Final Digipack and Evaluation

The front cover of my digipack:

Starting off with the original picture, before I edited it, the posture and facial expression of the actors face suggests that he is deep in thought, maybe thinking that he's done something wrong. He could be contemplating such thoughts as 'where is my life leading to?' or thinking that he's just had enough. Relating this back to the lyrics of the song is crucial as the lyrics are all about heartbreak and the emotion felt during relationships. He is leant against the tree as if to suggest that it's holding him up from falling down, like he has no power left to stand after all the trauma he has been though. He is also looking towards to floor with his head hanging down, looking ashamed or embaressed to look at the camera. He's not able to hold his head high in pride which gives the feeling that he is upset or may have done something wrong. The actors stance and posture is one of the many things that fits into mise-en-scene.
I have used earthly colours in this, as I plan to use throughout my Promo pack and video.
I have failed to put the name of the band on the front cover as I am going with the idea that the band is already extremely well known and the main actor is somewhat famous so is recognisable through just looking at the cover of the CD. I realise however that putting the name of the band on there would maybe appeal to drum and bass listeners more as they are likely to experement with music more than people who listen to other genres. So if a title was in place maybe it would achieve greater sales from the experemental type of person.
For the title of the song, 'heartbeat' I have placed it just above the water and made a reflection to look like it's bouncing back out from the pond. This is not a connotation of drum and bass music, however, as i have said earlier, I intend to mix the genres of music between a melodic tune and drum and bass. This is because the song that I have chosen is a remix of a slow paced song, with the emotional lyrics still intact. I have left drum and bass conotations with the font, as it is techno style. I felt that mixing the two genres is a vital step into creating a new type of music as this is a remixed song.
There are no comparisants with this and a drum and bass front cover, as I have already looked at that of Pendulum and The Prodigy. I feel that this is because of the type of music is a hybrid between Drum and Bass and Melody (Nneka Heartbeat - the original version). This is against the normal conventions.
This was a previous idea, I planned to originally have it in black and white to give more of an emotive feel.
I wanted to place an effect over the picture to make it look eerie and a bit misty, to give the thought of suspence, to intise viewers in wanting to view the video, or listen to the music more.

For the back cover of the Digipack, I first edited my image with the colours I felt would look good. Then, I wanted to promote a certain part of the cover, so I decided to use the gradient tool to make a circular gradient and put it behind the layer of my original cover. I then reduced the transparency of this layer so that the circular gradient would show through, in my example I have given greater notice to the top left hand corner of my picture, as I have made it the brightest. This is where the track listing will be going so therefore should be the most important part of my back cover. As you can see, the font now stands out more. I also had to reduce the darkness of the tree behind the font as before it was taking the focus away from the writing, leaving the viewer unable to read it properly. To do this I used the lasso tool and selected the tree, then, using the Curves shortcut took the made the contrast and brightness higher to make the tree look just part of the background, which I achieved.

This picture also looks emotive as the actor is facing the tree looking in dispare, questioning his actions maybe? It looks as though he has in some way blown his chances. The shape that the actor makes when leaning towards the tree is that of a blade, an inverted V (/\), which is an old english way of promoting and showing masculinity. It could also be said that the tree is holding the actor up as he is weak and feeble.
As before I have also used earthly colours but this time there are more blues and greens rather than browns and reds. I have used the same fonts to keep the continouity.

This is the inside left cover of my Digipack. I wanted to keep this simple by just having a picture of out charecter and his previous girlfriend, the person who caused all the drama in the video. This shows our actor in an over the shoulder shot staring at the picture, he may be feeling remorse, anger, or still upset about the situation. I put contact details on this cover as well to try and get more traffic to the myspace site where other videos and tour dates are kept. This will hopefully boost the fan base.

This is where to CD would be places upon. I took a shot from the music video here and placed a warm filter over the top. I chose this shot because I like that way that the actor is framed in the middle.