Digipak Designs

I began the process of creating my digipak by doing some designs and then deciding which side I will put each image on. Here are the designs I came up with.

I made a definite decision on the front and back cover, these fit the conventions of digipaks, and the style of each fits my genre. The picture on the front of the singer is generally found in rock bands as the lead singer is generally the centre of attention, as he is in the video also. Due to the major role of drugs in the video (mainly alcohol) I felt that the other sides could be interesting plays on a different type of drug in which you could see the title of the song, fitting the creativity of the indie genre and would also be quite appealing to a younger audience.

I then decided that the inside cover, where the booklet would be will be some spilt pills spelling out pretty visitors, in the image provided the words may not be very clear but the way I will position the pills and the background I put them on when actually taking the shot makes me much more confident they will be perfectly visible.

And finally on the CD back, which is underneath where the CD would be. I wanted to try an effect on photoshop that would allow me to make smoke I had taken a photo of look like it is spelling out words.

I decided against the syringe idea due to health and safety issues. plus i feel that the other designs would have much more of a visual impact.

I also realise that these designs are not the right format as the measurements of a digipak are nothing like these but these are merely design ideas that I jotted down, and so I don't feel that using the correct measurements at this stage is entirely necessary.

Font Ideas

When I came to initially designing the digipak i found that all of the fonts available to me were copyrighted so I could not use them. This meant i would have to design my own, I made only one design for the band name font and I was happy with it. The font looks slightly retro in style and as the band is of the indie genre this fits the type of style that would generally be associated with this genre.

I then came to the font I would need for the song title. I went on to the Arctic monkeys site and took some inspiration from the font they used there.

This then gave me an idea for a font, I drew it out a few times until I was happy and this is the finished version.

I didn't feel that this really fit the tone of the song the way I wanted to and may have looked slightly out of place on the digipak. The font looks a little disgusting and although I want the font to be slightly creepy I feel it should still be aesthetically pleasing. So I went back to the drawing board and began working on a second font, the final version of the second attempt i feel fits what i wanted much more, the elongated jagged edges of the font give the creepy and slightly scary effect i wanted but the font flows nicely and is not displeasing to the eye. The hollow letters again add to both aims of being eery and yet nice looking.

Risk Assessment

I didn't find that after completing these assessments that anything got in the way of me proceeding with the production process, I needn't re-think any of my ideas for safety reasons and couldn't find any instance where I would be endangering either myself, the actors or the equipment.

Target Audience Research

When researching my target audience i felt it appropriate to visit examples of sites that you would typically find Arctic Monkey's products being sold, so i went to HMV's website and found that they had categorised them in "rock and pop" other artists in this category are Take That, Britney Speares, and Robbie Williams. A set of artists that I'm fairly sure an indie band would not normally want to be grouped with, this showed me that although they are an indie band they are very mainstream now. This would suggest to me that there audience has grown which it undoubtedly has but due to the fact that they are no longer an underground band a lot of fans may have responded negatively to their recent amount of success.

When on the NME website I took a screenshot of a page that told me about artists similar to Arctic Monkeys. This would have been put on the site to attract members of a similar audience so I felt it was appropriate to put on here.

I then did the same thing with the HMV site and here is the screen shot for that

Then to help me gauge the how many of either gender like my band I went onto their website and decided to check out their forum posts to see how many I could identify as male or female. Unfortunately due to online screen names there would be no way for me to do this, and the site does not give out personal information of their users, however I did again take a screen shot to show just how many users there are.

From this we see that the site has nearly 800 topics in the forum and each topic could have anything up to 9,634 posts on it, and thats only the first page of discussions. If we average out each topic to having say around 4,000 posts on it, with 747 topics that means that the site could have anything up to or around 2,988,000 comments on it, and rising. If we then do the same thing for the amount of times each post has been viewed (which is the number in the second column) and we average this out to around 17,000, means that the forum could have been viewed in one way or another 12,699,000 times.

All of this shows me just how popular this band have become and possibly just how wide their range of audience is.

When analysing the NME magazine for my digipak research i noted that this magazine was consistent with the music websites suggested artists for fans of Arctic Monkeys, which in turn suggests to me that this is the sort of magazine my advert would be featured in.

Animatic

It has been pointed out to me by other members of my class and staff that the pace of the animatic seems a little slow, after reviewing this I don't feel that I need to make any changes to the cut rate as the action inside each shot can't be properly represented in an animatic and this, I feel will help the song flow much better and seem much more lively than the cut rate here suggests.

Digipak Research

Digipaks typically consist of a gatefold (book-style) paperboard or card outer binding, with one or more plastic trays capable of holding a CD or DVD attached to the inside.

Digipak-style packaging is often used for CD singles or special editions of CD albums and the tall DVD Digipak (DVDigipak) is used as a premium package for DVDs and DVD sets. Because such packaging is less resistant than jewel cases, it tends to show signs of wear relatively quickly. Digipak-style cases grew in popularity among record labels and recording artists in the early 2000s.

Historically, Digipak was only available in large quantities. However, AGI has recently introduced a new product called digipak i-create for the consumer market. Digipak i-create is a web-supported concept that is aimed at the download, music, photo and creative markets.

Digipak covers are generally similar to normal album covers, in fact the only considerable difference between the two is that digipak’s contain a DVD along with the CD, they are similarly laid out with a main cover, usually with an image representing the band or album, a track list on the back and the discs inside contained in plastic trays.

Here are some examples of digipak style cases.

After checking out some digipaks first hand I found out that there dimensions are

13.8cm in width

12.5cm in length

and the spine is roughly 6mm wide

all digipaks tend to include several if not all of these attributes

• Record label name, with copyright symbol beside it
  
• Website
• Bar code
• Tracklisting
  

Each digipak is also slightly different to another in the way they open up. Some are the same design as a CD case, others upon up in a gatefold style, and i have seen some that work similarly to a book, as in the CD tray sits in between two outer covers.

Then to further my research I looked through the NME magazine and found various forms of advertisement for digipaks. I found that there are various sizes and pages that these advertisements could go on, there were some that were about 1/8th of a page and were put underneath articles throughout the magazine. Some adverts were took up half of the page and others are full page spreads.

After thoroughly analysing these i noted that each advert contained at least one of these things:

• Artwork
• Band Name
• Album Name
• Website
• Label Name with copyright symbol

I also noted that a lot of the adverts had the HMV logo on them. This could suggest that the advert is not merely for the band but possibly for the shop it is sold in

.

From these examples I found that the adverts can also come in different sizes in magazines. so I found out the basic costs of the different sizes of advertisement in NME.

Full Page : £3,920

Half Page: £1,960

Quarter Page (4 columns): £1,120

Quarter Page (3 columns): £845

Storyboards

Deciding on a song, treatment and permission message

Deciding on a song

When I was given the task of deciding on a song I knew that to make the best music video I could, I would need to use a song that I liked. I felt that essentially there were two types of song that I would like to create a video for. These we’re either an up-tempo, happy song, to which the video would be quite performance based and very bright in terms of imagery, to reflect on the songs happy tone, or a much slower tempo, meaningful song, that I could create and equally meaningful and possibly quite dark music video. To make my decision I scoured my iPod to find songs that I was excited about the prospect of filming for. I narrowed my decision down to four songs, three of which we’re very up-tempo, and one song was a powerful acoustic song. I narrowed it down to the acoustic song and one other that wasn’t in my original four as it was a very recent release and I hadn’t heard it until very recently. Although I felt I understood the acoustic song better, something told me that I would be able to make a much better music video for the other song, purely because I liked the song much more and would have more fun trying to be creative with it. The song I finished up choosing was Arctic Monkeys – Pretty Visitors.

Permission Message

After I was positive on the song I had chosen i sent an e-mail to the brittish label the band were on asking if I could use the track for my video and stating where it would be found and by whom it could be viewed.

I have been made aware that when the image is clicked up to be viewed in its full size it is no where near big enough to read the message I sent. i double checked the sizings that I uploaded it in and can't find any reason that it shouldn't come up large enough to read, so I can only assume that it has something to do with blogger and not myself. The e-mail that i sent to Domino UK the representatives for the Arctic Monkeys in the UK read like this:

My name is Thomas Cooper and I am a media student from Thomas Adams Sixth Form Wem in Shropshire. I am e-mailing you to ask your permission in using a track taken from the Arctic Monkeys new album to make a music video with. The track I wish to use is 'Pretty Visitors'. Once the video is made I will not be uploading it to youtube or anything like that, but instead the only place that I will be putting it is on a blog that my college have set up for students to publish their work on, this way the exam board can see it when it comes to be marked. I hope that you will allow me the permission to use this song in my video

Regards

Tom

Treatment

Music Video Analysis

Analysis

This video has an extremely unusual visual style. The background, although it is completely naturalistic, is almost otherworldly in the colours it has in it, and the way it changes colour throughout the video. This is seen again in the motion of the boat the band are in as although everything looks completely normal the boat is going against the current. This video has quite a slow pace which when combined with the strange mise en scene is quite unsettling, part of the strange mise en scene being that a band of five people, long with instruments and a full drum kit fit into a tiny, unsafe looking boat and are sailing in fast currents, without a sail. in place of the sail are a series of lightbulbs strung out across the boat. The performance within the video is completely as expected, the band play their instruments and lip sync the song, there is no narrative in the piece, which again is almost a convention of this genre, to have either no narrative or a very strange and seemingly abstract one. The lighting again added to the effect of the video as it tended to match the colour of the sky around them as it changed. The lighting was also quite dim which gave the impression of the song having quite a dark meaning although this didnt really come off in any other way. CGI was probably used to create alot of the water effects as they didn't seem quite as naturalistic as any of the other elements but this only again added to the very unsettling and strange vibe the video was giving off. This again was used to create the giant versions off the artists rising out of the sea playing there instruments, this was however made much more obvious because the had a slight opacity, suggesting there link to the sea maybe? For the most part mid shots were used showing the entire band rather than what would normally be seen in a music video, which is lots of close ups, mainly of the lead singer. Some close ups were used to show instruments being played, along with some long shots so the entire boat could be seen in with the giant versions of the artists.

Analysis

The first thing that srikes me about this video is that it is monochrome, which is the case with quite alot of videos in this genre, and for the most part of the videos in colour they are always quiote dull or faded colours. as for the distinction between narrative and performance this video is somewhat unusual, the singer does lip sync to the words of the song, but not in a performance context, but rather down the phone to someone (whom is never revealed) this would initially suggest to me that because there is no performance the video will have a clear narrative, however this was not the case, instead of this no real storyline can be followed and seemingly random events all lead up to the collapse of a building around the singer, you could argue that this is a metaphor for something but nothing else in the video really suggests this. The shots in this video are very soft focus and very slow paced allowing for a very calm mood to be set, this mood is then offset when the shots begin to blur and become faster towards the end of the video. Again as with most videos plenty of close ups and moving shots are used. The fact that the whole video is very difficult to understand I think adds quite effectively to the unsettling end, as the audience can't quite be sure why the things that occur in the video are happening.

Conclusion to analysis

I feel that analysing these videos has been extremely helpful to me in that I have been able to take away both inspiration and confidence in my abilty to make a good music video for a song in this genre. This is mainly because of what I took away from analysing the second video, i found that a successful video can be made without it having much, if any relation to the lyrics in the song. This was one thing I was particularly worried about with my song choice as the lyrics are quite difficult to decipher. Although I have taken some meaning away from them I know that a video can be made even if I hadn't. In terms of conventions of this genre I found that the videos tend to mimic the songs. By this I mean that if the song was slow paced so was the video, if the song had a very dark tone, then the video would mimic this with a dark mise en scene etc. camera shots tended to be cut to the beat which helped them become a little less noticeable. I would need to consider these conventions when planning, filming and editing my piece.