Digipak Ideas

After brainstorming ideas, Elliot began to make some drafts of the front cover of our digipak. I also drew up a plan of the entire digipak and kept it consistent with Elliot's ideas, using similar images such as the doves and clouds.

The original idea we had was the black background with doves. Elliot made this by creating a cloudy effect and then downloading a brush for doves. After selecting some doves he added a blur and a glow to them to give them a different effect. He then created some subtle rays of light coming through the clouds as this kept the theme of secrets and confession.

He experimented with the dove idea in some other designs, for example the candle cover and the cello idea.

We all liked these ideas, however we did notice that the candle did not feature in our video and this would not create consistency across our platforms, and also the cello covers look like they are intended for classical genres.

The last point was to choose our font for the digipak. This font would also feature in our magazine advert as this would keep the coherancy. We chose the font Headline from DaFont.com, and felt this font worked well with our designs. It suggested a mix of formality and informality with its blocky text. It also fitted well with previous fonts used by One Republic.

One Republic - Digipak Logo's and Styles

Elliot began looking at the existing One Republic digipaks and whether they had any similarities. Each of the albums have a different font used on the front covers, as you can see from the image on the left. The albums also do not display a band logo allowing us a freedom when designing our own digipak. Despite this, there are many similarities between the fonts, as they all use black, white and browns as a distinct colour scheme. The fonts are all formal which reflects the band as a whole, as throughout their music videos they are seen wearing formal clothing. This style further promotes the band's image. In some cases, the same fonts are used for both the name of the band and the album title, but the difference is indicated by a change of colour.

The album artwork is generally abstract as you can see in the image on the right. 'Waking Up' uses paint splatters as an album artwork, and 'Dreaming Out Loud' uses a silhouette of a tree on a blue starry background. This album cover is the only one that appears to have some relevance to the title of the album, as dreaming is commonly associated with stars and night.

'Apologize' is one album cover that shows the band as a whole, where you can see they are dressed formally and the structure of the image gives an indication of the members of the band. The lead singer is presented at the front, and the remaining band members are situated behind him, showing his importance and role in the band. If we use an image of our band as a whole we would need to pay attention to how we set up the image like this.

Digipak Research - Alternative Rock Genre

I began some research into the general conventions of digipaks in the alternative rock genre and found some patterns in the way album covers are presented. If the album covers show the band, they usually depict the lead singer at the front of the image. The rest of the band members are behind the lead singer in a photo. The lead singer appears as the front face of the band and is often the most recognised member of the band, so putting them at the forefront of the photo makes the band more recognisable.

From the image of the Stereophonics album cover and the Razorlight cover you can see that both lead singers are at the front of the band members and both are looking out of the image at you. The other band members are looking away or appear less engaged with the viewer. This highlights importance of the lead singer and also allows people to understand the roles of the people in the picture without necessarily knowing who is who.

However I found with the majority of alternative rock digipaks that they often display abstract art or computer generated images. We had already found that the majority of One Republic's album covers feature art rather than an image of the band and this research showed that this was common for the whole genre. The image on the right is an example of the different kinds of album art within the genre, with many posing no specific relevance the title of the album or the name of the band.

Digipak Research

To start putting ideas together for our ancillary tasks, we first needed to look at some existing products. We need to create a digipak for our song, so I looked at some albums of the same genre to our song that I had in my house. The analysis of these will give us a good idea of what to create for our own digipak.

The first album I looked at was American Idiot by Green Day.

The front cover of the album is a piece of artwork rather than an image of the band, and depicts a hand holding a heart shaped grenade. A theme of destruction is presented with the use of simplistic red, white and black colours and a blocky, distorted font. 'Green Day' is the largest text on the front cover followed by 'American Idiot', the album name, in a smaller size but in a red font. The front cover also features a sticker showing the most popular songs that feature on the album, and quotes from magazines and newspapers such as NME, who say the album is 'marvellous, 8/10'. The sticker is a good idea as it draws attention to the most popular songs of the album. If we chose to make a full album rather than a single, this idea would be good as we could make the song we chose to create a video for stand out from the rest of the album.

The inside of the album shows the back of the front cover and the CD case. The inside cover of the album sticks to the same colour scheme as the front cover, and although it does not have any pictures of the band itself, their identity is shown as their names are highlighted in large, red writing and their roles in the band are written beneath in small white writing. Other names listed on the inside cover include the producer, place of recording, additional musicians and guest singers. Behind where the CD would be placed is a simple black background, and this panel of the pack does not feature anything interesting to do with the band.

The back cover of the album, like most, shows the list of songs featuring on the album, and a picture of the pin from the grenade featuring on the front of the album is shown on the back. This creates a sense of coherancy throughout the album. Other aspects featured on the back cover include barcodes, 'Parental Advisory' label, and advertisement for 'greenday.com' and 'repriserecords.com'.

The second album I looked at was the Employment by the Kaiser Chiefs. This album was very similar to American Idiot as a brown, tiled theme is displayed throughout the album and many features of the album design are in the same place.

The Kaiser Chiefs use a similar colour scheme of browns and yellows throughout the album and similar to the Green Day album, the back cover of this album features the song list, barcodes and contributors to the album. 'Kaiserchiefs.co.uk' is also featured on the back of the album in an attempt to link people interested in the Kaiser Chiefs to their website. On the front cover, the usual 'Kaiser Chiefs' font is used and their album name is written in a different, italic font. The front cover also shows a sticker stating 'special edition' and this feature of an album appears to be very common, so we will have to take this into consideration.

Unlike the Green Day album, the inside of the album behind where the CD would be place features a pattern that is coherant throughout the album. The inside cover also shows the names of the songs in the album and a small change in design is shown. The back and inside covers are different to the front cover and CD panel, as they depict lighter colours.

The next album that I looked at was'U218 Singles'.

This album was different to the other two as it focused much more on the band identity with pictures of the band themselves. A black and white colour scheme is used throughout the design and three different pictures of the band feature across three panels of the album. The panel behind the CD is plain black, similar to the Green Day album. Many albums appear to not have any kind of pattern behind the CD, and if they do it is very simplistic.

Digipak Initial Ideas and Mood Board

Since the name of the song we chose was 'Secrets', and we filmed the video in a church, to create a coherence across all of our tasks we decided it would be good to stick with themes of religion, secrets and freedom. We wanted the album to be dark with a small light source, and we looked at a number of albums such as 'Come Closer' by Miles Kane and 'Defamation of Strickland Banks' by Plan B. These two albums both feature a dark setting and a small light source. From the Miles Kane album, we thought that we could possibly use the silhouette idea in front of a church window. From the Plan B album, we thought that our lead singer sitting in a confession box with similar lighting would work well.


We then had the idea of doves and freedom, relating to 'give all my secrets away'. We liked the idea of having white doves flying away on a dark background, and possibly changing the contrast and effects so that the doves glow on a black background. We also added to this idea by thinking of having a cloudy effect on the background, and possibly having a ray of light shining through the clouds.
We then needed to decide what sort of names would be appropriate for our album. Elliot came up with these ideas:

'Letting Go'

'Breaking Free' 

If we decide to make the album a single, then we would be able to name it 'Secrets' after the song.

Adding a Logo

After learning how to key frame and layering our video we decided to add the MTV Rocks logo to our video. We first had to decide where the logo would be positioned on our video. After looking at these images, we decided that the picture would need to be in the top left corner of the video.

We then needed to import the image of the logo. We saved an MTV Rocks logo as a PNG file as this meant that certain areas of white background wold become transparent, which is what we wanted. We dragged the image into Final Cut and then on to the video track above our original footage. This allowed the two tracks to overlap each other. When we first put the image into the video track it came to fill the whole screen, so we had to check the option for Image and Wire frame, so we could adjust the size and position of the logo on the screen. After we had done this we simply stretched the image across the entire song and then added fade in and outs for the logo. This gave the video a more professional look about it.

How to Keyframe

One of our ideas for our final cut was having a small sign pop up at the start and end of the video indicating what the song is called and who it is by. The way to do this is by keyframing. This allows you to lay an image over another and move with to parts of the screen you want to. We may also add a watermark to the video for example the MTV Rocks logo, as that is the channel we feel our video would be best suited to.

The way we learned how to do this was watching more videos by Final Cut King who had made two videos; the first a simple guide to keyframing and the other a guide to layering.

Rough Cut Feedback

Once our rough cut was finished, the rest of the class watched the video and wrote feedback on areas that were good and areas that needed improvement. Many people agreed that the shots and angles used for the instruments were good and drums were synced to the music the best. The video flows quite well as a whole however there are a few improvements that need to be made and the class did pick up on these.

• To begin, many people said that the lighting was varied throughout the video and this needs to be corrected. The problems we had were that our own lighting was not powerful enough for some shots of the singer and also the light coming through the window was sometimes too bright, obscuring the rest of the shot. Hopefully when we next film the natural lighting will be slightly less, if not we will have to edit the contrast of our shots.

• Our classmates said that we need more shots of the singer looking into the camera as this will create a better connection with the audience. This will be easy to correct and we can refilm the majority of the singer shots.

• It was also suggested that we refilm the opening as it is a bit jolty and we decided this was a good idea because there was a bigger and more interesting stained glass window in the church. 

• Something that many people thought was a problem was the shots of the cello strings. The bow seems to be moving too slow over the strings however the cellist is playing the right tune. Our teacher suggested more shots of the fingers of the cellist and violinist to accompany the close up shots of the strings because this will show the audience the right tune is being played. 

• In some areas we also need to edit the syncing in time with the music.

After the feedback, we are pleased with the result of our rough cut but now know some more aspects we can improve on the easily make our video better. We are refilming in the church again on the 5th of February were we will:

1. Re film the opening using the bigger stained glass window and less jolting

2. Re film singer shots we liked from the rough cut with better lighting

3. Film more shots of singer looking at camera

4. Film a close up of lips with the line ‘all my secrets away’

5. Film more varied shots of strings and fingers

6. Create more energy in chorus

7. Film faster cello shots so they look correct to the audience

Secrets - Rough Cut

Secrets - Rough Cut from Jamie WGSB on Vimeo.

Rough Cut Editing Process

After filming, I began to edit the footage and sync it with the song we had chosen. I used Final Cut on the Apple Macs to do this, and to start with I had to import the footage from the video tapes. After I had imported the clips, it was important to name them so we could tell which sections of footage were which.

The next stage was to import the song into final cut and then lock the audio layer, so that when I began dropping clips into the timeline the music did not split.

The easiest way to apply the footage to the timeline was to go chronologically through the video using our animatic as a guide. I pulled the animatic up alongside our video so that I could tell specific cuts and effect points. At the beginning of our video, we use longer takes and transition effects to reflect the calmer music, instead of the straight cuts we used throughout the rest of the video. you can see from the picture opposite the way we had to drag the fade effect into the space between two clips and then lengthen the fade so that it overlapped both clips it was between. The only other effect other than a fade that we used in the video was an additive dissolve, which gave the transition a glow as two clips overlapped each other.

In order to get the clips into the timeline, I had to play the footage we had taken in the preview box, and then mark in and out points for the few seconds that we wanted to include on our timeline. This allowed me to drag small sections of our original footage into the timeline and sync it easily. Once I had found the clip I wanted, I locked the first layer of video and inserted the clip I had on the above track. This allowed me to get the timings right before dropping it into the track with the rest of the clips.

The hardest part of the process was lip syncing our actor with the song itself. It took a lot of patience in some cases to match the video exactly with the song as sometimes the clips were a fraction of a second out and this was very noticeable on the video.

 After I had the clips on the timeline in the right order, I had to edit the contrast and clolouring of some shots so that they were as light as the other clips. This was particularly difficult to do on Final Cut and the result meant that we would need to re-film some of our shots.

Equipment

Here is the list of equipment we will require when shooting our video:

• Sony Handycam Video recorder
• Camera Tape
• Hand held lamps and lighting
• Digital Camera
• Toshiba laptop
• Speakers
• Music player
• Extension cable.

The actors in the video will be bringing:

• Cello
• Guitar
• Violin
• Drums
• Microphone
• Amps

Filming

To the left is the checklist we used to make sure we had all the right equipment on the day of filming and to make sure we didn't lose anything whilst filming.


The filming went smoothly and a warden from the church was available to help us with lighting the church and setting up the equipment. Upon arriving at the church, we began setting up the equipment in the corner of the church with the most space and windows, allowing the most light into the area where we were going to film. Our priority for the first two hours was getting shots of the band as a whole, and the lead singer. This was because Dan, our lead singer needed to leave early, and after he had left we could focus on individual instruments and their close ups.

Throughout the filming, Elliot was controlling the lighting, Alfie was making sure the right shots were being filmed and was also playing the violin, and I was filming the video. Before we began the filming, we set up the instruments in their correct places, showed the performers the animatic we had made, and set up the song on a music player so that the band members could keep in time with the music.

Once we began filming, we took a variety of close up shots of the lead singer along with some medium close ups. We also took longshots of him and the band as a whole so that we were not missing the lead singer in any shots after he left. We took some short clips, and also allowed the band to play through the song twice whilst is continually filmed the band. This gave us a variety of shots over a small space of time and we didn't need to keep repeating certain lines.

After the lead singer left we focus on the instruments in the video. This was an easy aspect of filming as the chords and beats for each instrument were the same throughout the video so could be repeated easily unlike the singing. We took long clips of each intrument from different angles, for instance, with the drums we filmed the cymbal crashes, over the shoulder of the drummer, and close ups of his hands and feet.

As the light through the church windows became dimmer we needed to rely more upon our own lighting. The warden was happy to let us use more powerful lightbulbs and these helped us get a nice glow on instruments such as the cello and violin. We knew from the day of filming that we would need to schedule another day to record the lead singer.

Shooting Schedule

Filming Location

Here are the maps and the location for our church where we will be filming the music video. The church is accessible for everyone in the group and we will all be able to make it there easily.

Holy Trinity Church