Late Research on Digi-pak Adverts

Because of our huge mistake in thinking we had to create a Magazine cover instead of a magazine advert we have had to do some late research into magazine digi-pak adverts and create our own accordingly.

We looked at famous singers' as well as previous A-level media projects for research on our digi-pak. Here are some we found:

This is an advert made by a previous A2 Media Studies student. It is an advert for "Florence + the Machine"s album "Lungs". We really liked this advert and drew some inspiration from it. Such as, having a picture of the artist in the advert and also involving the icons of the shops in which you can buy the album. We also liked that they involved links to websites where an audience could get more information. 
Florence + the Machine is a very flamboyant artist and this is depicted in the way the person in this advert looks and is dressed. Her facial expression is neutral if a bit sultry which enhances her femininity appealing to both men and women.

This is a digipak advert for the rock band "The Killers". It is straight to the point and shows exactly what it is advertising, their album "Day & Age" and the single from that album "Human".  Someone reading this advert could assume that the album cover has a similar background to the background of the advert and so it would be easy to find when looking for it in a music retailer such as, HMV or Itunes. However, it fails to tell an audience when and where they can buy it. This is something we will add to our digipak advert.

This is an advert for rap artist "Wretch 32"s album "Wretchrospective". 
The sideways, open stance of the artist suggests that he is relaxed and this may make an audience feel comfortable and more likely to buy his album. The jewellery hanging out of his pocket suggests wealth and makes the advert seem glamorous attracting an audience who aspires to this type of lifestyle.
The fact you can see him and his stage name means that previous fans will be attracted to the advert.
This magazine digi-pak advert tells an audience exactly what they need to know:
*The name of his album
*When and where someone could buy it
*What is featured on the album
*A picture of what his album looks like
* A website link where people can look for further information


We will be involving all these aspects in our digipak advert.

Decision on Narrative

A few weeks ago we eventually decided that we should add in a vague narrative.

The storyline is: 

A girl wakes up with a crystal, she then drops the crystal and loses it, the video then follows her search for her crystal, edited with slow motion shots of her spinning round, representing her going a bit insane looking for the crystal. At the end she is reunited with the crystal and is shown standing still and contempt with the crystal spinning in front of her eyes.

We intended the video to not match the lyrics as "The xx" are completely different from any other band and we thought this should show in the video. 

Throughout the video there are also a lot of clips showing bright lights, glass and glitter, we thought this was a good consistency with not matching the video to the lyrics and instead using the title to inspire our video. 

Final Album cover (Front and Back)

Front Cover

Back Cover

Album Back Cover Analysis

"The xx"'s back cover to their album, like the brand they have created, is very simple and so we thought we'd do something similar to contrast with the front of the album cover which is busy (compared with the bands usual look). We thought that the back cover shouldn't have too much detail, as it should focus on the song titles and they should be the only detail to stand out.

Here is the back cover to "The xx"'s current album "xx":

As I said, it is incredibly simple and the only thing that stands out are the song titles. This reinforces the point that "The xx" are all about their music and nothing should distract their audience away from that.

Although most of our work so far has been contrasting with "The xx"'s usual simplicity, we thought that for this particular part of the digipak, we could bring it back to basics and make the back cover all about the music. 

Our version of the back cover will be in my next post.

Mistakes

We recently realised that we had misread our brief and had made a magazine cover instead of a magazine advertisement for our digipak. This means we have spent a lot of (very needed) time on something we don't need. Thankfully, in order to make the unneeded magazine cover we spent a lot of time on Photoshop and so we now know a lot more than we used to. This is a positive thing as we can now use Photoshop more effectively and time efficiently for our Digipak Advertisement.

We also realised that we needed a back for our album cover. This was fairly simple as it didn't take us long to research similar products and put something together using our new increased knowledge on Photoshop. It took us around an hour to create the back of our album cover and so we know we are very capable of creating an Advertisement within the time we have been given to do so. 

Album Cover Draft

Magazine Cover First Draft