How the Digipak was formed

This was the initial template I acquired for the digipak:

Designing and Customising the Background

From here, I added a gritty paper background to add to the idea of having a dated diary fused in with the background.

As the theme we were going for was Zen related, incorporating peace an tranquility - juxtaposed to the situation, I gathered a photo of a zen leaf. As the original image had a blue background, and blue was strongly present in the leafs, I used the colour correction and colour replace tools, to replace the blue, with brown, to blend well with the background. Also, as the background around the leaf was different compared to the main background, I used the clone stamp to replicate the texture of the background, along with the spot-healing tool to blend the edges of the two textures. I then lowered the opacity to 30%, so it simply blends into the background.

Another image I acquired was similar to the image on the right. As I wanted the image to use only half the total height of the digipak, but 100% of the height, I cropped off a section of the sun. This section was then resized to make the most of the space available, whilst retaining the aspect ratio. Any parts that overlapped onto the other side of the Digipak were simply cut off.

As I realised that the Zen leaf overlapped on the sides and creases, I just chopped off the remaining excess of the image

The end result for this section is shown above

Customising the Back Panel

The first element added to the back panel was the track list. To create this, I decided to use the font, Monotype Corsiva. I chose this font as I found that it had an angelic appearance to it, which would well-suit the character of 'Jane'. I then applied an outer glow and drop shadow to the text, to add depth.

I then added a QR code to the digipak, due to the amount of digipaks which feature them. To do this, I went onto a QR generator site (qrstuff.com), entered in the Facebook URL for our band, and downloaded the image. I then removed the white elements, making it transparent, and added it to the back panel. To our amazement; even without any solid colour background, the QR code still worked correctly, even when we printed it off.

Next, I added a barcode. I did want to get an authentic and custom barcode, but after seeing that it would not be free, I decided not to. Instead, I simply found an image of a barcode on the Internet, and added it to the back panel.

Finally, for this panel, I added the necessary copyright information required, and commonly featured on a digipak. This information included details of the record company, distribution company, and licence terms of use within the European Union.

This is a screenshot of how the back panel looks, amongst the other elements.

Customising the CD Panel

To get this image of a disc retainer, I just acquired another, more generic, CD template, and copied the Photoshop layer. I chose to copy the layer as this would retain the most quality.

This is a screenshot of how the CD panel looks, amongst the other elements.

Customising the Front Panel

Initially, I added in the band's title. To do this, I typed out the band's title, using the same font settings as the Advert, Poster, and Post-Production, which included the font family, Bernard MT Condensed, along with the same spacing between the two rows. I then added an outer glow to emphasise the gap in colour between the font's colour, and the digipak's background, thus helping to make the text stand out.

Next, I added the text for "Diary of Jane". To do this, I used a font named "Honey Script", due to it's curvaceous form, and feminine appearance - which in a nutshell represents "Jane"

This is a screenshot of how the front panel looks, amongst the other elements.

Customising the Polaroid Photos Panel

As I wanted the Digipak to look and feel like a diary, I decided to add some photos depicting "Jane" and "Ben", representing the love between the two. In regards to how I made this panel, I first started by gathering a Photoshop Template of a Polaroid Photo. From here, in the cases of the behind photos, I simply added the photo on the appropriate layer, cropped the image, and merged the layers to add on to the Digipak document. With the front image however, I took a photo of "Jane" and "Ben", and tweaked it in Photoshop. The main tweak was cutting "Jane" out onto another layer, and filling in her original position. From here, I used the Shadows and Highlights Option to emphasise the couple.

I then used the Handwriting - Dakota font, as I found this to be the most realistic handwriting font.

This is a screenshot of how the polaroid panel looks, amongst the other elements.

Customising the Spines

This is a screenshot of how the spines look, amongst the other elements.

Photoshop - Removing Objects

Using Photoshop we can remove images from photos without affecting the quality. This will be of great help to the creation of the Digipak and Advert. As many of the images have unnecessary object which deter from the feel and mood of the image. The tool used is 'Content Aware', this copies the background surrounding the highlighted area and creates a sudo-background based of the surrounding area. Below is an example of this tool being applied.

Final Digipak

Photoshoot (Band)

An overview of the shots taken of the band.





This was our chosen image of our singer for the band, we chose this one as it was the best quality photos in the way that the overall quality was extremely good , meaning there was not much blur or light interference , we had also for all of the chosen photos turned all the lights of apart from one so that we could achieve the shadow effect.




This was our chosen picture for the guitarist for the band, we used the same lighting technique that we used on the singer , the shadow effect that was created by this technique is also shown in this photo however due to the light coming from only one side it shows the guitarist with one side of his face in the light and half in the shade.

This was our chosen photo of the drummer for the band , much like the other two chosen photos of the band members the shadow effect is in effect as well as the half shadowed face effect which is a lot more prominent in this photo mainly due to the drummer's pose.

For this photo of the band we had lights on either side of them , this did not create the many effects that we achieved with the band members by themselves (shadow effects) , this is why we chose to put all 3 of the photos of the band by themselves together to make it look like they were all standing together in the shot.

Finally, although this photo was simply taking in humour, we did find the outcome to be very effective. As the shutter was well timed, Joe was focussed in the shot, with the other band members being blurred slightly, with some sort of energy wiping in front.

Photoshoot (Jane)

This is a overview of all the shots well took of the actress Karen O'Leary as the mysterious Jane. Many of the shots if used will be abstract, even removing the background entirely.

This photo has been used in many of our draft digipaks, more so for the image of Jane (Karen O'Leary) than the background. The composition of the photo and the positioning of Jane allows us to use her pose in and out of context.

It was unfortunate that the street light was visible in this shot of the the framing and composition is quite good. We may, as we did with the other photos, crop Jane out of the image and use her on a different background. We may use photoshop to change the colour of the image.

This image captures the feel and mood we intended for. However the background deters from that mood. We may remove her from the background and use the image in a lesser capacity, may show the image with a huge opacity change. As I believe the image has a small transient quality.

Again the dreaded background has ruined the shot, but the rusty chains and the fence are great feature, we may exploit. The use for this image is unknown at this time.


Whist conducting the photo-shoot our photographer Dan Spurway had a little difficulty reaching the right position, Enjoy.

Other Influences

This book had some very interesting ideas that we might apply to our music video. As it mostly discusses issues and problems on a more generalised level. Allowing us to try and exploit theories from other denominations and apply them to the music video.

Team Meeting 11

7th January 2013

This meeting took place first lesson back from our 2 week break over the christmas holidays. we have completed all work by the deadline and are now just preparing to starting the evaluation questions. The division of labour is difficult as we need to be credited for all 4 questions. The work around is that one of us writing a essay type document and the second person changes that documenting a script or another format to present the information.

Team Meeting 10

17th December 2012

Our deadline is only 2 days away, it is well within are grasp to be complete by that time. The Digipak and Advert only need to be cleaned up, and most blogs are full and correct. We are going to triple check all posts to ensure everything works and also everything is completed.

Team Meeting 9

12th December 2012

This meeting is taken place after the Music video deadline. The video is finished and complete to a good standard. The focus now is to finish and prefect the Digipak and Advert. All three of us are contributing to these, we are also organsing and cleaning up all of our blogs. We will be completing all the lower priority tasks, such as updating blogs annotating posts and so forth.

Team Meeting 8

7th December 2012

This is the final team meeting before the deadline for the music video. We have edited almost all of the video, we are in process of adding the images to the music video, (The band's name on the Drum Kit) also changing the color of the chair to eliminate continuity errors. The other members of the group had been hard at work on the Advert and Digipaks and developed 2 designs in which to choose from. And from those concepts our photoshop guru, Dan Spurway, will clean up the designs and make them the final versions. We are also dedicating friday afternoon to ensure our blogs are all working and up-to-date and more importantly correct.

Team Meeting 7

3rd December 2012

By this time our group had just completed rough cut 3. The majority of the editing is completed, some sections need cleaning up i.e adding transitions, changing colour. The ancillary task are slowly progressing, all draft work has been completed for the digipak and advert. The final versions are in the works more so involving the digipak. We are actively editing the final cut of our music video.

Team Meeting 6

26th November 2012

This team meeting was one of relief as on the 23/24th of November our group completed the photoshoot for the band and for Jane. On top of that we refilmed the Jane seqeunce with the original Jane which was a serindipous as she was busy that weekend. This meeting focused on our teams future, the editing of the video. We dicided to completed the bulk of the editing by the 30th November which gives us a week to fine tune the video. During this time the other members of the group not working on the video will be updating blogs and completing draft digipaks in prepartion for completing the ancillary tasks.

Team Meeting 5

5th November 2012

The team meeting was more a ploy to ensure the filming will be completed, we had filmed the Band on 3 separate occasions. They are completed to the best of our barely sane minds. But during this time of great insanity our actress known as our 'Jane' gained a huge work load and is unable to film anymore. Due to this we have had to find a new Jane, and scheduled a shoot with her for the 17th November. If everything goes well we will finish well ahead of the deadline.

Team Meeting 4

29th October 2012 

The group meeting we discussed the recent cancelations on the Bands shoots and tried to find a solution for this major problem. We checked our blogs and they were up to date. We are only behind on the filming front. Alex and Dan have started the animatic and is on schedule to be finished by the deadline. We also got a progress report from our tutor on our working at grades,. This information has motivated us to work even harder.

Team Meeting 3

22nd October 2012

The team meeting we discussed the filming that was completed over the 1 week break, and decided that the majority of the filming was not suitable for the music video due to the quality of the video. The weather for the shoot made it very difficult to get the best shots, and set a date for the Band shoot. During the meeting we compared blogs to ensure that nothing was missed on anyones blog.

Team Meeting 2

7th October 2012

In this second meeting the group came together and discussed the progress we made towards the deadline on the 8th October for the basics of the Research & Planning. During the meeting we double checked the call sheet to ensure the details were correct, as the next week we have a holiday. So made plans to film parts of the Jane narrative over this 1 week holiday.

Team Meeting 1

October 1st 2012

This is was our first official team meeting. We discussed how we were going to portray the meaning of our chosen song 'Diary Of Jane'. During the course of the meeting we consulted our pervious work (Lyrics Breakdown) and other people music videos for help. The end of the meeting was settled on a music video that contained two narrative strands one following the band and a second following the mysterious Jane.

Call Sheet 2 (Photoshoot)

Call sheet from 0Dan0

The Song