Digipak Examples

Here are some digipak examples which I found. I decided to evaluate and analyse them so that I can gain more information on how a digipak is created and the conventions of one.

I found three, they all had the genre of indie (either they were full indie or half) so they were good for me to evaluate.

The Innocents by Weyes Blood 

I personally really like this album because it is simplistic but still intriguing. The black and white photo of the girl, side on along with the off white background is very pleasing to the eye. Whilst the back of the album still carries the white background on, it has replaced the image of the girl with a silhouette of her filled with different colours.

I feel that this album is very aesthetically pleasing however I do not like the font of the album title. I feel that it is too difficult to read and I had to look at the spine to get the name of the band and the title of the album - this was also difficult to understand because both the name and the title could be confused and swapped.

This digipak is formed differently to how mine is, with it only having two panels and the disc slips inside a pocket and not on a plastic holder. Due to this, the inside of the digipak has the names of the songs and any extra info.

Freedom by The Black Tambourines 

Although the album with the collage is pretty, it doesn't link at all together. The front cover is a colourful collage with the back of the album being pen illustrated in black and white. I don't think they link and that this is a very well put together album. However if you take in the title of the album 'Freedom' it could mean freedom in all aspects meaning that the want to get freedom from conventional album covers. 

This 'freedom' aspect may change my expectations with certain points however they don't keep the same font for the back cover for their spine where they use a font which looks like it's been picked randomly off Microsoft Word. The text is also too close together and there is randomly 'East Action EARSO85' written on the side, unless this is their record company there is no reason for it to be on there and even then they should of used the company's logo and not their name.

This digipak is alike to the two panels with a disc pocket instead of holder, they have used a similar technique to the digipak before with having their song names and any extra information on the inside. However they have put all the text onto one side to leave room for another collage on the inside. This again is most likely following their 'freedom' aspect.

Overall I do not like this digipak it annoys me with its visual aspects and it does not follow the typical conventions of a digipak.

I Aubade by Elvis Perkins

I do like the old aspect of this album with the fading and the stained background. I feel that although the front and back don't match fully the colour scheme used in both saves it from looking like a mess. The album instantly tells you what genre the artist is, folk and indie. I like how the song titles and the album title are written is font that mimics a typewriter, this again supports the fact that the album is folk. 

The front cover looks like a piece of art and this is further justified by the artist's name in the corner. Maybe the artist wanted to make a statement about his music being his art? I like how the album creates enigmas for the audience.

The spine keeps the same font for the artist's name and the album title as it did for the front and back cover. I do not know how to feel about this because whilst the album is keeping to conventions it looks awkward because there are 3 different types of font on one small piece of the album. 

This digipak follows the same template as 'The Black Tambourines' with having an image on one side and information on the other, the way they have staged this it looks very well put together unlike the album before.

Overall I feel that this research has helped me with my ideas and the conventions of a digipak and I will be using these skills in future.

Digipak Template

Here is the template for my digipak ancillary. I have chosen a 6 panel with a centre tray so that the product looks professional and I can include the photos we took.

By having the template I can plan the images I want to feature and also see whether or not they work with the style of the piece.

Audience Reception Theory

Stuart Hall

Audience Reception Theory is also known as reception analysis, the audience reception theory is widely used as a way of characterizing the influx of audience research which occurred within communications and cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s. 

Audience reception theory can be traced back to British Sociologist Stuart Hall and his essay titled "Encoding/Decoding." Hall proposed a new model of mass communication which highlighted the importance of active interpretation within relevant codes. Hall's theory put forward three central premises: 1) the same event can be encoded in more than one way; 2) the message contains more than one possible reading; and 3) understanding the message can be a problematic process, regardless of how natural it may seem.

These premises highlight the way a product can be complicated, in that have different genres and meanings to the audience. The product can be viewed in different ways due to the audience's unique experiences in life, and how it causes them to view the product in different ways due to that. Because of these different views on the product, he coined the terms of 'dominant', 'negotiated' and 'oppositional' readings these can describe the different readings of the audiences.

'Dominant' readings are produced by those whose social situation favours the preferred reading that the producer wants the audience to have; 'negotiated' readings are produced by those who accommodate the preferred reading to take account of their social position; and 'oppositional' readings are produced by those whose social position puts them into direct conflict with the preferred reading.

The audience reception theory is important because when creating a piece the producer needs to think about what type of reading they want for their product, whether they want discussion about the meanings of the signifiers within the audience or whether they want a piece that the audience has no question about.

For my own piece I would want discussion about the meanings within it because if the product causes a stir it means more people are talking about it and it means that it is promoted more. A good example of this is the film 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' (1986), the film has many negotiated readings surrounding it with some viewers believing that Ferris is just a figment of Cameron's imagination and that the whole day is made up in Cameron's mind. Others just view it as an American-teen comedy film.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_reception

Music Video Screenshot

In the video I have edited the footage to have a 'Gaussian Blur' over it, this is to portray to the audience that the footage we are showing is a flashback. I decided to have a warm tone to the footage because that is stereotypically the tone for old footage. I learnt how to use the gaussian blur effect off of Youtube and then applied it to my own footage.

In the photo above you can see the effects I applied to the footage, with gaussian blur you take the footage you want to change and then duplicate it, you then put the duplicated copy over the original in track 2. Then you get the gaussian blur effect and drag it to the copy, after you go into effects controls and change the amount of blur. For my footage I chose 30 and had it on a blur dimension of horizontal. I changed the opacity of this to 80% and changed the blend mode to soft light so that the audience could see the footage easily. 

After this I then created a title and changed the colour of it, I wanted my video to have a warm effect to it so I put the title on track 3 and changed the opacity to 60% and the blend mode to soft light. This meant that it gave a warm tone which suggested a flashback without being too overpowering for the audience.

This screenshot demonstrates the changes the gaussian blur effect makes along with the coloured title overlayed over it, the new footage looks a lot more dreamlike and less realistic.

Music Video - Titles

In a conventional music video, it contains titles which say the artist/band and the name of the song. In our media product we will be following this convention. For the product we decided to have the text be translucent and have the footage from our bath bomb shine through, because of this we need the text to be thick and bold so that the viewer can see the footage. 

The style of the font is also very important because we want it to follow the conventions of an indie-pop video as well. I tried multiple styles however I narrowed it down to four and asked for audience feedback.

I asked our main target audience (teenage girl and boy) for feedback.

Bell Gothic was the first I showed, they both said that whilst they liked the boldness however it was too plain and boring for an indie-pop video since it looks like a documentary title font.

This font is called Fake Smiths, whilst the audience did enjoy the look of it they said it was too 'funky' and that it didn't suit the indie-pop style, it was more the style of a rap genre video.

This third font is called Grind Zero, the audience said that they liked it and it embodied the genre of indie-pop. They were concerned with the placement however I reassured them that the title would be centred if I used it.

I like this font called Yuanti C, I feel that it is fun and suits the genre of indie-pop. However my target audience said that it was too boring again since they felt that it wasn't fun enough and you wouldn't be able to see the footage behind the title enough. 

Overall I have decided to go for the Grind Zero font because whilst it is fun, it isn't wacky and it fits the indie-pop genre nicely. It is also very bold and thick so the audience will be able to see the footage behind it.

Music Video - Narrative & Themes

Narrative

With the music video we had several ideas for the narrative but we decided to follow the couple and during the storyline show flash-fowards of an argument that they will have, at the same time show flash-backs of a happier time.

These changed as we were filming, originally we didn't have the flash-forwards or backs and had a chronological storyline of the relationship falling apart. However when I was editing the footage that we filmed first, we realised that we didn't have enough of it and decided to go out and film more. This is when we filmed the flash-back sequence, it was originally going to be part of the chronological storyline however we thought that by putting snapshots of it within the original footage it would keep the audience interested for longer. We also put the flash-forwards in the video for this reason as well.

Themes

Water
A key theme in our video is water, we tried to include it in most footage because it was representing a fresh start which is what the couple get when they break up. It was supposed to abstractly foreshadow the break up for the viewer. The multiple bathbomb shots, the water speakers and the sea interjecting the couple footage breaks up the long, boring footage and interests the reader. It also follows the conventions of a indie-pop video which has quick cutaways and bright colours (bathbomb shots).

Love
With the editing it was key to show the love between the couple deteriorating, we showed this through the flash-backs which have a very warm filter to them as well as the gaussian blur. We chose a warm tone because it represents the 'cozy' and happy part of their relationship. To show the time change from the past to the present we changed the filter from very warm to neutral with slight warm undertones, so that the graphics colour match with each other. When the couple are arguing the filter changes from a neutral tone with an underlying warmth to a blue cold filter. This represents the relationship breaking down and getting colder. I feel that by using the colour tones to portray the relationship it adds another level to the video and interests the audiences.

Music Video - BTS

Here are some photos of us heading to the location for the flashback shots and whilst we were having the photo shoot:

Music Video Screenshot

This showcases the differences before and after I've edited the footage, for this particular shot I zoomed in and warmed the shot so the white isn't so harsh.

Music Video Screenshot

Again here is another image of me editing the footage so that it fits the conventions of our music video. I particularly like this shot because of the colours featured. 

Music Video Screenshot

Here is a screenshot showing how I am editing the footage I have gotten to an area where I am happy to begin to edit the look of the footage. 

With this particular shot I have rotated the image so it is straight, I have also added a orange tint to the footage so that it colour matches with the band shots which have warm lighting. The saturation has been turned up to showcase the contrast between the reds and blacks. I have also zoomed in slightly to focus more on the vinyl record player's hand. 

Music Video So Far

Here is mine and Imogen Millard's video, it is still a work in progress and there are parts of it which are blank or aren't correctly synced up to the music however I have uploaded it because we wanted to gain audience feedback.



Music Video: THE SOUND (rough cut)

Music Video - BTS

Here are a series of photos showing behind the scenes when we were filming the band shots, I have also included some photos of the lighting box so the mise-en-scene is shown.

Please click on photo to take you to the album:

Music Video - Mise-En-Scene

All shots we filmed we thought about the mise-en-scene however the shot that involved the most thought put into mise-en-scene that we used whilst filming was in the band shoot, because we were filming a black space and needed objects to 'dress it up'.

The light settings

Before we had the shoot I set up the lighting, which was quite difficult. I had never properly worked with lighting before, apart from a brief workshop I did in AS a year ago, so the process of setting it up was very tricky since I didn't really know what I was doing. But I set up two free standing white lights that I angled into the set so it would light the band members up nicely by showing their faces.

I had wanted the lighting to be coloured as red and blue with a gobo effect but we didn't have the equipment for that. I also set up the fixed lighting, we had four lights fixed in a box position, you can see to the right the brightness I had the lights on. The levels on the left didn't control any lights so they were off, but the centre ones controlled the lights in front of the band, I had them on quite high because we wanted the band's faces to be visible to the audience, I had the centre left on higher because it had a yellow bulb so it gave a warmer tone, and we didn't want the footage to be extremely warm. This is why we had the white lights as well because otherwise the footage would be too warm and I would have to edit it to be colder which could lower the quality.

We had the band back lit because we wanted to create a enigmatic space where the audience couldn't see the set behind the band since the glare from the lights would stop the anything from being seen apart from the band and the obvious props.

You can see below some more of the light set up:

BTS - We were playing around with having a 'The Who'
inspired shot.

The lighting created this effect on the band, I really like the lighting because it makes the shot look a lot more aesthetically pleasing, the band being backlit also creates a glow around Isaac (the frontman) which adds to his status as being the actor in the rest of the video.

The shot above also shows the mise-en-scene of the set with the props we included. We had two amps set up; since one is massively bigger than the other we put fairy lights on the smaller one to compensate. We had two guitars in the band because the shot would be unequal if we a drum set, because we were filming Jack (red guitar) in a close up shot we had him wearing a strap holding the guitar. However because we only had one strap Tom (black guitar) had to hold his up but because it is black and his shirt is as well the audience can not see it as much. Isaac is holding a microphone since we thought it would add more realness to the footage.