CD Digipacks

Digipacks are a type of CD packaging made out of heavy paper or cardboard material. Digipacks can flip open like a book, or it can have three parts, so that one portion of the packaging opens to the right and one to the left, with the CD in the center portion. Usually, the portion of the digipack that holds the CD is made of plastic like a traditional jewel case CD - the plastic part is simply attached to the paper background.

Digipacks were first created by MeadWestvaco, and their product, called Digi-Pak, is trademarked. However, as the format became more popular and began to be used by more manufacturers, the generic "digipack" came to be used to describe all soft CD packaging.

I found a website that has the top 100 CD covers on (http://rateyourmusic.com/list/fedderedder/rolling_stones_100_greatest_album_covers) so I chose a few from the website that I liked the best to put on this blog:

This is CD cover for The Rolling Stones album called "Sticky Fingers" I really liked this design because I think that black and white with red writing works really well and makes it stand out. If the picture of the trousers was in colour then the red writing would be lost and hard to see, but the use of black and white makes it bold and eye catching. Black and white with red is also the idea that we have for our own music video which is another reason why I chose this digipack because it may give me inspiration for when I create my own.


This is another CD cover which I really liked of Joe Jackson. It's a very simple cover with a photograph and simple font writing in the top and bottom corner. The photography is very good in the way that the feet are central in the beam of light and it makes it interesting that they are facing diagnal rather that just straight forward or to the side. Again the CD cover is in black and white which I am going to do mine in so this can help me develop my own ideas.



This album cover for Arctic Monkeys "Favourite worst nightmare" is another one that caught my eye because it is in black and white but also mixes the use of cartoon and photography. The prominant colour that appears apart from the black and white is green. The green along with the large colourful circles create a retro type of feel to the album that may be reflected in some of the songs from the album. I also like the perspective of the photograph of the building and as it is not face on, it makes it more interesting and abstract or makes us feel like we are really in that position looking onto the building. From this album cover I can take the inspiration of black and white with one prominant colour on top of it.


This is the Kings of Leon album cover for "Youth and young manhood". I really like this design as it is simple but also really effective and stands out. As soon as I saw it, it reminded me of the Queen song "Bohemian Rhapsody" with the positioning of the heads. I thought this was a really clever idea as they have used a really well known concept and made it their own by having it more in cartoon form and also in black and white. From this CD cover it has given me the idea to maybe use intertextuality in my own digipack design.


I like this album cover by Muse as it different to the others that I have looked at in the sense that it is not black and white. It also uses a mosaic type of style which I really like and think is effective. There is a small person that is also featured in the cover and it makes it look disorientating and almost like a sci fi type of genre. The font that is used on this album cover is very simple and easy to read which is true to most of the alternative rock album covers I have looked at. This album cover has given me new things to think about with designing my own digipack as it means I do not have to follow the theme of black and white.

Storyboard

After we completed our storyboard for our music video we decided that to get a good idea of how it will look in time with the music, we took pictures of each frame and put them onto imovie and edited some of the shots together with our song over the top. After doing this we realised that some of our shots are far too long and will make our video seem boring and slow (especially the very opening shot) so we had some group discussions on how we can change it and add in more shots to chop it up and edited our paper version of our storyboard that we will take to our shooting sessions and help us get more interesting but structured shots.

This is our animated storyboard:

Planning our video

We have now been given our equipment to start filming our music video which includes a camera, tripod, gorilla tripod, chargers, leads, a battery, tapes and the flip camera. We have done alot of practice filming with our flip camera and now we have the chance to practice on the real camera. We are going to use the gorilla tripod for some of our close up shots from different angles.

For our video we are going to use a band from outside school that Molly knows as they will be reliable and they are also a few years older than us so it will look more professional than having a band our age looking young. The band have also been in another A level music video which means that they are used to the process and will be profesional about the filming. They are good performers and the genre of their music is punk/rock which will fit in well with our music genre and means they will have an ideal image for our band.

This is the A level video that they took part in before:

Framing and composition of shots

Rule of Thirds
The rule of thirds is a compositional rule in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.

















Head room
Headroom refers to the distance between the top of the subject's head and the top of the frame, but the term is sometimes used instead of lead room, nose room or looking room to include the sense of space on both sides of the image. Headroom changes as the camera zooms in or out, and the camera must simultaneously tilt up or down to keep the center of interest approximately one-third of the way down from the top of the frame. The closer the subject, the less headroom needed. In extreme close-ups, the top of the head is out of the frame, but the concept of headroom still applies via the rule of thirds.
One of the most common mistakes that casual camera users make is to have too much headroom - too much space above the subject's head.

Questionnaire

We have made our questionnaire and started to hand it out to people to fill in to help us with our research and make our music video suitable for our audience.

These are our questions that we have asked and I will put the results up when we get them all in:

1. How old are you?
-14 [ ] 14-16 [ ] 17-20 [ ] 21-25 [ ] 25-30 [ ] 30+ [ ]

2. Are you male or female?
Male [ ] Female [ ]

3. How do you usually watch music videos?
TV [ ] Internet [ ] Download [ ] Other [ ]

4. What is your favourite genre?
Rock [ ] Pop [ ] Alternative [ ] Jazz [ ] RnB [ ] Heavy metal [ ] Classical [ ] Other [ ]

5. How often do you watch music videos?
Never [ ] Everyday [ ] Every week [ ] Every few weeks [ ] Rarely [ ]

6. Do you prefer funny or serious music videos?
Funny [ ] Serious [ ]

7. Do you prefer music videos that are reaistic or non realistic?
Realistic [ ] Non realistic [ ]

8. What are your expectations of rock music videos?

9. How do you interpret the lyrics "She's such a charmer"?

10. What music channel would you expect to see a Kings of Leon music video on?

11. What colours do you think represent the rock genre? and why?

I think that we have a wide variety of questions that will help us gain an understanding of what people want from a music video and what will work and we also used a mix of open and closed questions throughout the questionnaire.

Lip Syncing

We also used the flip cameras to practice lip syncing that we will be using in our music video. Charlotte from our group is going to be the girl that features in our video as the obsessed fan as we thought it would be easy to use someone in our group as we know they will be reliable and know the sort of results we want from our video. We are also already using people from outside the group to be our band in the video so we thought it would be nice to also have someone from the group in it too.

For the parts of the song where charlotte will be lip syncing it will mainly be extreme close ups of her mouth which makes it even more important to be perfect. We practised and put it in black and white because that's what our video is going to be shot in, however when we do the real thing, we will have Charlotte's lips bright red with lipstick to stand out as seductive and feminine.

Although this practice video is not perfect, we have learnt how to do it and hopefully when we do it for our real video we will have more experience so we can make it perfect.

Stage composition

Last week our group decided to use our flip cameras to try out the stage composition for our band in our school hall on the stage. We weren't sure if the school stage would be too big and look wrong for our video so we tried it out and by putting it in black and white decided that it may look quite good. We also said that if we cover the back and sides of the stage with big black coverings that Molly has at her church, we will be able to make the stage look suitable. We decided though that rather than trying to create a proper performance and having to find an audience to fill the hall which could look terrible and fake, we will make out the band are just at a casual practice. We gave eachother roles from the band and postitioned ourselves on stage to see what it looked like. Sarah was lead singer, Charlotte was bass, Molly was guitar and I was drums and this is what it looked like: