Print Work...

This is a collaboration of all my posts about progress of our print work.

Print work begins! We've decided to make a three fold CD case as we think it would be more interesting. We've made a three box template in InDesign in two lines with tabs to stick down with glue in order to seal it. A band from our genre that uses this kind of CD case is a band called In Flames and the album that they've used it on is Come Clarity. Their case is a three fold too and this is where we took some of the inspiration from.

For our front cover we've got two ideas. Because the song that we're using is called Faith, the band is called As Gods and our opening scenes were in a church, we thought a cross might be a good idea as the front cover.

Whilst looking on the internet one day I came across this DVD cover:

Although it's a DVD cover and not a CD cover, we still liked how the skull was made out of people. We thought maybe we could do the same with a cross. Deciding on the design of the cross wasn't that simple as we all had different ideas and images in our mind. I wanted a traditional cross made out of seven or eight people but they would be the outline and maybe have a glow behind it like in The Descent poster. Nick wanted a cross with tails on the end made out of four people and Tilly wanted two people to make the cross traditionally. So as you can see there was a lot of ideas and maybe a heated discussion about what we thought was best.

There is a band that use a cross made out of people for their CD front cover. The band is called Motley Crue and the album is Saints of Los Angeles. This is the kind of cross that Nick wanted and although it's a good idea and a nice design, I still think that a cross like The Descent poster would be better.

Motley Crue are a band from the rock/metal genre that we're studying and that our band is from so it's lucky that our work links to them!

Here are some cross ideas that we drew in order to help bring our creations to life!

Our cross designs

Our CD three fold case has six panels and we've come up with a plan of what should be where and how it should look. For our front cover we've got either an image of the mask or the human cross. We want to have an image of the band somewhere in the case and we are thinking of having a striking image of something to do with the actual video itself like a location or a character as a panel. We would also like to have a panel for lyrics and of course we want to put the band's logo in. To make a three fold, you obviously have to fold it up but that means that some images have to be upside down and not in the place you immediately think they should be. That's why we drew out a plan in order to keep ourselves sane whilst trying to figure it out and also because it's visual, it's easier for our brains to take it in!

First screen shot of case

We've almost finished our CD three fold. We've decided not to go with the cross idea as the front cover as it's time consuming and also because it doesn't tie in strongly enough with our video as it's not seen anywhere else. We're all disappointed but we might use it as a second image; for example the first inside image you see when the case is opened.

We've put in a screen shot of the band as one of the images because we wanted a photo of them all and this image ties in with the video because it's directly from it, and also because the lead singer has his arms upwards like he's gesturing towards the heavens. We feel that this image strongly links to the song name, the band name and our setting of the church. We've put in the lyrics to the song as well because that's a convention that I quite like to see and also, you enjoy a song more when you know the lyrics and can sing along in my opinion. This photo is in colour although the band footage is in black and white. We've done this because we thought that for a photo for the CD cover, it would be better in colour as it's more eye catching. We also did this because the CD case has three black and white colour scheme panels already so we didn't want to overload our audience and buyers with too much black and white.

We've chosen an image that we photographed of the church we filmed in and we've edited it in Photoshop.

The photo before the edit:                                                And after:

                                               










To get this effect we went to image on the drop down menu, chose adjustments, went onto HDR toning and turned the detail up. I really like how this photo has turned out as it's grainy and everything is more in tune and all the detail is easier to see.

The mask photo we decided to use was just a simple image of the mask on a background of green grass as we felt that this contrast interestingly. We did a few edits to see what it would look like and just to have a play around with ideas in Photoshop. Here are our edits we did:

Our finished CD cover!

In the picture before, the band's logo was the inside middle panel and the photo of the church with the track names was the back cover but we've decided to swap them. We decided this because we had put the band's website, their Facebook page, twitter link and Myspace site on the inside panel and we thought it looked more professional if the black panel with the logo and websites was the back cover. We then put the church panel with the track names where the black panel was. They were both directly above or below each other so it wasn't difficult to move! As we were swapping them both over, this meant that the track names would be on the inside. We knew this was unusual and that we were breaking a convention but we decided to do it anyway because our CD case isn't your typical one. For example, it's a three fold case which isn't so usual although it's becoming more popular, so we decided to do it and it's also eco friendly as well as it's using less plastic.

The band has three logo designs on their Myspace website (www.myspace.com/asgods) and we decided to use two of them in our CD cover. We used one as a whole base for one panel and the other was just the top half of a panel which we put dedications and copyright and record label information.  The record label we decided to put our band on is RoadRunner Records. RoadRunner is a label which is for the heavy metal/rock genre. Some artists on the label include Nickleback, Slipknot, Black Stone Cherry, Kiss, Lynryd Skynryd, Lenny Kravitz, Slash and Korn so there's quite a range of musicians on this label.