Steven's A2 Media Blog

Monday, 14 April 2014

Completion of official Digipak

First stage

The skills that were learnt from experience and guidance from YouTube videos helped to get the basic layout for the album cover. The images were blended effectively and shadowed well to suit the black background and the parental advisory is there as a warning to the explicit language on the songs which is very common on hip hop album cover. The pictures seem proportionate and to the right scale to give the sense that both artists are equal in this joint album.

Completed cover

We felt that the abbreviation of Holy Grail is a statement to people that says that it is going to be a popular and recognisable title and people will recognise the abbreviation. This is a demonstration of power and fame which is very common in the hip hop genre. The font was kept simple but defined to make it looked chique and contemporary. The addition of the strip of the playing card symbols again references our video.

Record label

This was a feature that we thought would be very important to add to make the album look authentic and professional.

The back of the album digipak took more time because of all the detail placed into it. The artists are featured at the back exposing their torso's which expresses their dress sense and gives the audience an idea of what their characters are like. It also makes them look quite powerful and dominant. List of the songs are featured and displayed in a creative way matching a symbol that is over the photo in the background. Other small details added to make it look even more authentic are the album producer's names, bar code and the compact disc logo. The spine features the artists names to make it clear who features in the album and the the full name of the album.

We were inspired to include 7 tracks from Micheal Jackson's album thriller as it is unique to have that amount of songs on our album and it is iconic due to the legend using the same amount on his album.

We then moved on to working on the inside of the digipak. As we were making the inside of the digipak we had an idea to make the whole of it a play card back to maintain that poker card theme going through out but we felt that it didn't work with the album as it looked too messy. above is a photo of us using Photoshop to achieve a professionally designed digipak.

This is the finished inside of the digipack. The images from the front cover are featured again in the inside however they are facing towards each other in the side where the CD will be placed which will mean that when the CD is removed then that is what is revealed underneath. We also included the Fleur-De-Lis which is a symbol that has been used throughout the digipak. It is a very sophisticated and artistic symbol that has been around for many years which gives it a nostalgic value as well. It fitted very well on the inside of the digipak and with a little shading on the top of it, it looked very appealing. We researched many hip-hop digipaks which also didn't feature any texts on the inside but rather images of actors and other symbols, so we took this into account and decided to match the hip hop convention of not having texts on the inside of the digipak but rather miscellaneous images.

Album digipack draft/idea

This is the draft for our album cover and back of the album cover:

Front Cover

On the front cover we felt that we needed the main artist's faces to be presented to glorify themselves which is a very common thing to do especially in this genre (Hip Hop). The reason for the one of the artists faces to be above the other and facing the other way is because we wanted it to have a resemblance to a playing card layout which links to our video. We emphasised the first letters in 'Holy' and 'Grail' to help enforce an abbreviation to allow audiences to easily recognise the title from those two letters alone.

Back Cover

This was the draft that we created for the back of the album and it features the two artists (Ahsan on the left and Muzzy on the right) displaying their torso. We thought this would be effective because it would portray the contrast between the two. One is sophisticated and stylish and the other is more ghetto and casual which suits their personalities perfectly and we feel that this would be expressed well with this image. The back will also display the songs that will be on the album and the Record company that produced it (we used platinum records as an example).

This is a picture of me and Muzzy using adobe Photoshop

Seeing as we had not had much experience using Photoshop we had to use very useful YouTube videos to guide us. Videos like the one below were very useful for our particular task of blending images together on our album cover. Video was not created by me but it was used by the group and shows the resources that we used in the process of completing this digipak.

History Of The Album

Albums have been around for many years. It used to be the only form of listening to the music that you want to listen to, that was until digital music became available. The first format for albums was the LP records which were albums that were on a vinyl disc. The LP vinyl records were introduced in 1948. Then the Compact cassette was introduced by phillips and it became particularly popular in the 1980's with the release of the Sony Walkman. In 1982 the compact disc was commercially available. This format replaced both the vinyl record and the cassette as the standard for the commercial mass-market distribution of physical music albums. Then in 1995 the MP3 format for music took over and it quickly became the easiest and cheapest way to download and listen to music thanks to websites like Napster. Then later on in the lifecycle of the MP3 format youtube came along (2005). Youtube became the ideal place to stream music from the internet and listen to it freely without charge. All these components contributed to making the traditional album redundant because people found streaming or downloading digital versions of their favourite songs and listening to them whenever they want, for free on their phones, laptops or Ipods much easier and convenient.

I never purchased an album before but my parents have and they always had them around all over the house. Even when i was listening to the songs on the album, I hardly ever wanted to listen to the whole album because not all the songs on the album are good. When you download your own music you can pick and choose specific songs that you enjoy and experience music in that way which is much more convenient. All this information accumulated shows that Digipaks are no longer relevant in todays society.

Thursday, 10 April 2014

Album Cover Idea

This is our drafted idea for our album cover without the text and other information that usually accompanies the album cover. This was hand drawn and based off of a playing card.

We got the idea of using the king as a symbol on the album cover from the cards that was used during our filming. However the idea became more relevant when we made the link with the queen card that features in the video burning. The queen symbolizes the girlfriend that gets kidnapped in the and the king represents the boyfriend that rescues her. This gives the main artist power and a larger profile (King status). This portrayal of power in album covers is very common. We also saw that the heart symbolizes the love that the couple have for each other.