Digipak Analysis

Front Cover Pane

This is our final edit of our cover pane for our digi-pack. Dan Russell and I presided over the creation of the panes entirety, as Mitchell focused on his poster work. We chose to give this an urban feel, whilst adding in the antique frame around the edge, which was adapted from a picture Dan Russell took at home, to add a contrast between the urban genre and the high class lifestyle of music artists. There are two main focal points within this pane, the predominant image in the foreground of our subject (Mitchell Banks), and the image in the background of a rescaled and edited image of Telford Plaza, a mainstay in our music video. Dan Russell, being much more technically gifted than myself, took control of the editing of both images, both using ‘Adobe Photoshop. To grey scale the foreground image of Mitchell, and give him a statuesque appearance, he researched tutorials on ‘Google’ and ‘YouTube’ and then followed various steps until we had the desired effect. The image was created through multiple layering, and trial and error changes to various colour effects. With the background image, we played around with various effects, contracts and edits until we got to our desired scale. We chose to do this to both images as we felt it urbanised them, keeping in touch with our UK hip hop conventions. Once these foundations had been layered down, I took control of the more simplistic effects such as the background colour, and various splattered colours through the image. I did this by using he paintbrush tool, and then used feedback from Dan Russell, combined with my own initiative, to create the eerie-grungy feel to the cover as whole. The cover also contains the title of our artist ‘Dappy’ in a script font, which we chose to intertwine with the artists signature neck tattoo.

Inside – Pane 1

This was our second pane, and again we chose to incorporate an image of our subject, once again as a dominant figure. We chose to carry through our urban theme, and to do this we inverted the colours of the image and increased the contrast to give the black and white view. We chose to completely contrast the block-coloured background from the cover pain, and changed to a block-black background, which played into our editing of our image, and added emphasis to the dominance of the character. Throughout our inside panes, we chose to quote lyrics from the title song ‘No Regrets’, which we felt were iconic. On this pane, unfortunately, we misquoted the lyric as we rushed to complete the pieces. The lyric should say ‘’Now I’m flyer than the birds, Richard Branson’’. As a simile within the song, we felt this had various connoted meanings. Firstly, within urban culture ‘fly’ is related to the way a person dresses well or acts within a ‘cool’ fashion, this relates to Dappy in that he is very egotistical, and very self assured, so from this he is stating that he is better than most. Another connotation could be that he is referring to his self made fame, in the same way that Richard Branson is the self made billionaire founder of the company ‘Virgin’ amongst others. To add emphasis to our lyrics throughout we added some different touches to the black background, or the lyric itself. In this image, we added subtle light blue and transparent black tints to the lettering to enforce the urban theme, almost as if the font has been defaced with graffiti.

Inside – Pane 2

Meeting our continuity purposes, the second pane again featured a block-black background, a dominant image of our subject, and a significant lyric from our title song. In this image, Mitchell is striking a very powerful, and often offensive, pose. This is to tie in with the urban iconography, and with the Dappys’ troubled past, and again the object has been inverted and then had the contrast increased into black and white. The lyric on this pane reads ‘’Kate stays in my dungeon when her sister’s round’’ This is derived from the recent hype around the royal wedding, in which Kate Middleton was said to have been ‘upstaged’ by her older sister Pippa. This could be seen to be Dappy comparing himself with royalty, and the archaism that the Royal family use dungeons. It could also have sexual connotations, teamed with Dappys’ arrogance, seemingly projecting that he feels he could obtain both sisters, despite their hierarchical status.  Our subtle change to the piece this time is a red, blood-like splatter to the font. We chose this as we felt it intertwined with the dark connotations of a dungeon, referenced within the lyric.

Inside – Pane 3

This is our third pane from the inside of our digi-pak. Again the prominence is held by the character image,  and again this has been effected into a black and white theme. The lyric we chose for this reads ‘’I’m a changed man now, Chris Brown’’ This is in reference to recent debacle that was the Brown-Rihanna saga, in which Chris Brown was convicted of the assault of his then girlfriend. In the song ‘Champion’ with UK artist and Dappy affiliate ‘Chipmunk’, Brown’s signature verse is written and performed in a pensive manner, as he expresses his feelings towards repenting his sins. We felt this would be the basis for the lyric, and could possibly connote, closer to home, his venture from his group N-Dubz into becoming a solo artist, following a new musical path. As with our previous and further panes, we added a different touch, however in this pane it is evidently more prominent. We used a green/yellow mist around the corners, and borders surrounding, and adjacent to, our main image. This was used to signify the ‘change’ referenced to in the lyric chosen, and adds a grimy aura to the pane.

Inside – Pane 4

This was our final inside pane, and we followed on with our continuity by keeping a block-black background, prominent image, and featured lyric. With this image I felt that as the final inside pane, we should accentuate the prominence of Dappys’ recognised iconography, in our piece, this was his hat. By carefully adjusting the contrast, I managed to leave the hat with enough dominance to overpower the body, although some detail remained on the torso. To counter this I used the paint tool to whiten out any detail and leave the simplified white body, leaving just the hat with detail. The final lyric we used was “I’m Kurt Cobain, but I just couldn’t do it’’. This is in direct reference to the suicide of grunge band Nirvana’s lead singer in 1994. This could refer to a feeling that Dappy has had suicidal thoughts, although I think it most directly links to thoughts of less sincere motives of quitting music. We felt this was an iconic lyric, not only in the song, but in our video as we used ‘After Effects’ to install an image of floating shotgun cartridges, linking to Cobains’ death, to coincide with the “I’m Kurt Cobain..” section of the lyric, then the cartridges dropped out of shot for the “Couldn’t do it” section. Our subtle touch on this pane was a transparent black paint added to the font, adding a grimy edge.

Back Cover

This pane was heavily chosen to show continuity with our opening cover pane, accentuate the picture frame theme. This is our simplest pane, as it is, in its entirety, an image taken by Dan Russell, of the back of a photo frame his parents own. We simply chose to add the artist name, ‘Dappy’, and created a 2 song track list with, what we felt, were Dappys’ most notable solo songs, the title single ‘No Regrets’, and Tinchy Stryder collaboration ‘Spaceship’.  The font for ‘Dappy’ was chosen as we felt it blended with the authenticity of the image, almost as if it has been stamped, or branded, by its owner/creator. The font for the track listing was chosen in continuity with the ‘Dappy’ on our front cover, again intertwined with the artist signature neck tattoo. In deeper thought about this font, I feel like we used it to represent this single as a defined characteristic of the artist, as it is his first solo release, it will be a permanent part of himself, and his career, in metaphorical comparison with a tattoo.