Digi Pack Photos

Whilst we were out filming we decided it would be a good opportunity to take some photos for our digipack in which we have to create a CD cover and promotion poster.

From experience we gained last year and further research into Indie genre conventions we had a good idea of how we wanted the CD cover to look. We wanted to somehow overlay the images of the puppet and Harry in order to portray his inner torment and a sense of being trapped in a nightmare in which the puppet is the dominator.

Here our some of initial drafts just to get a feel for how we are going to manipulate the images in photoshop and the kind of look we want to achieve;

Using photoshop we manipulated the contrast of the photos in order to create a sharper more striking image. We then inputted some text and our choice of font was influenced by our research into previous Killers albums:

We chose the colours according to our research and also the effectiveness of the colours against our the background of the woods which had the potential to be very overpowering. However the yellow was striking and eye catching and so we decided to make this our uniform colour scheme along with black and white which represents our idea of "Shadowplay"

Digipack Research

Before we could even begin to designs our digi pack we needed to fully understand the conventions of a digipack and how they are targeted at their audiences. This required intensive research on the topic. We found that a digipack was described as "A form of jewel case, for holding one or more CDs or DVDs, in which the outer cover is of card rather than plastic." Digipacks typically consist of a gatefold (book-style) paperboard or card stock outer binding, with one or more plastic trays capable of holding a CD or DVD attached to the inside. Digipacks are not only used for CD covers but also DVD's.

In order to ensure professionalism in our work it was important for us to use the correct sizing for our digipack. We found this information out from a website called http://www.4bmartinvest.co.uk/fulfilment/pa-digipak.htm which distributes the "Flexi trays" used in digipacks. The information we found out was that the typical size of a CD tray is 135mm x 125 mm. Now that we know the correct size of the tray this enables us to make correct sizing of our images on Photoshop etc.
The word digipack is really just a fancy way of saying what we would call a CD case. In modern society with an increasing competitive market in the music industry and the competition from downloading online, the digipack has become increasingly more important to the success of the single/album being sold. The CD cover has the ability to determine the track's visual desirability and it must make our CD stand out on the rack. It also imprints an image into consumer's mind and makes it recognisable. This puts a huge importance on the design and layout of the digipack. However this also varies according to the market you are trying to appeal to. Here is an exmaple of two digipack appealing to two different markets:

Gwen Stefani - RnB

Faster Days - Indie Rock

A RnB digipack will focus more on promoting the singer of the video whereas Indie Rock will have more effects and stylistic features. Indie Rock colours and mise en scene in photos is often more simplistic e.g. singers will be in black whereas RnB will be much more glamourised. This is just one example of how digipack differ according to their target audiences.

Filming process

Cast

Here are the characters in our music video; Harry will be playing the young teenager tormented by his inner battle with puppet.

Name: Harry Painter
Gender: Male
Age: 16
Role: Skitsophrenic teenagers battling his inner "demons" which takes form through the puppet. He is not in control of his own life and the line between reality and nightmare begins to overlap.

Costume: Indie style, hoody needed

Name: Charlie the puppet (skilfully won off ebay!)

Role: the puppet must torment Harry our main character. His presence in subtle and ominous as he represents a tormented state of mind.

Problems...

This process was never going to be perfectly smooth and ours has been far from! Due to "adverse weather conditions" our timetable was impossible to stick too as we could not get to our locations. However we still had deadlines to meet so we compromised: we extended our filming schedule into the Christmas holidays, and changed our location from Bromley to Dartford which made it much more accessible for us and actually worked our looking much better on film. We also had to change our original actor as he was unavailable and as a group we decided to use Megan's brother Harry as he was more reliable, had the right look and it also meant Megan could film extra parts at home if necessary. So despite all of this we have managed to work around our problems and will hopefully make our deadlines!

Filming

We have now begun our filming. This is our rough timetable of where and when we plan to film;

Risk assessment