Idea 1
We initially came up with an idea that would show a picture of the main character, duplicated 4 times. However, each person would be digitally edited to be a different colour. This would show the confusion which has lead to the boy not knowing who he is and overall, not knowing his identity. After making the sample however, we felt that this was not showing off our full knowledge of the software, Adobe Photoshop, that we were using. Adjusting each individual colour using the tint and saturation effects gave us many different options of how to represent each picture.After much deliberation we found that these colours were the best outcome we would get.
We did not feel that this idea had been represented in the way that we had first hoped, and despite multiple efforts to adjust the pictures, this was proving to be a time consuing task and we decided it would be best to think of other ideas.
Idea 2
The next plan we came up with, again reflected the 'No Identity' theme, but in a comical 'Where's Wally?' type way. We again used Photoshop, however also had help from Adobe Fireworks, and using the eraser tool, cut round a picture of the back of George's head. We multiplied this numerous times and pasted each head into a row on the screen, eventually filling the canvas. Before we had even put the one face of George we were going to put on, in order to show that out there he could find his identity, we had decided that this picture was not what we had thought it was going to turn out like. The hair proved to be a big impact and seemed to take over the whole picture and therefore missing the point of the picture. We did not think this was a very successful idea and this showed that you have to try everything out first before you settle on specific ideas because, on paper they may look clever, but after actually putting the picture together, it may not turn out like you hoped.
Idea 3
As they say '3' is the lucky number, and as it turned out, our third idea was deffinately the most effective and we chose this to be our main album cover. Thinking still along the theme of 'No Identity' we came across the idea of silhouettes. A silhouette shows the outline and shape of a persons body, but not their face. So along these lines, we pasted a picture of George onto paint and used the 'Brush' tool to black out his face, arms and legs, but leaving his white printed t-shirt. We decided to leave this because this shows the band's signature style and emphasises a convention of the indie genre, printed t-shirts. After making one silhouette we decided to make another, but of George in a different pose. We did this three times and evetually after using Photoshop, Fireworks and experimenting with a new software called PhotoPlus X2, managed to organise our pictures showing varying poses that George was standing in. These silhouettes, together created an effective background and we changed the size of some in order to vary this more. After choosing the 5 most successful pictures, we decided to have one normal picture of George, as to not confuse the audience and this will make him recognisable to those who had only seen the video. We rotated one picture of him in order to create a 'back to back' effect and we found that this also reflected the humrous aspect of our video. When choosing the font, we went on Google and came across a website called http://www.1001freefonts.com/. This website gave us a range of fonts to experiment with and in the end we chose a font called 'Ashcan' as we felt this was rather youthful looking, optimistic but also jagged. For the title, 'No Identity', we chose a font called 'Carbon Type'- which is very similar to the font of a typewriter. We used this as this shows an authoritative yet traditional idea.
After we had found the fonts, the last thing to add was the parental advisory sign and also our record label, Cherrytree records, symbol. After finishing this we had completed our album cover, which we felt was a huge success and was the most interesting and creative idea out of all the previous options. The silhouettes help to emphasise the album title and the banana on the t-shirt also adds a humorous aspect to the whole product. We felt that the pictures could have used a little more editing and could have been better quality, but the overal final outcome was successful.
Inside the Album
The rest of the album, of course, was based around the 'No Identity' theme and so each picture reflects either an aspect of this, or an aspect associated with the band. The inside left picture, as typical to most CD conventions, has a thank you note to the fans but is also quite humorous because the image is of the banana that is shown on George's t-shirt throughout the video and also runs as an occurring theme through the digipack and magazine advert. As with several artists, the obvious being Justin Bieber and his purple hoodie, clothing can often represent the band and we felt that this banana could show as a good way of other texts making intertextual links to our band. So we emphasised this banana as much as possible in order to make it memorable inside the audiences heads and therefore they would associate banana clothing with our band.
The image behind the CD shows George, however, his face has been blurred out, which helps to emphasise the 'No Identity' theme. We blurred his face using iPhoto and the 'Retouch' tool which tries to take out any blemishes in a photo. Normally you would use this tool very sparsly, but in order to make the whole face blurred, we had to use the tool multiple times to make the whole face blurred. Although initially this seemed to be quite successful, we found it hard to merge the skin and hair colours together as this created a very dark splodge on the side of his face. To fix this, we had to edit the blurred version and make it slightly softer by increasing the saturation and shadowing. Again we used iPhoto to do this and it made the picture softer, however, we are not that satisfied with it as the outline between the forehead and hair line is very obvious, and if we could change anything about our products, this would be one of the first things.
The back of the CD, we decided to leave quite basic, similar to the back of Kate Nash and Ellie Goulding's albums, and this simplicity is a convention of the indie genre. Having kept a recurring theme of white throughout our album, it made sense to have a white background. The white could be interpreted in different ways. When searching for what the colour white could signify, we came across this website http://crystal-cure.com/white.html which, on the opening page, explains how white can signify a fresh new beginning, brings about mental clarity, purifies thoughts or actions and also clears obstacles away. All these are very relevant to our overall theme that you can always turn your life around no matter how bad it is getting. So this shows that the white is a real signifier of our meaning and although each audience member will decode their own meaning, the preferred encoded reading from us, the producers is that it reflects a new, fresh beginning. We decided to re-use the font that we had used for our front cover and so went back to http://www.1001freefonts.com/ and again chose 'Ashcan'. In order to comply with typical CD conventions, we included the copyright law and symbol along with the compact disc logo. To make the product complete, we used a barcode to make it look professional and realistic.
Evaluation
Overall, we are very pleased with the outcome of our digipack. The themes are clearly represented as well as the band, whose identity, although ironic to our album name, is revealed throughout this album with every picture, colour and font having a significant meaning. If we could change one thing, we would try and make the blurred face picture slightly more professional looking, but we tried our best to find many ways of doing this and eventually could not find any so we had to settle with what we had.
No comments:
Post a Comment