3rd Digipak Draft

We received further feedback from our 2nd Digipak draft. This was the conclusion: 

• Our front cover photo was liked and disliked equally, which meant that it was a good idea to try out another photo to see if this would get more positive feedback. 
• Everyone loved the inside cover, so we are going to leave this. 
• Important to finish the product to get better overall feedback.

I decided to go with this photo as it was everyone's second favourite. This was what the front cover came out as:

This was a lot better as it was more slick and looked a lot better with the font. 

I then took the font from the front cover and wrote the song titles out with this to keep with the theme of the album cover. I then wrote my own 'rights' warning at the bottom; a common trait found on all albums: 2016 BEEZY recording production. Manufactured in London in BEEZY recording studios. 26 Berkley Square, W1 2SP. All rights reserved. Warning. Any attempted re selling of this CD is strictly prohibited by the federal government and is subject to federal prosecution. I also added the production company name in the corner 'BEEZY' and created our own font with TM at the end to show it is trademarked. I finally added the barcode, to make sure it looked professional. 

Finally, this was the CD page. We wanted to keep this simple to keep with the minimalistic theme of the Digipak, however ensure that the artist is constantly publicised. 
All these received very positive feedback, the only concern being that the CD page may be too simplistic.

2nd Digipak draft

After creating the first draft of the Digipak, we decided to get some feedback from our peers to try and develop it further.
Everyone seemed to like the black and white theme.
They liked the style of the photos.
The main concern was that there was not a huge amount of variety between the photos. They felt this would show in the inside covers of the CD. 
After receiving this, we decided to do another photo shoot, baring in mind the black and white theme as well as the concept of the photos. 

Here we had our artist dress topless with a leather jacket. This kept to the sexualised star image as well as gave an impression of her personality through the naked/raw look. We flicked water on her face [as seen in image] so the photos kept to that steamy/wet look. We emphasised this through slicking back her hair with water.

We took a lot of photos to ensure we had variety during the Digipak editing process. From this, it can be seen that we kept to a very similar theme to before, but just made her image slightly darker. This was successful for us as it furthered her star image. 

Then I began the editing process:

 This is the first attempt at the front cover. We wanted to keep the same font as we felt it was simplistic but professional and stood out. We also kept the parental advisory warning. We thought this photo might work because the smoke gives the dark impression to her character. The smoke also leads to the name of the artist, so the audience eyes will attract to it, which is important for new artists(like ours). 

I then needed to create the inner cover. We had always planned for this to be like a contact sheet, so I took this from a photography page and used Photoshop to edit our photos onto it. This is what I created: 

This gives the audience a further idea of what her character is like and the kind of artist she is.

The next thing to do, was get feedback and create the back and the CD page. 

Album song names

1. You & Me (feat. DoubleÜ)

2. Loyal

3. Golden

4. Fantasia

5. Fever

6. Right There

7. On & On (feat. Caroline)

8. Static

9. Poplar Trees

10. Regression

11. Settle

12. Amelie

Digipak development

To try and gain inspiration for an album name we could possibly use, I decided to scroll through my music and see if there were any songs or artists that had names that we could use as a jump start for our own.

Whilst doing this, I noticed all the different album artwork. I decided then to google this and see if I could gain any inspiration from album artwork that had similar concepts to ours.

After doing this, I could tell that most albums expressed the meaning of the album or the title. I decided to look up synonyms or other meanings for Isolation, Entrapment Or Going back. From doing this, I found the word 'regression.' We felt this was perfect for the album name as it expressed our music video song, the look we were going for as well as expressed her character.

Here is an example of an alteration of the album artwork with the name of the album:

After attempting to add the name of the artwork, we were not sure whether the set up was right and looked professional. I decided to play around with different layouts to see what looked right :

We are still unsure of what album artwork to go with, so we need to take some more photos to see what else we can work with.

Audience Feedback

Now we had finished our video. We wanted to get some audience feedback to see what the end opinions for the video was. 

The audience felt that our strengths were mainly through our dance, choice of lighting and pace. They said that they were constantly intrigued and never felt bored. 

The only weakness they said was that they might have liked to have seen more of the dance as they thought it was so good that it was a bit of a waste. 

Another positive is that the audience seemed to have understand our concept; isolation/entrapment. As well as this, they also understood that the dance was a reflection of the artist's song. 

Overall, a successful audience feedback. 

First attempt on the Digipak

Today we discussed several ideas that we could use for our album artwork. This included ideas for the front, inside and back cover. I came up with the idea of using a 'contact sheet' inspired inside cover. I feel like this is effective as it gives the audience an idea of who the artist is as well as upholds this dark persona. 

As well as this, I played around with making the front cover. I wanted to try out different layouts and ideas to see what would work and what wouldn't. This was what I came out with as a start point.

I had to ensure I kept with the same font and idea of the name as the website. As well as this, with the image behind our artist we felt it appropriate to add the 'explicit content' sign as it is a subtle furthering of her dark image. 

Performance Cut VS Final Cut

Here is a comparison between our performance cut and our final cut. There are several differences that can be seen between the two. 

• The beginning in the final cut has been made a lot slower. This is to allow the audience to be introduced to the artist and have a feel for her character. As well as this, it also allows for a more impacted build up as the song progresses. After receiving feedback, we were also told that slowing the beginning down might be more effective as it was quite fast paced. 
• The colouring of the video has been altered. This is because we wanted to make the video more professional by slicking the shots up. We played around with contrast, brightness, saturation and more. 
• We spent a lot more time focusing on cutting the shots on the beat instead of on the lyrics. This was better as our song was very fast paced and it worked better by cutting on the beat.
• There was a section in the middle that cut to black on a certain beat. After receiving feedback, we decided to change this. We replaced the black shot with a moving shot so that we still had the same effect, but it still maintained the pace of the song.
• Finally, we were able to add in the dance element and the other lip sync which we had not been able to do as a result of the power cuts. Through editing we can see that the dance and other lip sync became crucial in maintaining the theme, concept and audience interested throughout. The dance was particularly effective as it showed both the story of the song as well as added something extra to the video.