7. Flat Plan of Digipak

Our digipak does not show our main artist or any other person. That is because we thought it would not be suitable as Band Of Horses and their recent albums do not show the band on the cover but it is all nature based.
However, we are going to include an eye inside the sun, which should represent that "someone" is watching. That is very loosely related to our music video as it should represent that if someone has done something wrong the truth is always coming out. It is like a gigantic eye watching every step people are making and reporting what they hide from each other. However, we though the eye would make the digipak look more interesting as the previous albums always show simple pictures, which were edited in a way that lets them look different.
The back of the digipak is going to be a blue sky with clouds in it. We chose that picture as it is related to our theme, which contains of sky, clouds and sun and there is not too much on the picture, which would make it difficult for people to read.
The next picture shows a pinecone held towards the sun. Through the sun the original shape of the pinecone is changed and we thought it created an interesting effect.
The tree is going to be black due to the sun and the contrast of the blue sky. Through the program Aperture the color of the sky is stronger, which makes the tree look black. It is a very nature based picture as the focus of this pictures is the twigs nobody would recognize when passing the tree in a normal light. At the back where the CD is supposed to be kept in we decided that a blue sky edited with Aperture would be enough as when the CD is in there the background cannot be seen and therefore it is not important to place a picture there, which has a lot of meaning.
The last picture again shows the sun with the eye in the middle, which again should remind us that "someone" is watching.

6. How did CD sales change in the last 5 years

CD sales dropped dramatically in the last five years due to illegal downloading from the Internet and the widespread CD burning.

Joe Nardone, owner of the 11-store Gallery Sound of music chain in Pennsylvania,said that the music companies charge too much for albums. The Universial Group, which is one of the largest record cooperation cut the sales prices up to 25% in the last two years, in order to increase sales. 

Comparing the sales figures of 2009 and 2010 the figure dropped from 147 million to 114 million this year. 

In 2007 CD's accounted for 90% of the album sales in the United States, with digital accounting for the other 10%. In 2009 the CD sales were only 79% whereas the the digital download of music had increased up to 20%. 

Therefore it can be said that the sales of CD's changed rapidly over five years and online download especially illegal download is becoming more and more popular. 

However, Paul Grein, who writes the "Chart Watch" column for Yahoo says " I think it's (CD's) becoming less of a mass-market item and kind of a niche product that caters to a small but loyal following." 

Nowadays it is not so much the sales of CD's, which makes the artist earn his money but more iTunes and other online downloading sites. That change came along because it is so easy for everyone to access Internet anytime and anywhere. In addition iTunes also allows the buyer to buy only one song of a whole album, which makes it more convenient for some people.

5. Copy of CD cover

This is our CD cover. We made it with Photoshop and we tried to make it close enough to the real one but we made some mistakes. First of all we had to do the writing on Word as it would not work with the font on Photoshop. Therefore there is too much space between the different words. In addition the lighting is darker and you are almost unable to read the words Groove and Armada, whereas in our cover the words are clearly visible.
On the back the lighting is much brighter although I think that the back is made quite similar to the original one. In addition the writing of the tracks is blurry and we have no idea how that happened.

4.Star Image

Star Image1 on Prezi

How we made our digipak

First of all we chose pictures from the nature as the covers from Band of Horses always use covers based on nature. We focused on the sky and the contrast of the clouds the blue of the sky and the tries in the background.













What was very important to us is the sun, which is also reflected in our music video.
What we are going to try is to put an eye into the middle of the sun, which should demonstrate that the sun sees everything.

I edited the pictures with the Apple Programme Aperture "Toy camera" effect. I thought that this effect was most suitable as it made the colours appear stronger and the contrast between the sky, clouds and sun.

3. Digipak vs CD case

Digipaks are mostly made from thick card and virtually shatterproof. It allows great graphic display. The digipak is designed to include a booklet either by placing in a die-cut slot or gluing onto one of the panels.

 The original CD case has been used since 1982. It is a three-piece plastic case, which contains the disc along with the liner notes, which is a booklet containing information about the musician and the lyrics. The back card normally lists the number and titles of songs.

This video demonstrates the clear difference between the digipak and the CD jewel case.

But why do I think there is more value in a digipak? It gives much more information on the band the songs they are singing etc., which spares me the time it would take me to research it all. Furthermore I believe that people prefer buying digipaks rather than the normal CD cases as they are more visually attractive. In addition the plastic case of the old CD case do not look professional to me and the quality of it is nothing compared to the digipaks.
What we will need to include in our digipak

• Title of the Album
• Title of the Band
• Title of the Songs
• big image across all parts of the digipak
• different image inside the digipak 
• where the cover was made and the company name
• the barcode 

2.Font Test for Digipak Advert

1.Part of the Ancillary Task

This is the cover of the their latest release called Infinite Arms, which was released 2010.
This box set includes a digital bonus track "Desperoscoe", photo prints of the band, a 18x24-inch poster and if customer want to order it online they do get a Band of Horses Poster sent to them as well. The first 30 purchases also got a limited edition tour poster.
The design of the new album represents a still image of mountains combined with a "moving" image of stars. This cover follows the pattern of the previous two albums as they are also based on nature. They actually take simple pictures and make them interesting through adding a special effect to it.

This is the cover of their old album called "Everything all the time" released in 2006. It shows actually simple picture of trees but then they are reflected like they are reflected in water.
Also the font of the covers are always the same and personally I do not like it very much as I think it looks quite unprofessional. However, I have to say that it looks like it is the the writing of a book telling a fairytale and therefore quite mystic, which has probably a reason. I interpret it that the when you listen to the songs you are almost carried into another world. Similar to the 2006 cover is the Bon Iver album design. Therefore I can see a pattern, promises that the music is going to make you feel you are part of a mysterious fairytale world.

The Band Of Horses uses much stronger colors, which is important as people see and pick it much quicker than the other one where colors are fated.
Also noticeable is that the title of the album is not in the foreground but more the name of the band, which needs to be considered by us as well.

Rough Edit

 

This is the rough edit of our video. It is almost done except from we need to change the color as it looks like we used a comic effect and I believe that is not what we have been looking for. We also need to cut some of the clips as they are too long and we did not edit it careful enough. We also did not include any of the shots with Peter Miller because the ones we took were not good and so we thought we should leave them out

Editing

We used iMovie to put the sepia effect onto the shots we wanted to use. That effect was not available on Premier Elements 9 and therefore we used the Apple software. 

This picture shows how we chose the right effect for our music video.

Us Filming

I know it is a bit late to put those pictures up as we are well into our editing process now.
The first picture is Paul explaining to Farina what she has to do.













Paul is taking shots of Farina and Peter walking towards the camera from and angle where at the end the focus is on them holding hands. We thought that this shot was very important as it is vital for our video to express love.

Anton looking over the lyrics again. In order to create variation to our video we decided that Anton would sing two paragraphs of the song in a slightly different location.