Production Journal: Digipak

Ancillary Product 1: Digipak

Production of the ancillary tasks took around two weeks.

One of the first things we did was go back to our previous blog posts and revisit what we had planned to create for our 'Final Digipak'. Once we had remembered what we had planned we used this closely alongside our digipak construction process. Our first job in the actual creation of our digipak was to source a template for it so that we had a rough idea as to what the dimensions would be as well as the layout. We then opened up Adobe Photoshop and inserted the template along with the images we were going to use for definite.

Digipak Dimensions

How we used the templates to scale our digipak photographs within Photoshop

We differed slightly from our original digipak idea after looking at the shots we had taken from our filming days because some of the ones we took looked better and more effective. As we worked more and more on the images by moving them around and adjusting the dimensions it began to look more like an album cover quickly. Therefore as a group we went through pictures which we had taken and decided on the most appropriate ones to utilise.

Adjusting dimensions

We wanted the outside (front and back covers) to have the washed out sky/dark shades on it because the songs a night-time theme. This meant that the front cover was going to be Phoebe (on top of the car park) positioned to the right hand side of the album cover. She was looking out into the distance to highlights how intensely she is thinking about her situation and that it has really affected her.

Front Cover

The outside back cover is a picture of Phoebe from a side view, and again she is looking out into the distance from the top of a Maidenhead car park. When investigating the connotations of other real media artefacts we decided it would be a good idea to include a barcode (for the advantage of the consumer) and also social media icons was another thing that our research proved to be prominent. Therefore, we included the logos for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Spotify.

We also included two logos for The Chainsmokers record companies, Disruptor Records and Colombia Records.

We thought that all of this was important information to include because we used what we found out from researching our real media artefacts that these were all conventions of traditional album covers and they all serve a purpose being placed onto it, e.g. logos to show how to access more knowledge about the artist, tour dates and merchandise.

Back Outside Cover

We also needed to establish how we were going to include text onto the digipak. This was an essential part of the digipak as it indicated who holds the rights to the artist and the CD's profits along with the record label and release date. Having looked at a lot of album covers altogether as a group and by using them as guidelines we feel as though we have managed to create an effective digipak that coincides well with the themes and look of our music video. It will link and flow nicely with the music video and magazine poster.

Final Back Outside Cover

After this section of our digipak was completed we then moved onto working on the front and back of the inside of our digipak. We thought, as group, that it would be nice and versatile to have the inside of the digipak as 'daytime' and the outside as 'night time'. This meant that we used a photo of the opening shot of our music video (Guards Park Island bridge) as the inside back cover.

Inside Back Cover

We then decided that the best photo to use as our inside front cover was a photo of Phoebe looking out at Maidenhead Bridge (over the shoulder shot). We used Photoshop to insert a lyric from the song onto the photo to enhance our Photoshop editing skills and to make the digipak more interesting.

Inside Front Cover

Finally, we moved onto working on the spines of our digipak. We had a choice of two pictures and by using the cutting tool on Photoshop we cut around the original picture in which we chose to have as our spine. We chose the left photo (lamppost) to have as the spine of our digipak because we originally wanted it to be a photo of the initials of our two characters engraved into a bench but when it came to scaling down the image to fit the dimension of the spine the picture was no longer visible and it just looked like bark as you could not read what was engraved. It also made sense to have the lamppost as our spine because it meant the whole of the outside of our digipak was 'night-time' themed and we also thought if we used the bench photo it would look jarring as it was taken in the day time.