Final Digipak

We decided on making two digipaks because we were unsure of which one looked best. Also, it is not ad hock for artists to do this because many produce two different albums, an example of this would be Coldplay-Myloxoto.

Conventions of a Music Magazine poster

Magazine Advert

After taking a long time to research into magazine adverts, we thought it was time to initiate our construction and planning of our magazine advert! Vicky and Emily had the responsibility of our magazine Advert and worked very well together when coming up with the idea.

Our music video's chorus is very iconic because it is full of strobe lighting, this is an aspect of our music video that were really liked therefore thought it was a good idea to implement this in our magazine advert. Also, from the people that have watched our video so far all of them have commented on the strobe lighting therefore if a customer saw our advert they would link it with our music video therefore used as a promotional tool.

Here is a grab shot of all the photos that were extracted from our music video of the strobe lighting scene, this was a difficult job for victoria because the strobe lighting was very fast therefore changed the actors expression very quickly.

Due to the amount of photos we used on our magazine advert, it was a very good idea to put them all on different layers in photoshop so we could adjust them if we needed to without moving the whole picture

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This is the construction of our magazine advert, as you can see the photos were placed in photoshop and adjusted so atleast 8 shots were able to fit in one line- this is important for continituy and for it to look proffessional.

It did take a while for all the photos to be uploaded, however as we got to our half way mark we stopped to review and were very happy with the overall look of our magazine poster. We used the same font "code" that we used in our album therefore keeping our house style. When conducting our research we found all the different conventions of magazine adverts and applied them to ours, as you can see so far we have added the 5 stars which is a key aspect and the masthead in bold to stand out to the customer.

Planning Digipak

Here is a short clip that gives an introduction on the research and construction of our digipak:

To ensure we are on track I have create my own to-list using http://www.tadalist.com/ where I am able to go online and check off the things I have to do. This is a very efficient way of ensuring my time management is on track and I have done everything I am supposed to complete. I reguarly check into http://www.tadalist.com/ to monitor where I am and where I should be.

Here is a screen shot on my to-do list:

To start the construction of our digipak I thought that it was a good idea to personally draw some photos on the image I am trying to create, as you can see below. The front page I hope will be a close up of Jake taken from our video with the house style text stating Bloc Party, Escape.

(Drawing of photo's by myself)

Album covers

Independent research
I thought that it was a good idea to look at home at different albums' artwork. I looked at artists/bands within my genre of indie however also a couple outside the genre and compared them whilst identifying the conventions of album artwork. The albums I looked at were Coldplay, Killers, Adele and The Script.

Coldplay:
I absolutely love the artwork of Coldplays new album MyloXoto. It has a very urban scene look about it with a wide range of crazy loud colours. However, this also greatly links in with their new songs on the albums as their video's are very bright with lots of different lighting. Therefore, coldplay have continued their house style and If I was to watch their video then try to identify their album I would not have difficulty. I have noticed that they have used their album name in the inside cover of their album cover to, to give that unified effect and to also use it as a promotional aspect.

However, I didn't just look at our genre I also looked at pop/mainstream. When looking at this genre I came across the artist Adele. Known greatly for her slow moving songs I believe the artwork clearly connotes this. I like the way they have kept the continuity of colour with is very grayscale. The back page looks very clear in terms of how the songs are set out and believe this is fundamental to when we create our digipak.

This is a very simplistic inside album cover, however it has shown us that not digipak's are busy with lots of different images. However, I believe this particularly suits Adele because her music is very slow pace and calming and her video's are rarely upbeat or fast. Though, I like the way they have used a vibrant green that makes the album title "21" stand out to the audience.

Another piece of artwork I looked at was The Killers whom are in our chosen genre therefore equally important. The Killers album "Sam's town", according to Wikipedia "The album takes its name from Sam's Town Hotel and Gambling Hall, a hotel-casino in Las Vegas, the hometown of the band". This clearly sums up the album's artwork for The Killers. However, more importantly The Killers are known for keeping their font the same on most of their albums, this creates brand identity because instantly when we see this text we will associate it with the band.

As previously mentioned, The Killers have placed their text in the inside cover, instead of on their CD. Many artists do this (possibility for extension of promotion). Futhermore, the back page has a different layout, with the song tracks going along horizontally also it is the first time on the artwork we see the band.

The Script: This is one of my favourite albums artwork. I believe it is a continuation of their artwork throughout. Similarly to The Killers, The Script have the same text throughout their albums, to continue their house style. However, we are not shown with the band's image on this album, though this is normal for The Script and their previous albums.

Lights, Camera, Colour?

We were happy that we completed our final cut however we need to take on board our feedback.
In the rough cut they pointed out that the overall colour of the video was a bit bland and dull. We aimed to make our final cut bright and enhanced. Therefore, I listened to a few turorials and found a way in which I can correct the colour, brightness, gamma, saturation; making our music video look so much better (hopefully).

The tutorial that was most helpful was the link below :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLyGDlBnDfwFrom

From I was able to follow the simple instructions into correcting the colour and other effects. We noticed our video looked a bit "washed-out" and too light in places which did not look very professional.

The tools I mostly used in Final cut to correct the colour were:

• Brightness and contrast







• Gamma







• Colour correction
  
  

I have shown evidence of this from the grab shots below:

Below is an example of the difficulties I encountered when sorting out the colour of the video, we needed to get the right balance between the colours and saturation or it could end up worse than we started, being far too saturated...

Digipak planning

Our first aim was to decide what font we would like, we have recently been on www.dafont.com and it took us a while to find the most appropriate font and the one that looked like our bands album cover masthead.

We came across the font type called Code and it gives a bold version and a normal version, this seemed perfect because Bloc Party Albums normally have their band name in bold and the album name in a less sharp font type.

Next we had to download this font and install it into photoshop in order to aid design of our digipak.