours that reflect the mood of the music and a barcode. 

Below shows a few sketches of first ideas for my album.....

Front and back cover:

 Inside covers:

Questionnaire feedback

I designed a short questionnaire shown below to ask people from my target audience. This is girls aged between 15-20. I have directed the questions to be quite simple and not use many media terms so that anyone will be able to answer it and it will give me and immediate look into whether my video was success or not.

Below shows a photograph of my questionnaire....

 

 

I distributed my questionnaire to 12 girls from within the age range of 15 and 20 using the social networking site Facebook. I used Facebook because it is a quick, easy way to distributed information and it also allows you to post the video link using YouTube easily. Here are the results to each question:

 

1. How would you rate my video from 1-10?

 

    1 person rated it a 6

    4 people rated it a 7 

    6 people rated it a 8

    1 person rated it a 9

 

2. Do you think the costumes used were appropriate for the video?

 

    11 people said yes they were

    1 person said no they were not

 

3. How would you rate the lighting through out the video?

 

    3 people said 8

    4 people said 9

    5 people said 10

 

4. Did the video maintain your interest?

 

    11 people said yes

    1 person said no

 

5. Would you believe that this could be the real video for this song?

 

     10 people said yes

      2 people said no

 

6. Did you enjoy watching it?

 

      9 people said yes

      3 people said no

 

 

 

All in all the feedback from this questionnaire was quite positive. It shows me that the majority of people enjoyed watching my video and only 1:5 thought it wasn't believeable as an actual music video. It maintained a lot of peoples interest and mise-ene-scene characteristics such as lighting and costume were reviewed as good.

Feedback from my Mum

Below shows video feedback from my Mum about my final cut of my music video. This is my secondary feedback because my Mum is not necessarily my specific target audience because she don't necessarily have a keen interest in consuming media like music videos but she would have an interest in this style of music because of the original by Elton John.

Feedback from AS class

I decided to gather feedback from a media class in the year below as some of the people would be the target audience for the video (young girls 15+ who would watch a video with a romantic narrative.) These people will be my primary feedback as they are the main people that my video is targeted towards. The feedback is useful and relevant to me as it is directed towards my specific target audience. 

For the people in the group who would not watch this video out of choice and not be my target audience their feedback is also useful because they will have a knowledge of media work and terms to give me more specific and professional feedback. 

The main points that the group made about my work were:

-It was repetitive in parts
-Match on action is good
-The end of the video would be better if it went from blurry to focused sooner
-Like the end shot and sparkly technique
-Liked the different locations especially the fairy light inside scene
-The video is simple and effective

Evidence of my feedback....

Construction- video

Changes to the video

After a talk with our teacher she gave us the advice that our video didn't flow as professionally as we wanted it to. We thought it would look better to edit the video so that the different shots cut to the next shot in the middle of a lyric instead of after a line of song so that it flows better. 

We decided that more of a variation of shots so that we could cut the video more quickly would make the video look more professional. So we went out and filmed some more landscape scenery to add to the variation of shots in between our character singing. The sunsets, lakes and fields that we filmed fit the romantic and natural look of the video.    

We also decided to add a video effect of sparkles to the video that we gathered from Youtube. We then added the effect over the top of parts of the video and lowered the opacity so that it looked less harsh and fitted in naturally with the video. We added this effect to add to the magical and romantic look of the video and give it that extra something.

Feedback from AS Class

After editing our video further and receiving feedback from our A2 class we decided to show our nearly completed music video to an AS Media Class, to gain feedback on it at this stage in the editing.

Their feedback was -

Storyline - Like the narrative of the couple

Liked all the transitions - Good use of match on action pretty solid

Background sound was still on in one of the clips

They rated our video overall at 8/10.

This feedback was all very positive and other than the comment on the background sound, which we can easily fix, we received no other negative feedback or suggestions. This proved to us that our music video performed well within its target audience. As well show to us that it had impressed other media students, and hopefully of good quality.