Digipak Plan

After much deliberation, the song I decided to do a music video and create a digipak for was Ring The Alarm by Beyonce. The original cover of the single looks like this:

I want my cover to be very different to this as there is a lot going on in the background. The overall mood of this song is very angry, with the narrative being about someone who has cheated on their girlfriend and she responds to this negatively. To reflect this mood, I want the main colours of my digipak to be red, black and white. This is because red and black are usually associated with anger and danger however, the white shows a little hope/happiness which mirrors the bridge in the song when the tone becomes happier. For my front cover I want there to be a girl in a plain room with a red light wash. She should be positioned on the floor, sitting down with her head in one of her hands and on eye showing which almost looks haunting. The inspiration I got from that was from a CD cover which looks like this:

I want both the above CD cover and my own to radiate the almost 'mental' and 'dark' look. Even though this CD cover inspires my own, I will definately make sure that there are many differences between the both. To fit in with the haunting theme, the text that I want to use for my digipak looks like this:

This text links in with the dark and almost scary nature that I'm heading for which mirrors my character's thoughts. Also, it highlights the royal and poised nature of a woman.

Conventions That I Would Use In My Music Video

To get ideas for my music video, I did a lot of research from different ones that artists have produced and noted the conventions that could be useful to mine. One video that stood out to me was Rihanna's Man Down:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhy-RXkNo0&ob=av2e
There's a still from the video that appealed to me quite a lot :

I would be interested in filming something like this for my music video (Ring The Alarm) . This is because it emphasises the beat that is in the song. For example, in the beginning of my song there is a long alarm that rings. Blowing out smoke or even the opposite, inhaling breath, will make it seem like  he person is trying to calm down which doesn't work. This then makes the eruption of the beginning of the song more powerful.

Other conventions that are very common in music videos is the uprise in sex or minimal clothing. I don't plan to use this type of convention as I want something appropriate for all audiences.

Photoshop Skills

When starting the A2 course, I didn't know how to use the programme, photoshop. After having a quick demonstration, I was instructed to have a practice session. By the end of the lesson, we were expected to re-create a digipak.

For the first part of the practice, we experimented with layers, how to fill shapes with colour and how to insert text and add effects to it. An example of this is as follows:

For the next part of the practice, we had to take pictures that re-created a digipak that we were assigned. Our digipak was an album cover of the group 'The Lemonheads' which is mostly red with a man standing to one side with stars around him, here's the original of it: