Digipak Update - 10/11/12

One of this week's action plans was to draft a few ideas of possible digipak's (album covers, poster and back panel). Today was supposed to be dedicated to doing that by me sketching a few ideas on paper, however, I am struggling to not only come up with unique ideas what to do but I think it would be beneficial for me to practice on Photoshop with Google image pictures rather than attempting to draw my own. Unfortunately, I don't have Photoshop at home so all of this will have to be done at school, although I am going to make my editing a priority first and once this has finished (hopefully taking only another week or 2) then I can get started in focussing on just my digipak to finish before Christmas. 

I think this is an appropriate target for me as I don't have the spare time to really work on both at once, and I think once all of my editing is out of the way I can put all of my effort on the Digipak and make it the best I can.

Here is an example of a really quick R&B Digipak that I designed earlier on the website www.pixlr.com. This website is much like photoshop, and it's also free, although as I am not used to using websites or software like these, my final Digipak is going to be much better than this quick draft today. The reason for this draft is just to experiment with a few of the different tools before I actually have a go in school.

I think the layout and idea of this would work quite well and I think the image of this person that I retrieved from Google images may work well when I photograph Ted for my actual piece. Some other ideas that I had were putting a photo of Ted walking onto a picture of a railway tunnel, to give the whole inspirational element and to add to the guardian angel image Ted's character is creating to seem as if he is walking towards 'the light' at the end of the tunnel. 

I have already looked at some potential images that I may like to re-create, such as:

I liked this nature feel that this image gives and instead of looking into the tunnel and towards the light, this photo is taken from the tunnel and looking to the world. This would represent being stuck in life and the fact the light and happiness (that the nature background present) is always there. 

This one is taken from inside a tunnel full of graffiti. The reason why I liked this was because the graffiti connotes with the R&B genre that I am using and would attract the audience well. 

I even decided to draw my own setting of a potential album cover, featuring a train tunnel but also the surroundings of one. The idea would be to place a photo of Ted walking on this picture as if he is walking either towards or from the tunnel on the tracks.

At the moment I am worried that the train track ideas of the surroundings and the nature in the background promote the more Indie and Country music, rather than R&B. Also, when analysing the R&B Digipak's at the beginning of the course I found that most of the album covers featured the image of the artist, which is why when I drafted an album cover earlier (shown as the first image of this post) I used a man's face. 

An idea of an album cover that already exists is Conor Maynard's "Contrast" cover which shows him on the front. I think I could quite easily re-create something like this to fit in with the typical codes and conventions, and the style, of the R&B genre. 

As said before, once I have finished the editing of my music video I will concentrate much more on the ideas of my Digipak.