Final Digipak and Advert Design:

Digipak Band Photo Rough Ideas:

On Thursday the 16th of December, I will be taking a collection of images featuring the band members, locations and mise en scene props. After gathering and researching a variety of different images and ideas to include on my cover, I feel as though the balance between unusual/entropic/abnormal and unique indie will be the main attraction. For example in my images i want to have the four band members, two of them dressed in either morph outfits/colourful clothing and two others wearing very indie clothing. By doing this process, I believe this will capture both mainstream and a niche sides from this music group. For example a variety of fans who enjoy listening to 'Mumford & Sons', 'Bombay Bicycle Club' and 'Vampire Weekend', and with other target members who enjoy more 'cultured' music, such as The fleet Foxes, The Babyshambles and Blur. The fact that I will be ranging my images from an ordinary photography studio, to a forest location also sets the tone to being quite cultured, arty and unique and hopefully this will be the main outlook upon my finished piece.

This is the template that I will be using to create my Digipak design:

Technology Divide- Photoshop Tutorial:

Over the weekend I have been practising a variety of different features on Adobe Photo shop. Before the weekend I had forgotten about many different aspects and services of this editing programme such as the magnetic lasso tool and the spot healing tool. After searching through a couple of tutorial videos, explaining how to contrast one image with another, I found this very interesting and simple to make my final edited image the best it could be. I believe that getting information and following these structured you-tube videos, I believe my final digipak design will have a lot more potential and from appearance look more acceptable.
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These two videos clearly show how easy it is to edit a picture to show its appearance completely different. I believe that both video's will really help me in the structure of my final Digipak idea, this is because the general theme of the appearance and outlook of my music video is going to be Entropic, yet happy and colourful. This is why I believe counterweighting both of these video tutorial's will really help me in the final stage of creating my piece.

This is my final piece of work I have created. I believe that both tutorial videos have helped me very well and I now feel I can edit other images to a batter standard.

Music Video Storyboard:

After constructing a variety of rough drawings, me and my group have conducted a shot by shot analysis storyboard of our music video.



1. At the start of our music video, the scene is set and starts off with a short duration wide shot, focused on a row of trees. This is then followed with a morph-suit character stepping in with the start/stop motion process from either side of the camera. Again with this stop motion positioning, this continues until each character is face to face with one another, and slowly face the camera. This not only is quite entropic in the music video industry, I believe it is also quite comedic seeing as they are morph characters.

Tokyo Police Club CD covers:

After researching and discovering both formats of cd covers, it is clear to see that they are entopic, niche orienated and portray a range of colour to undermime its particular music genre.

As we can see this first Tokyo Police Club album cover is (although basic and not very interesting) has a varied amount of entropic features which suggest its 'indie' and unique genre style of music. For example the first point which I felt was very unusual and quite entropic, was the use of space figurines/ UFO's, Spaceships and Robots. As this is very uncommon in todays music publishing standards, due to its basic and not very interesting outlook, I believe it relates to the album name 'A Lesson In Crime' due to in the media and particularly films, many 'out of this world' and made up character's such as Robots and Spaceships are traditionally known to be scary, evil, threatening and on the other side of the law, and thus Need a 'Lesson in Crime'. I also believe that as they are surrounded by a deep red colour, suggesting a fire ball or any other dangerous device, this could also suggest the steriotypical view of these variety of characters. I also believe the white background of the album cover could have a sence of significance to its musical genre. When I first viewed the image, I immediately thought it was just a boring and not very productive cover. Eventually after long thought, I put myself into the shoes of a music fan who would be interested in this genre of music and the white and basic background could suggest an amplyfying yet clear, relaxed and the sence of 'nothingness' about life and the media. I also believe that Tokyo Police Club have this personalty about them, and this is shown throughout their music.


The seccond Tokyo Police Club Album cover is also very unusual, yet amplyfying and entropic. The spectacular use of a variety of strange and almost undecided different images such as a carving of wood could also suggest an 'indie' music fan's outlook upon life. The way everything is put together in a very odd, rushed and abnormal fashion could also represent how a teenager's mind works and what they believe is the most important factor in life. It also suggest that the way the cover is represented by glitter thrown all over the cover, apart from the title placed in the middle of the cover could represent the 'party' and niche orinated style of genre. Overall I believe this is quite a difficult album cover to explain and break down.

After comparing both Album Covers, I believe that these are not the kind of style we were hoping to look for. In our digipak design we are currently deciding on either an outdoor location which would most probably be most redundant from a traditional Indie video/Digipak design, or an indoor feature. At the start of this project I wanted to take a variety of pictures of an indoor setting, preferbly an old thatched room cottage or old castle. The main focus of our digipak final outcome would of course have to be very entropic, and I thought of the idea to keep it traditional and 'Vintage British' including retro Great British Drapers, the old 'RAF' symbol/Mod target, old photographs, strange yet entropic photographs, the focus of drugs and old whiskey bottles and also odd figurines such as a Deers Antlers or Animal Carcuses and bones. The idea also came to mind that as our music video is mainly taken place in a tradtional countyside location in England, I also wanted to include a very upper middle class/wealthy outlook upon our digipak cover, but also include some elements of a rebelious and indie feel to it, such as having our band cast wearing tweed jackets, chordes, battered and retro desert/loafers and holding a shotgun etc, but have the indie and fun side to it by wearing a morph suit underneeth. I believe this is a brillant idea and hopefully we will use this in tyhe final making of our digipak design and some elements in our music video.

Locations, Mise En Scene and Cast Photos:

Here I have gone out of my way to take a variety of different rough ideas, that I feel will be similar to our final location features in our music video piece. As you can see from this selection, I have intended to use natural lighting such as the sun to be the main feature in the picture as this will hopefully connote quite a unique and entropic outlook upon our indie music video. The use of quite a 'rough and ready' location such as the subway and the battered garages on a traditional British council estate should hopefully compare the mixture between the countryside and the inner city suburbs, which should also connote the balance between the two and different cycographics of people.

Developing Technical Skills:

1) I believe that the best way of developing a variety of technical skills, is to keep experimenting with a whole range of different ideas. I believe that using a high factor of random, general and detailed creativity in the process of our music video will enable our final piece of work to be as well thought out as possible. I also believe that because our genre of music (indie) is stereotypically known of being quite unique, entropic and creative, for example Pete Doherty from the Libertines & Babyshambles keeps a regular diary/logbook and writes strange novels and poems about daily events. As all of our group are using and experimenting with daily blog posts, notes and pictures, i believe this will give our finished piece of work a very unique and typical indie video.
2)I also felt that to develop technical skills, it was very useful to ask another student, and thus the pitch that we presented to our audience was very useful for feedback and advice for our final piece. I believe we need to have some negative/improving comments to make our music video stand out from the rest.
3)I also believe that technical skills on the internet and particularly youtube are very useful in the success of our final music video. For example we tried and tested a 'stop motion' music video and used a small example of a rotating pen. With the help of stop-start motion videos on youtube this will give us a lot of advice on achieving the best quality technique. I felt that this particular video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY gave us the best advice and style of stop motion, as it took this technique a different meaning. I believe that balancing creativity and techniques such as stop motion, we will be able to achieve a much improved and entropic piece.
. What motivates you to develop specific technical skills?
- I believe that teamwork and trust is the key to motivation and the development of technical skills, particularly with a huge task such as creating and putting ideas together to put forward a high standard music video. The fact that there are so many tasks involved, time management is the key to success and I believe that if everyone puts in a little bit at a time, regularly, this will hopefully enable us to get on and complete the task successfully.