Digipak Advert First Draft

I wanted my advert to be simple but eye-catching, i didn't want to overload the advert with text so i chose to only include the important information. I started by chosing the background picture, i used the same image as the inside of my digipak in order to keep up the brand identity and themes and i felt this projected the theme of gold nicely whilst being a bright photo to catch the attention of an audience. I included the artist's name and the album name in the top right corner to match the text on the digipak so everuhings kept similar. I put the artist's details in the top left corner as i felt that was a very important part of an advert so the audience can know how to find out news and updates from the artist. In the middle at the top i wanted to include a review of the album as this is a common theme of an advert in order to show that the album has been noticed by popular magazines that would be trust worthy for a new audience. The bottom of the advert has a bit of information about the album itself including a picture of the front cover, where it can be downloaded and when it will be out. There's also a bit of text next to it about some of the songs that are featured on the album, having "brand new" before the song titles makes it feel exclusive and exciting so should be more eye-catching for a potential audience.

Digipak First Draft

For the front of my digipak i wanted to portray both the theme of the music video as well as the brand identity of the artist. My digipak contradicts a stereotypical digipak cover as the artist isn't on the front. This is part of the brand identity as this actor would be featured in all the artists videos, not just Gold. I chose to enhance the intensity of the gold highlighter using a tool on Pixelmatr so that when this album is on a shelf in the shop or on a website it would grab the attention of someone walking past or scrolling through the website. I wanted to keep the rest of the cover very simple so all the attention is on the image, particularly the gold highlight as it represents the title of the album. The choice of font is also very simple in order to again focus the attention onto the model and the highlight.

I wanted to continue with the same colour scheme and themes from the front of the digipak, so again the same actor is used on the back to keep up the brand identity. I chose to also enhance the intensity of the gold highlight in order to again grab the audience's attention but not distract too much from the music. The colours used are also black, white and gold as i wanted the attention to be predominately on the gold. The back features the names of the songs on the album and also the barcode and some information about the record label and copy right issues down the side. I feel the front and back match well enough for the covers to be clear what artist they belong to.





I wanted a slightly brighter image for the inside of the digipak to represent the happiness that is now inside of the actor in the music video. I chose this image as the gold in the balloons continue the theme of the digipak through to the middle and i put the effect of the gold dots to enhance this further. I wanted to also keep the inside very simple when it came to the text so the focus didn't shift from the images and themes so i decided to put where the album will be available to download and also some information about the artist's social media and website so the audience can get involved in her music more.

For the other side of the inside i wanted to just choose an image and keep it very plain (no text and information). This is because this is where the CD would be so it doesn't need any information as it wouldn't be able to be seen. In order to again continue the theme of gold i chose this image of gold glitter and stars, i increased the exposure of the gold in the stars and put a filter on it to make it a lot warmer and make sure the gold matches the other gold on the digipak so it all connects.

Filming Diary: Studio

8th November 2016 and 14th November 2016:

Filming for the studio scenes was split into two days as we weren’t completely satisfied with what we had at the end of the first day.

On the first day, Devyani, Jack and I all came to my house to film. We had previously practiced setting up the kitchen (see vlog) so knew everything would look okay and knew roughly how long it would take. We put the backdrop up first and held it in place using a stall and the bin, we borrowed a box light from my cousin so we placed that on another stall so It was at the right height to capture all the shots, we also put the tripod and camera up next to the lighting so we had enough space on the ‘stage’ area. We began by filming mine and Jack’s scenes which were us fighting. These went really well as we had planned previously what we wanted to get. One of our ideas was to have a fight with gold paint. We did this however had to change it slighting so it wasn’t so violent otherwise the paint would have gone all over the backdrop and this didn’t belong to us. So instead the fight scene was more like we were caressing each other rather than hitting but it still turned out well and links into the scenes well. A lot of the other shots included Jack being quite dominating towards me by grabbing me and my character being quite submissive as we made Jack tower over me. Additionally we wanted to make it clear that the relationship is coming to an end by me snatching my hand away from him when he’s trying to hold it, by me pushing him off when he’s hugging me and by me walking off as if it was over completely. We also ended it by my character having a gold tear run down her face, which represents the values coming out of her. This worked really well and really links everything together and is a good place to end the fighting scenes

 

After finishing those scenes we moved on to the lip-syncing so we changed up my makeup slightly by having black and gold lips as this would be a zoomed in shot. We found it looked more natural if I actually sang rather than just mimed so that’s what I did.

Once we were happy with that we moved onto Devyani’s shots, her scenes involved a lot of props and we had a lot of problems with these. We wanted to put glitter into a balloon and blown it up so that when she pops it the glitter all falls out. This didn’t work as whenever we went to pump air into the balloon the glitter just got blown out and went all over the floor so we soon realised we weren’t able to do this. Secondly we had bought some large confetti poppers that we wanted to film popping so we could slow motion the footage. The packaging said to only pop these outside so we tried this first and it went everywhere so we wasn’t sure if we wanted to use the other one inside or not. We chose to do it as we really wanted these shots. I decided to hold the camera rather than use the tripod because I wanted to get all of Devyani in as well as some spacing around her to capture the confetti. However I failed to remember the massive Bang sound the popper makes when twisted and as the popper went off I jumped so didn’t manage to get any of It in shot. Leaving just a huge pile of mess and no footage to put in our video. We then continued with other shots of Devyani but overall just felt very disappointed at everything that had got wrong and didn’t feel like these were what we imagined when we planned her scenes. Therefore we decided to keep the scenes of me and jack and the lip-syncing but meet up again to get the rest of Devyani’s shots. So we cleaned up the mess we had made.

About a week later we met up again but this time we went to Devyani’s house to set up the studio in her bedroom. We did this because we didn’t want to be on a time limit and if we had used my kitchen we would have only had around 2 hours which wasn’t ideal. The backdrop fit really well in Devyani’s bedroom and we set the lighting and camera up so they lit everything nicely. The shots also went really well, we focused on getting a lot more than we needed to be safe, we also scrapped using the confetti popper and balloon ideas and focused on just using the confetti to throw and used a hair dryer to blow it over Devyani. Towards the end of filming we had an idea that we would like some warmer lighting in a gold or orange tone but didn’t know how to achieve this. I then spotted an orange Sainsbury’s bag on the floor and thought it might work if we put this over the lighting. We did this and it worked really well and helped to break up the studio shots so they’re not too repetitive. By the end of this filming day we felt so happy that we had started those bits again and felt that they were much more of the level that we wanted and expected. This was also our last day of filming apart from filming a few sparklers about a week later so we were pleased with how it went.

Vlog: Studio Filming

Pixelmator practise

In order to find out what effects are avaliable for my digipak i produced this practise picture with a few different effects that i may be able to work with. Below i have a few screenshots of how i managed to do the different effects.

 First i had to work out what size i wanted my practise to be, for the digipak i'll make it 16cm by 16 cm however for my practise piece i made the page the size of A4.

 In order to make this picture the background i dragged the picture from my desktop onto the programme and stretched it so it filled the whole page.

 I wanted to try and cut the image so that the girl and the balloons were the only part left. This is something i might do for my digipak so i used this practise to ensure i found the easiest method to do this. The first technique i tried was the Eraser Tool. This too a very long time as i had to make sure i didn't go over the lines and that it was all kept neat. It took a while and it also isn't as neat as id hoped so i won't be using this tool for my digipak.

 I wanted to try putting a filter on one of the pictures. So for the picture in the upper right i put a Sepia filter on it. The scale in the screenshot gives me the chance to increase the intensity of the colour or make it less obvious. This is something i'm very likely to use as i want to keep the pictures with a warm tone.

 I used the Quick Selection Tool to try a different method for cutting around a picture. This tool was a lot quicker and kept the image much neater than the previous tool so this is the tool i'll use for my digipak if i wish to do this.

 In the top image i used the Warp Tool to just try out what it does. It allowed me to stretch the image out of place. This isn't something i'd want in my digipak however i wanted to give it a try to practise.

 I tried out the Blur Tool and it allowed me to change the intensity of how blurry i want the picture. I may use this in my digipak but only maybe for the background of a picture.






 Finally i tried out another filter on a picture. The filter is called Nebula and i feel like it would really work well on my digipak as its a very warm tone.









Finally i practised saving my work and making sure i knew how to save it as a JPEG image in order to be able to put it on my blog once it's done.

Vlog: Setting up studio and practise studio shots