My main inspiration for my digi-pack pack came from Klaxon's debut EP - 'Surfing The Void'. There front cover as you can see is colourful, vibrant and full of what seems random pictures however when examined closer you see there is a lot of thought behind the chosen images. I knew straight away I wanted to replicate something similar as I liked this idea.
I believe that my theme of what seems random-ness fits in very well with my song choice, this being 'Shuffle'. Shuffle is a word that represents alternativeness very well in terms of you don't know what to expect, therefore I believe that my digipack links very well to my song choice and also the genre of indie/alternative well as I have followed a lot of indie conventions that are commonly used by other artists of the same genre. Obviously my front cover represents Klaxons' front cover reasonably well as they both have the aspect of what seems random with the varying pictures used to make one big collage.
I took a lot of inspiration from this cover and reconstructed my favourite parts of their cover to produce my own. I took the idea of spelling the band name in a different way than just writing it out and I therefore wrote 'LA Unknown' in a wordsearch and highlighted the words. I also liked the way that they had made faces out of different things so I took pictures of 2 of my friends eyes, one greeny coloured, one hazel, used a drawn nose and finally got a picture of a girl's lips with some lipstick on and her pouting. Furthermore I used the convention of using a 'torn'effect on the images, I managed to do this using an effect in photoshop.
My back cover is very simplistic. This choice came about as I didn't want to over complicate things with an already extremely busy front cover, I thought it would be best to just keep things basic on the back with minimal text. However, I thought that before I did this I'd have a look around and what had already done before. I straight away pulled up some examples of more simplistic back covers, in particular Mark Ronson's debut EP - 'Version'.
This cover is very much something I wanted to recreate. It is simply a black background with the song titles in white, the barcode and some of the legal things that have to go on there for copyright purposes. However I didn't want to have the font so bold, or big, and also wanted it centred. Furthermore I chose not to have any featuring artists as it would just add more detail and writing that I didn't want. Therefore I followed this indie/alternative convention however added my own twist on it.
The album itselef is called '?'.
I chose to do this as I feel it fits with not only the lead single 'Shuffle', but it also fits well with the band being called LA Unknown. It fits with 'Shuffle' in the sense that you don't know what to listen to, so you shuffle things, and obviously related to the 'Unknown' in the band name.Furthermore, my album consists of 10 tracks. I chose to do this because it seems that with a bit of research artists that are releasing albums these days are now only really lasting around 35 minutes and the 10 track mark is perfect for getting 10 short, snappy, indie songs out there to their fans. I think it fits well with the idea of my simplistic back cover as it means that I won't have a big long list, instead a simple, basic one.
Despite these seeming somewhat slightly random there has been a lot of thought put into them. First of all with the track named eyelids this is done because I wanted to feature various pictures on the front cover of eyes and I thought it would be fitting to include a song with a eye reference. Furthermore, I opened the album on this track as when you wake up you open your eyes hence it being track 1. In terms if golden sun, this is another track that relates to the morning hence the start of the album and I like the way the sun is described as golden. Young Love is a track that was released by the Mystery Jets. I really like the song and believe it fits well with my genre, I once again decided to feature it towards the first half of the album due to the obvious use of Young in the track name implying it's early on.
Lotus flower was a track I knew was going on my album from day one, due to the fact I had plans for various shots of flowers for my front cover in my mind. It's a song from Radiohead who are a band that I listen to a lot and wanted to get some kind of reference of them into my band. Secret Door is a track that comes from Arctic Monkeys. I picked it really because of the use of the word Secret and the way that everything seems a bit elusive, which is definitely the feel I wanted to get across for LA Unknown. Two Steps, Twice comes from a band called Foals. I'm not too sure why I wanted it in there, but I really like the title of the song so decided to get it in there. Track number 7 sees the single from the album 'Shuffle' appear. I chose to put this in at number 7 purely for the reason that it's so many people's lucky/favourite number and with it being the debut single it's likely to be someone's favourite track on the album at first. After that we have Jigsaw, once again another song from Radiohead, however this time I chose to use it because of the fact that my front cover is something of a Jigsaw and I believed it represented the whole idea really well. Good Evening is my track 9, this was chosen as it's coming to the end of the album. As the night draws to an end you would say good evening, so to give the idea that the album is coming to an end I thought it would be a good song name to use towards the end. It is also a song title that is used by Bombay Bicycle Club. My last track name 'infinity' comes from The XX. I really like the idea that there is no end and it never stops so wanted to give this same impression for the album; just because it has ended doesn't mean that the meaning has stopped applying to everything. It also links in with the never ending spiral that I plan to have on my front cover.
My 3 page spread on the inside of my digipack was an idea that came through seeing lots of different digipacks of my own. I had a look and soon found that people had either used 3 seperate images that all overlap and link in some way to make one big picture, or they had simply used a panormanic style picture and had it over all the three pages.
I decided I wanted to emulate the same with my inside cover and therefore wanted a panoramic of some woodland spreading accross the 3 with somehow encoporating in some way my torn, colourful and 'random' effect. I believe that I achieved this by me putting in all the band's instruments, however I put them on top of a newspaper background and once again gave it the 'torn effect'. Furthermore, I added in some colour by using a few flower pattern effects on photshop and put them in where the bushes were to give me some colour and give the whole pack some continuity. Finally I decided that I'd make the whole image black and white as I felt it fitted a lot better with the whole colour scheme of my pack and it also followed the convetions of similar artists to 'LA Unknown'.
Finally my other page was once again very simple. It consisted of the 4 band members, on top of either newspaper that I had literally torn my self or a word search which i'd also torn. The images of the band members were then merged onto either the word search or the newspaper and then this was put on top of my black background, once again used to keep things simple. I believe that the images of the band members helped give the buyers of the album an idea of the personality of the band and what they actually stand for and represent. Obviously it was essential that I had the band members dressed in the style I wanted to represent - indie/alternative as this adds to the overall feel of the pack.
Here is my final Digipack for reference:
In reference to the video we believe
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