DIGIPAKS. Exciting.

Being at a half way point we can no longer purely focus on our music video as there are other aspects to this course. So we began work on our digipak. A digipak is basically just the CD packaging. It looks like: 

 

Before looking at digipaks and asking what they really are, we reminded ourselves of conventions. A convention is a typical form which is expected of a genre, a norm. It is the ingredience which makes up the product. It is a style and structure. So we questioned what the conventions of a digipak were. 

• There is a maximum of 2 fonts. 
• the front cover contains one main image that represents the album 
• The artist's name needs to be bold and clear so that the fans can easily spot it on a shelf 
• There must be a reoccurring visual style based around the panels; no more than 3/4 main colours. 
• Track names are on the back 
• Album name on the spine 
• production detail at the bottom on the back panel, copyright issues and all. 
• Maximum of 2 fonts 
• and a barcode. 

We then thought about who is buying didgipak albums and why they are they still making them. For this we turned to the cultural circuit 'audience, text, institution'. The audience who are buying them are most likely collectors who have the physical copies from the start, it honestly depends on the generation. The institution are clearly still making them so they can provide different products to different audience segments to maximise revenue. 

We started to design our own Digipaks, we first had to consider the genre of our song... on iTunes it says it is an 'electronic' and'pop'. 

So i looked up some digipacks from artists which were similar to ours and found: 

First off we drafted some panels:

What we did was run a girl called Hiedis eye through an app that turns it into a cartoon like picture. Then in photo shop we changed the block colours. Also there was a deluxe edition that came in black and gold! 

We liked these and so did phil, but we started to question if it really fit with our video? our visual style and theme is based around colour... lots of bright colours and very poppy. So did these products fit together? the answer was no. So we started trying out with brighter colours; especially the ones that we are actually using in the video. But in the end after looking at more and more pop digipaks that are already out there we realised that this sort of imagery wasn't really ever used; it was always an image of the artist themselves. so we decided to plan a time where we could meet up with Maria (our lead singer) and have a photo-shoot with her, it would also give us the opportunity to try on the clothes that we have brought in for her for the music video itself. It was back to the drawing board.