Ancillary Production - Let's Play Photoshop

My Zero desktop is the best thing.

Ancillary Production - Digipak Shell

Inside

Outside

Holy 3000x1000 .png files, Batman! I'm sure these will take their sweet time to load, but I wanted to show them at a nice high resolution. I think they look pretty. Except the ones with my face on.

(Honestly, I've wrote about this digipak so many times now... I have no idea what else to put here...).

-HM.

Ancillary Production - Final panels

Oh dark, the darkness that dozes in the dusk...

The flap which will lay on top of the disc upon opening the digipak.

The panel which will appear on the far right when the digipak is open.

I could regurgitate what I've said already about the whole dark imagery/guitar motifs again, but I think I've made the whole "branding" and "imagery" points clear by this point. I'll get these all edited together tonight.

-HM.

Ancillary Production - More panels

Left inside panel.

Centre inside panel with disc. (There would be a plastic holder here; this image is to show off the design side of things).

The left inside panel is meant to be the simple artwork-only panel (technically there will be more of these but this is the first one I've finished!). Not really much to say here other than that it features the reappearance of Dark Flame's signature Black Knight guitar, and some wonderfully edgy grunge-type brush textures going on (by the power of Overlay blending!). 

As for the disc panel, it uses the close-up of the fretboard from my post yesterday; I figured it wasn't really worth using anything too flashy as it was going to be covered up by the disc. The disc art itself is one of the guitar stills with my face blended in. As the disc art isn't going to have much impact in terms of marketing, I thought my priority should be making it look cool; which I think I achieved in terms of the main visuals. The legal text not so much - I wanted it to curve with the disc so it didn't take up much space, but me and pathing aren't particularly good friends. Eh, it's kinda in place I guess.

-HM.

Ancillary Production - The Knight of the Wind (Inside panel photography RAWs)

Hey folks!

Last time I updated about the digipak, I mentioned I'd be putting some emphasis on the Black Knight for the inside panels of the digipak. I now have some photography to show off!

No, I was not under influence when I took these photos - they're at odd angles for a reason. I want to maintain the disjointed theme from the video within the digipak, for the sake of consistency. Not to mention that I think it'd be a nice touch.

This guitar is becoming a kind of motif associated with Dark Flame - Goodwin mentioned in his music video conventions theory that videos from artists tend to have recurring motifs; I've taken it a step further by featuring it across multiple pieces of promotional material.

Will get editing later on!

Ancillary Production - Poster mk. ii

As I posted yesterday that I've updated the front and back covers of the digipak, I thought I'd show off how I've fixed up the poster a bit since the mockup post from a while back.

I will note that this is not the absolute final version of the poster. The font used for the text at the bottom is purely placeholder; I intend to use the same font as used on the back of the digipak for the sake of consistency; I just don't have access to it on my computer at home. Also, I feel that I could do with a bit of colour correction on my face - it looks a tad too dark on (my) right side.

So - changes? Well, I've updated to the digipak PIP to the completed version - no-one likes having an obvious beta work sticking out on a final piece, do they? Unless it's Sonic '06 where the beta versions actually look more polished than the final product, but I digress. I've also made it a bit bigger, so the thing we want people to be buying is more prominent.

The big change (that stands out to me) is the brush texture in the background. Now, I -could- have just ripped the brush layers from the digipak .psd, but instead I decided to employ a technique which is actually rarely used in the music industry these days, which is known as "putting effort in", and making new layers using different brushes. My main reasoning for this is that whilst yes, it is a good idea to have a visual link between the different promotional materials (as I've mentioned ~9001 times on this blog...) I feel that this has been achieved already by using the same photo, logo and fonts - and on top of this, the digipak itself is present, so having the exact same image twice would be incredibly redundant.

Now, onto something else - "why is it so simplistic?", you may ask. Well, I've been looking at some professional posters, and from what I've seen, using content other than the album art and logos doesn't happen much. Fear not, people with a fear of text, here's some pretty pictures for you.

A poster I actually own! Axel Rudi Pell's Circle of the Oath poster, pictured alongside the digipak for comparison. The poster is literally just the album art, with the logo and album name relocated to the top.  I would take a guess and say that this is because the poster is a gift packaged within the album as opposed to one designed to be placed in shops etc., so the primary aim is to look cool (which it does).

 

The poster for The 2nd Law, the Muse album for which I have previously analysed the album cover of. As with the ARP poster, this one too is just using the album art but moving the text to the top out of the way.

If anything, mine is actually much less simplistic than these two covers - my justification for this is that my poster is promoting a currently upcoming album as opposed to one which is already out, so it should be informative to potential consumers.

Final version to follow shortly.

-HM.

Ancillary Production - Revised front/back covers

So, here are the revised versions of the front and back digipak covers. I've made the changes I said I would in the previous version's post, but the more observant folks may have noticed some more updates.

Firstly, the institution information is now present - it references "Metallic Records"; get it, because metal? I am so funny. But in seriousness, it seems appropriate because it describes the kind of music they sell. There is also an anti-piracy warning. No copyright law in the universe is going to stop me!

The more obvious of the changes? I've used some royalty free Photoshop brushes to add a bit of texture to both panels. Why?

Well, I was looking at the album chart earlier, and I noticed a bit of a trend:

Whilst following conventions can be useful to a degree, it dawned on me that an album isn't going to stand out on a shop shelf if there are two other albums which look the same. Because of this, it seemed appropriate to add a bit of uniqueness to the front cover. I then decided to add similar brushwork to the back cover to keep it consistant with the front.

Now left to go are the inside panels. I thought I'd initially prioritise perfecting the front and back covers as they are the parts which need to sell the album, but the inside panels are coming soon. Be excited; one of them has a closeup of my beautiful Black Knight.

-HM.