Ancillary Products

For the last few lessons we have been working on our digipak and magazine advert. Our final digipak varied slightly from our initial idea but we kept many of the main elements including the use of a textured background and ensuring all text saying 'Supergrass' was in capitals. We spent a majority of our time working on the digipak as this was a larger project as it involved us producing both the inside and outside cover for a six panel gate fold template. We attempted to keep the design simple as we had not spent much time planning for it earlier in our project which put a lot of pressure on us to do it quickly which may have impacted the overall outcome of both pieces. As we produced our digipak first we tried to link it to our video using images taken from test footage and the finished piece placed on the back outside panel. We then also included text around the images explaining what can be found in the digipak. We looked at several digipak cases and information that was included on the back cover and from this got the idea to put information such as the colour format, disc lengths and language of the disc which we felt added a more professional feel to the finished product.

On the inside we produced a track listing on the central panel and then used individual photographs of each of us standing in a band members to represent the band. We then edited the photos using photoshop changing the colour and adding filters. These were aimed to be hidden behind the two discs which would be placed over the top so they were not always on display. We had hoped to show where the discs were going to be placed by producing some form of marking on the cover however we ran out of time as we did not manage to get to this stage until the last lesson where our main focus was the magazine advert.

Our magazine advert tried to continue some of the ideas found on the digipak. I decided by chance to take some 'green space' photo's while we were doing our individual photographs just in case we wanted to use something like this in our magazine advert as it could be used as a good base. Me and Adam then took the decision that as we did not have much time left we would use one of these photo's and edited some of the colours in photoshop before adding more layers and information. Trying to keep all our products linked we placed the crest we designed centrally to our image which looked quite nice as there was also a gap in the trees here. We also then used the same text we had used on the outside of our digipak to write a majority of the information relating to the product including the release date and product information such as discs included and the download. We then looked at other magazine adverts and decided to include 'quotations' from well known music magazines and newspapers attempting to give it a more realistic feel. We had initially wanted to include something along the lines of a star rating but could not find an easy way to do this so had to compromise.

Overall I am very pleased with the outcome of both our ancillary products although I think we could have benefited from taking some time to lay down ideas earlier in the project. The magazine advert was very rushed as we had not planned our time too well and were only working on one project at a time. Our finished products would have benefited from being worked on at the same time using two computers but as we failed to do this we had to work quickly. On the whole though I think the finished products are very good and relate well to each other and also to the general feel of the video and also some of the work that Supergrass have done as a band themselves.