Creating The Final Digipak

This is the Completed Digipak for my chosen song; Watercolour by Pendulum.
The ideas for the rest of the digipak mainly came through inspiration from the new Take That album Progress.

I loved the running colour scheme but still keeping it very simple, Using slightly more detail on the front cover helps keep the attention attracted to that.
The Take That Album is very catchy because its bright yellow, I think the digipak for Pendulum is still very eye catching but in a darker, more sinister way, an effect that I have been wanting to achieve through-out.

Technicalities:
Created on Photoshop, the digipak consists mainly just built up layers of colours with a very "splattery" brush.
I took the picture of the band off the interent purely because there was no way I could meet the band or take any photos of them, I cut the image out as I wanted the band to be present on the album as it is about them!

Digipak results

So the front cover chosen for my digipak was the second more watery type one.
I am glad that my audience liked this one so much as I felt it was really relevant to the song title as well as eye catching and also kept in line with all of the characteristics that I wanted it to have.
From what people said about this one when I asked them about what they liked about it seemed to be:
-It looked very proffesional
-It was relevant to the song
-It was creative and different to quite a lot of covers you get nowadays which are either a shot of the band or a solid colour
-It was keeping in the same theme as many of the other Pendulum covers, Shows artist continuity.

The positive feedback really encouraged me when thinking about how to produce the rest of the digipak.
Now with the main image has been selected I can begin to finish off the rest of the Digipak and then link it to the magazine advert.

Digipak Front Cover Options

Examples for digipak front covers, these are the 3 choices I have created as potential covers for my Digipak, I am going to put the final one down to a vote, therefore the audience are chosing which will ensure that the right cover is progressed with into the final digipak;</div>

Digipak& Magazine Advertisment

I have been working on ideas for both the magazine article and the digipak. I put together a little slide show of research for this and then began to create examples of both.

Creating the magazine advert

Original Cover for the song

This is quite a dull cover that doesn't really capture my attention and on the shelf in a record store it would probably just blend in with the rest of the albums, I want to create something that will really stand out.

UPDATE- Eugene Riecansky!

We had Eugene, A music video director come in and give us a talk on conventions and how to make a music video. It was a really good insight into the real world, it was surprising how down to earth he was.
Eugene has created videos for people like Madonna and The Prodigy. He was really creative and inspiring and really helped me think about what I wanted to put in my music video.
One of the points I took from his talk was the "be crazy" point he kept talking about, it's true, if i want to produce a good music video I'm going to have to take risks with my music video.
It gave me loads of ideas for fires, and running and explosions!

Scene locations and Ideas

Scene:
For the scene I am wanting to keep it extremely simple.
Here are some of the inspirations I looked at:

The idea i have for my video would be a completely black scene with light coming through the sides so ill get silhouette effects. This would keep it quite dark and secretive. 

I also began to think about the story that I could put with my video and thinking about locations in terms of that. I think that the idea of water and nature is one that shall be continuing through my video so I want to be using appropriate locations.

One place I had in mind was a little forest near to where I live, it is the perfect setting and I would love to film there on a misty morning and as the sun is setting, this will give the video more dimension to it.

I also want to be capturing water type shots so I am considering having shots of pools or water, maybe go down to the beach or even film some fish in a tank, I think a choppy combination of all of these locations would be really effective in terms of having a quite open genre and to make it appeal to many people.

Potential Characters to involve in my Video

Characters:

I'm going to use very plain characters. I want to use more than one as even though its a very lonely song I think it would be more effective to have "sides" to emphasis loneliness.

I will be using very simple characters that will be easy to move as part of my video will be in stop motion.

I chose 3 characters that were very brightly coloured however i'm still unsure as to whether the colours are right for the video, therefore I will do some try outs to see how they look. If the bright colours dont work i will spray them a different colour. When i purchased my "bendy men" they had very smiley happy faces which really didnt fit with my video so i took off their faces.

The bendy men are only going to be a small part of my music video. The majority of it will be using a human.

For my character I have chosen a very rugged looking young man.

I am wanting to only use one of two characters in my video as it is going to be quite a personal video and want the narative to be clearly coming from just one person. The only time I might use another character in my video will be by having a different character singing the song. This would probably be just a close up of their mouth.

Struggling with ideas

After beginning my story boarding I began to struggle, I was fine with the worded sections of the song but there are some very high tempo, quick, pure instrumental pieces I was finding hard to fill.
I needed to brain storm and think of more ideas to have with this as it was really starting to effect the whole piece.

My first idea was to have the theme of rhythmical circles...
I was planning on filming wheels, roundabouts and other things like that, For example:

However after some audience research I learned that I would have to do something else quite special to be able to have a really good music video. It was one comment that really got me thinking.

Idea Time!

Here are just a few of my initial ideas for the video.

The original Video

The Original Video:

I think that it was a good idea to have a look at the original video for the song, I think it is actually a really good video however I am still wanting to do my own interpretation.

About the Band and Song

Song change

My poll results chose the song Aqua- Barbie Girl as the song I was to do however....


I decided to change the song as it wasn't quick enough for the type of video i wanted to be making.
I decided to change it to Watercolour by Pendulum.
I asked quite a few people what they thought of this song and here's their opinions;

Just a quick note of what two people thought of stop motion ideas

Getting carried away with examples...

Since I had done a very controlled clay-mation animation I thought i would have a go at something more adventurous, I wanted to create something "real time" and "real life". Having a look on the internet I have seen a lot of stop motions of tutorials for software etc so I had a go at something a little quirky. I created a stop-motion of creating an oragami crane. I needed assistance with creating this as I couldn’t create the piece of oragami and take photographs at the same time. For this one I took 174 photographs, this equated to about 22 seconds of film.

Song Ideas

1.Aqua- Barbie Girl Lasts 3.22 seconds.
2.Rob base and DJ EZ Rock- It takes two 4.55 seconds
3.I believe I can fly- Punk covers 3.02 seconds
A punk cover would be an awesome idea at it would be something upbeat and really different.

4.Sum 41- summer 3mins
5.Sum 41- over my head 2.46 seconds
6.Sum 41- fat lip 3mins
7.Babylon zoo- Space man 4.05seconds
8.Panic! At the disco- I write sins not tragedies 3.04seconds
9.The killers- Somebody told me 3.22 seconds

This is my final list of 9. There are some very contrasting songs on there but i think they would all work with a stop motion. I shall conduct a vote in order for me to make a decision as I like them all!


And the winner is....


Barbie Girl by Aqua.

Claymation!

What else I have to do...

For my ancillary task i have to produce:


*A digipak design- 6 sections including a cover
*A magazine advertisement for the release of the song.


What is a digipak?

A form of jewel case, for holding one or more CDs or DVDs, in which the outer cover is of card rather than plastic.

I found that the only thing they all really had in common was the fact they related back to the band and song, some had images of the band on where others were just colours.
This gives me pretty much a free range of what I could put on my digipak. I think I might try and include some images from my music video to kind of make it all fit together. I will definitely make sure I use the same fonts etc as I might use in the music video. This will create band continuity. 
A few examples:

Magazine advert:
 

The usual conventions of a band advert in a magazine.





I'M GOING TO DO A MUSIC VIDEO!

...Now all i need to do is think of what song to use.
I want something quite quirky and odd.
I want it to be upbeat and lively!
Any ideas?

Here are a few examples of songs that I really like at the moment:

This stop motion got me really excited! An advert for a restaurant, I loved the part where they are stacking up all the bottles and back again, it's really different and seeing this gave me ideas of other adverts I had seen, such as the pringles advert. The whole lemon section of the video also gave me a really good idea of like creation or making something, of course all in stop motion. The ice cubes melting slightly and then adding a liquid gave a really awesome effect of something happening.

Spider Stop Motion from Lizzy Gaskin on Vimeo.

Inspiration

These are the first stop motion videos I started to look at.

Lyrical Interpretation...

When I'm falling down
Will you pick me up again?
When I'm too far gone
Dead in the eyes of my friends

Will you, take me out of here?
When I'm staring down the bottom
When I'm blinded by the lights
When I can't see your face
Take me out of here

When hes fallen from grace or from a position of power "protection, or safety\" and he cant take back what hes done maybe treason or some crime and his friends are forced to abandon him. They all left him for maybe the safety of their own lifes and he is standing in front of a firing squad, looking down the barrels of their rifles. The light that is behind his friends is so bright so he cannot see his friends faces. 

All I believe, and all I've known
Are being taken from me back at home
Yeah do your worst, when worlds collide
Let their fear collapse, bring no suprise
Take me out of here

This part here is possibly his family, maybe more his reason for living maybe a woman? At this point he seems to have nothing to lose and is telling them to do your worst, possibly to not harm who he is protecting? At the same time it could be possibly he is telling them to rise up with him. (normally at a firing squad it is a detail of a few men to commence the execution, and a high ranking officer to oversee which that one officer can be over ran) Hes asking his friends to release him?

Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me
Feed the fire, break your vision

Feed the fire, break your vision I think is referring to let your anger rise, see past your orders and fight back with me. Revolt against those who would have you harm your friend.