Going through the digipak

the layers in photoshop

I showed the digipak I had created to my group and they thought the inside panels were good but the front cover panel was quite simplistic so I thought of adding textures to the image. 

All of these layers give it a better look however the middle one makes it look quite dated therefore we will not be using that but the 1st and last one look good. I will work in photoshop to remove as much texture from their faces as possible as it looks slightly like they have a skin disease or something similar.  

Final changes to website

Liv took a lot of time to perfect the website and now it looks brilliant we have finished it. We used photos from both the photoshoots. 

The home page looks really good and all the writing is in the middle and fits with the image. 

The aboout page is simplistic which reflects the band, the music page has links to their soundcloud and also you can press play for some of her songs too. 

The merchandise page too a lot of time and effort but finally we got to the end of it! 

I did the contact page and I think that looks okay too! 

All the pages fit together and I love the black and white element that runs throughout the whole website. As the video is also in black and white and so is parts of the digipak! 
SO WE HAVE PUBLISHED IT! 

Creating a practise digipak

This is the practise digipak to show to my group. 

Digipak update

I did another photoshoot with the band and gave them specific references for costume as when we did the focus group they all said that the costume made it look sixties and country. There were also some references to the positioning of the bad, by having them very close and smiling they said they looked like they were in a relationship which we did not want to do have at all. 

lightroom screenshots of photos

The next day I showed the rest of my group the photos I took and we went through them and the ones we liked we gave 5 stars to the ones that we thought we could use. 

We then went through the 5 star images and decided what we would use where and I edited all of these. Some photos we will use for the website, and 5 photos will be used in the digipak. We don't want all of them to be images therefore the back page will probably be just black with the track list on the back. The CD page will be just glitter and then we had the idea of overlaying the glitter over 6 panels. 

I took all of these photos into consideration to decide what goes where, I chopped and changed images and layered images to create a pilot 6 sided digipak. 

I needed to turn the front side upside down so I could stick it all together. I have designed each side except one side of the front digipak.

Once I stuck this together I asked some AS students what they thought about the digipak and they said "it is really cool" and that all the panels fit together. 

This video has flipped the digipak but the front cover comes out to the left instead of the video making it look like the right.

Back page of digipak

I have looked at London Grammar's digipak in order to work out what credits to put on the album and where they usually sit. I also looked at 'the xx' album back to see where their credits sit too. Reading them they are usually based around the rights to the album, the company and where it was made. 

I then zoomed into the credits so I could read them and write the same as I needed to know what to write. Seeing as they are a similar band I was only assuming the credits would be similar as the same record company would usually have similar bands/artists.
We haven't yet got an image for the back of the digipak, we are shooting that today! However I have set up the back just so we know what it will look like so then we can just slide a photo right in. 

Digipak

Spine

I have looked at some physical digipak a to see what I need to put on ours. Common on all of them is the back page. On this is a list of songs, a barcode and credits. There is also writing on the spine of the digipak which is usually the artist/band name and the album name! 

Editing update

We have basically finished our video however we are putting a black strip at the top and bottom of the page so here we are editing the frame work and what will be seen. 

Website - merchandise

Liv has been working on the website whilst I have been working on the digipak however we all come together regularly to make sure we know what we are doing. In the focus group they said that the merchandise page was the least flowing page and it looked like it was from a complete different website therefore I went back to look at some of the merchandise from other websites which we have researched and took note of what their logo and merchandise is like! 

Tubechop

 Tubechop is a website that enables YouTube videos to be chopped to show examples in little clips instead of showing the whole video and just quoting the timings.

HOME PAGE

ABOUT TO CHOP THE YOUTUBE VIDEO

CHOOSING A PART TO CHOP

Once you have chosen the part you want to chop, you press "chop it" and it takes you to this page...

And then you copy the embedding link into blogger or wherever you are placing the video.

Focus Group

When we gave them the digipak they used 3 words to describe the band they thought they were looking at: chilled, indie and alcoholic. They guy who said alcoholic didn't have a reason he said that.

WHAT THEY DIDN'T LIKE:

DIGIPAK 
They thought that the digipak and video fitted together with the black and white element but they thought the digipak was quite dated. They suggested to reshoot the band with outfits that look more similar to the video instead of making them look 60's and make it look more their style of music. The photos made them look like a relationship but this is not necessarily a bad thing.


WEBSITE

• They thought the website was too bright especially the first page.
• They all felt merchandise page didn't fit with the website and we should make it look more like a website.
• Give a colour scheme to the website. 
• They liked the logo in the merchandise however they felt that we needed to add this onto the digipak somehow.

POP PROMO

• Need more of the boy in the video as they are a duo 
• They thought that it didn't look like the girl was singing in the stronger parts of the song it looked like she was half heartedly singing so we will need to sort this out.

WHAT THEY LIKED:

• They liked the black and white element of the video and the digipak. 
• They liked lots of different elements of the three products however they felt they didn't all fit together. 

We have synched the lip synching and the song up much tighter than before so it works more, essentially we should have practised the double speed parts more so it doesn't look like she isn't singing however we synched it up as much as we could and from what it looked like at the beginning it looks much better.

WHAT WE NEED TO WORK ON:

• We need to work on all three of the products fitting together. Each product has good elements in itself it is just all of them working together. 
• We will need to look at the website and work out the colour scheme
• We will need to work out how to integrate the merchandise logo into the digipak. We will go back and look at our research to see what type of logos other bands have such as London Grammar.
• We will need to take out the beeps from the beginning of the rough cut video.
  

WHAT WE LEARNT FROM THE FEEDBACK:
It was really good to get feedback from people who aren't used to seeing our video, digipak and website as it is new eyes for the products. It was also good to not have an impact on their view as they were talking.

WHAT WE HAVE DONE:

This is what we have done to the video, adding more of the boy to the video to make it clear they are a duo and it is not just her band.
BEFORE:



AFTER:





We also made sure they were together at the end of the video and it didn't just close on her.

Digipak research

LONDON GRAMMAR
From looking at London Grammar's work it is clear that the name of the band is much more prominent than the album title therefore I will need to edit the size of the font and play around with where to place both the album name and band name. 

ALUNAGEORGE
Alunageorge's work varies. The photos below demonstrate three of their albums. The one to the far left and the far right their band name is a larger font than the album name however the one in the middle the album name is bigger but the band name is underlined therefore still very visible. 

Front cover of digipak experimenting

Correcting the background 

Once I corrected the background I changed it to black and white as I thought this would go with the middle panel with the CD. Also as the CD is going to be black I thought this would match. I then experimented with text. 

EXPERIMENTING WITH TEXT

Adding the title

 I added a title to the front and moved it around just to experiment. At the beginning of the ideas for the digipak we had an idea of putting the title in a triangle therefore I added three lines to create triangle and was experimenting with this. I don't think it looks that good but I will confer with my group and see what they think.

adding the triangle

Creating the triangle -
layers in photoshop

Prefer the text like this

 This will not be the font we are using but I cannot find the text we used on the website in photoshop so I will change this but for now this is the closest thing to the text on the website. I experimented with the size of the title and where to put it. I like it one line under the other like the image above right. I then added the title on the band on the bottom. I will look back at the research I have done and see where the titles and names are on the front cover of the digipak.

EXPERIMENTING WITH COLOUR

I do like the black and white however it does not really show their personality and they are quite wacky people therefore I thought that by experimenting with colour this could show their personality a bit more. 

Low hue (-101)

Low saturation

Playing around with hue and saturation

High red in channel mixer

channel mixer

I then experimented with channel mixer to give it a layer of colour instead of two different colours. I will show the rest of the group what I have done and see what they think.