My digipak

My digipak has taken blood sweat and tears, but I am very satisfied with the end result. It has a mixture of panels, including a message from the artist himself, a photograph of the artist, and other appropriate, or in some cases inappropriate images, such as the cow, which simply fir with the 'Gag' theme. Additionally, I opted to incorporate a pull out into my digipak. This was for one of two reasons. Firstly, when looking into other digipaks, I found they commonly featured pull outs or pockets with parts to take out and read. Secondly, I had a string of images from set that I thought were hilarious and thought that it would be too good an opportunity to miss if I did not include them, so I did. Moreover, I chose green for the colour scheme because this is the colour of the guitar in the video, and the colour of the kayak that featured in some earlier scenes. Finally, after many attempts at playing around with colour, I changed my mind and decided to make my work black and white as I personally felt it looked more effective, especially witch such a bright green being incorporated.

This is what my digipak will look like. The top right hand image is the first image in the pull out, so the others (seen below the digipak) will be folded behind it so that the rest of the digipak can be seen, and it will thus form a pull out. Lastly, I chose to keep the pull out in colour because in some respects it is not officially a part of the digipak and also it adds to the comic quality of the images.

Here is a version where the green is showing as for some reason it did not appear in the screenshot above. The empty panel will be on the right hand side at the top and that is where the pull out will go.

Digipak draft

Here is a draft of what my digipak looks like at the moment. Obviously it is incomplete and this is because I am going to take some new shots, whilst re doing the shot on the front cover to make it look more effective and resemble the sign of a hitchhiker, rather than the plain piece of paper it currently shows. Thus, I will have a more striking cover, instead of what it looks like at the moment. I have put in a lot of hours on this draft and learnt a great deal about Photoshop, considering the first time I ever used it was 4 days ago. When around, I have asked teachers for guidance, but when working on it by myself, I have been watching tutorials, reading a Photoshop magazine, and even just playing around with all the tools till I found what it was I wanted. The theme for my digipak is the clouds as I personally think they give a nice feel to the sense of a journey and time from day to day. Moreover, green is featured on each panel of the digipak as it is a common colour in the video, seen through the guitar, and the kayak in earlier scenes. I am proud with what I have achieved so far, however I would imagine that my final draft will differ greatly from this one as I need to amend the colour and the sky on some panels, whilst completely creating or recreating others.

An introduction to Photoshop

Being a media student has enabled me to learn how to use a number of programmes, that previously, I was unfamiliar with. The newest one is Photoshop. Although I have always been surrounded by work that has been edited on Photoshop, I have never worked on it myself. Today, when looking at digipak's and how to create them, we practised on a photo of Jessie J. I was a bit slow at first but these things come with practise and I look forward to the potential that Photoshop with offer when it comes to piecing together drafts of my digipak. Here are some screenshots of the work I did.

 This was me amending the settings for my new project, as the digipak template has to be 12 by 12.

This is the photo of Jessie J that I used. I had to make sure I was holding down the shift key when adjusting the size to make sure that I did not jeopardise the quality of the image.

Here, I had to use a lasso tool to go around the outline of Jessie J, before creating a mask over her.

Finally, this is a basic attempt of playing around with the photo, where the gradient tool was used to change the colours. Moreover, the opacity was decreased so that Jessie J could be seen through the colour.

Ben Folds - Rockin the suburbs

As I am using the masking effect in my music video, I found it really beneficial when my teacher showed me Ben Folds music video for 'Rockin the suburbs'. This video features Ben playing each instrument in the video where he is essentially playing everyone, which is what will happen in my music video. From watching this, I am amazed at what the outcome of masking can look like, and although his is on a larger scale, I am very much looking forward to the editing process to experiment with this effect.

Here is the video for 'Rockin the suburbs':

Magazine Advert Conventions

• Release date (out now)
• Name of the artist
• Name of the album
• Reviews (star rating and magazine name)
• 'The brand new album'
• Artist's website
• Record label logo/website 
• 'Album of the year'
• Sometime list the editions it is available in
• Facebook/Twitter logo and link
• 'Featuring the hit single....'
• QR code
• Available at... (eg. iTunes, and include logo)

Character photoshoot

As we have Nikita playing multiple characters in our music video, it seemed appropriate to put together a photo-shoot to introduce the three characters involved. The first character is a nerd, the second is a nature girl and the third a slut. In the video, these three characters compete for the affections of Bryce Duncan (our artist). We edited this video on Movie Maker as we did not have any of the software we use in school at home. However, we found it very useful as it allowed us to change the duration of each specific photograph to fit in with the music. After we chose our song; LMFAO's ''Sexy and I Know It'' we realised it was very quick and thought we would use this to our advantage and ensure that the photographs were in time with the music. We chose this song, because like the rest of our project, it is light hearted, funny and not serious what so ever which is what we love.



I have selected some of my favourite shots from the photo-shoot below:

Target audience

The Proclaimers were a band in the 1980’s, who covered an array of genres including Pop Rock,  Folk Rock and Power Pop.

Folk Rock:

Folk rock is a musical genre combining elements of folk music and rock music. In its earliest and narrowest sense, the term referred to a genre that arose in the United States and the UK around the mid 1960s.

College Rock:

College rock is a term that was used to describe alternative before the term ‘’alternative’’ came into common usage, because it was played on student-run university and college campus radio stations in the 1980s. the stations’ playlists were often created by students who avoided mainstream rock played on commercial radio stations.

Power Pop:

Power pop is a popular musical genre that draws its inspiration from the 1960s British and America pop and rock music. It typically incorporates a combination of musical devices such as strong melodies, clear vocals and crisp vocal harmonies, economical arrangements and prominent guitar riffs.

These are some images that illustrate some of the genres mentioned above:

It is apparent that these genres all involve instruments, especially the guitar, which is something we will incorporate into our video. However, as our video is a gag video, we will use am inflatable guitar rather than a real one for our base layer.

Our target audience is young people who listen to alternative music. The age range would roughly be 16-23 as these are the type of people who have established their music taste and know which genres they do and don’t like. Our video reflects our target audience as it is young, fun, different, and not a big budget, go all out video which can be associated with mainstream chart music, that our audience would dislike.

Here is an upbeat, low budget, simplistic video with a positive vibe, where the artists do not take themselves too seriously. Again, there is use of a guitar.

This differs from a big budget video such as Mark Romanek’s video for Scream by Michael Jackson. Mark Romanek was given his first Grammy Award for Best Short Form Video in 1996 for ‘Scream’. The video, which cost $7 million to make, is cited as one of the most expensive ever made. His subsequent work has come to be regarded as among the best of the medium. He has worked with many top-selling recording artists from different genres of popular music, and his videos have been given credit for making starts out of some.