Digital StoryBoard

Digipak Final (Fern O'Gorman and Alice Sandom)

This is a collage our final and complete Digipak. We are extremely pleased with how it looks as a finished product but, in order to have a continuous theme throughout, we did have to make a few changes to our original designs.

Front Cover
The major change to our front cover was fading out our light bulb image and integrating a matted 'distressed leather' background to make the design more complicated. We also changed the titles font to one that appears similar to one of the band's own chosen designs, but does not look as simple or as clinical to the one we used before. We also removed the band's logo and placed more importance on the band's name, enlarging the font used so that it took up more space.

Back Cover
We also used the same matted, distressed leather image as a background for this cover, using only a part of the initial image we had taken in the cover's corner, This allowed us more room to place song titles and the copyright details which now fit snugly to the left of the image. Our main issue here, was deciding on a font to use that would be easy to read, would feel continuous throughout the rest of the digipak and suit the band's genre. We eventually agreed to an ittalic yet scratchy font but now realise this may look to basicc for the back cover. However, we are very pleased with how all the separate elements come together and compliment themselves and the front cover.

The CD
We made very little changes to our CD, simply adding a logo and title to give the design a unique flair and so that potential buyers would be able to recognise it without the rest of the digipak. For the title, we settled on the same font used as the front cover which felt continuous and showed up well against the space-like appearance of the background.

Lyric Page
We also added a lyric page of the song we chose to do for our music video 'In Between'. We used the same font as that used for the titles and placed it against the distressed leather background. Our main issue was fitting all the lyrics on and we found ourselves having to reduce the size of the font and abbreviating lyrics - removing chorus's and just keeping the verses.

Note from Richard Skeratt
The note was an extra addition we made, inspired by that of singers from other bands. Like the lyric page, it too has been placed against the same mottled background and uses the same font. It simply thanks people for listening to the music and explains why he enjoys performing and what first inspired him.

Photo of Richard Skeratt
The photo was included to enhance the singer's star image an to create a visual intertextual reference between our music video and the digipak. The image was take against a white background which allowed us to desaturate the image in order to make him stand out more and to darken the background towards the bottom, so that a large spotlight appears to be shining onto him. The logo was added after so that people would be able to recognise his connection to the band. 

Digipak Feedback

For our front cover we need to make the image darker or add another background or border in order to better suit our genre and to emulate certain style models. We also need to create a continuous theme that will start on this page, perhaps by keeping a border or similar image throughout the digipak. The image also needs to be edited more so that it a appears more distorted and faded out.

For our CD we simply need to add more details, such as track titles, band logo, recording company logo and copyright details. This will all help people to identify the CD without needing the rest of the digipak.

Our back cover also needs to be more faded and distorted and we need to agree on a certain font for the list of song titles. We also need to add certain social media symbols and the red bull logo.

Overall:

• Distort images
• Decide on a continuous font
• Add symbols and logos
• Include a picture of Richard Skeratt with the band's logo - stress his importance as the lead singer
• Add more pages - perhaps a note from the singer/songwriter?

Digipak: Front Cover Draft

Our initial front cover was also very simple, we used a photo that we had planned and taken and edited it slightly in Photoshop to balance the colours and to blur the background. Then, we added the band's title and logo - which has remained the same throughout most of their own album designs - and the albums title.

We tried to incorporate images into the design that we people would relate with the title 'Disgusting'. Our survey received mix responses, many that we decided were too grotesque to use on an album cover for a popular band. However, blood and broken glass appeared to be a mutual decision throughout. We smashed the light bulb carefully and used golden syrup, black treacle and food colouring to make the fake blood.

Although we are very happy with the image, we both agree that it is too simple to use on it's own and that it needs to have another background in order to make the design more professional. We will experiment with borders and muted colours in order to achieve this and will add the record company's logo and copyright details once we have a finished product.  

Digipak: CD Draft

Our CD draft was very basic, we chose the 'space' style background as it was dark but not too simple and still fitted with the front and back pages we were creating. We drew inspiration from similar genre Digipaks but felt ours was still missing details that would make it look more professional. In the end we decided that we needed extra titles and symbols over our background, drawing inspiration from these CDs:

As you can see, the designers of these had also opted for a simple style - opting not to have a background but to place symbols and titles over the plain black. This writing offers extra information about the albums top tracks, the recording company and copyrighting details.

Electronic Evaluation: Question 4 (Fern O'Gorman and Alice Sandom)

How did you use media technologies in the research and planning, construction and evaluation questions?

This evaluation question has been answered via us filming ourselves on a DSLR camera and explaining the different technologies that we have learnt to use this year. We decided not to do a voice over for this as there were not enough clips to fill up the time of our answer. Nevertheless, we did use final cut to include some screen shots and have edited in clips in order to give a visual example of what we are talking about, The final product was compressed and placed onto YouTube. 

Electronic Evaluation: Question 3 (Fern O'Gorman and Alice Sandom)

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

For this question, we decided to use Final Cut in order to compare the final and rough cut products side by side. We used the text tool to explain any changes we had made with the corresponding images and included some videos of us making these changes. For instance, we explain how and why we colour corrected certain images or cropped performance footage. We also noted how similar our two products are, although the overall presentation of the final cut is far more professional, it was interesting to see that much of the narrative had remained the same.  Much of this was due to our audience feedback which expressed liking for the story line and cutting but noted how certain edits could have been done better and more precisely. 

Electronic Evaluation: Question 2 (Fern O'Gorman and Alice Sandom)

How effective is the combination of your main and ancillary texts?

We created a Prezzi for our second evaluation question. as we believed the simple presentation tool would allow us to place images and screenshots of our work and inspiration to show the connections between our two final texts.

Neither of us had used Prezzi before, but we found that the editing tools were not hard to understand and we soon utilised the benefits of it. Despite only having made a student account, which limited some of the special feature we could use, we have managed zoom in and out on pictures and text, which was useful in order to inform readers more about our main and ancillary products. It also allowed us to break down large chunks of text which makes the presentation easier and more interesting to follow.

Electronic Evaluation: Question 1 (Fern O'Gorman and Alice Sandom)

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our first evaluation is a voice over of ourselves speaking about our video and other influential videos from the same genre. We had to use a separate microphone in order to record ourselves and used a written script to prompt our feedback. In order to edit this video we used Davinci Resolve 12, a software similar to final cut so that we could insert clips of films that we talk about. The finished product was of high quality however, in order to place it on YouTube we had to compress the exported file which has reduced the quality significantly.