Digipak Creation

I have drawn up a plan for my digipak design which I will use when creating my digipak, this makes it much easier to put together having a hard copy of my idea. I have included this below;

I have also made a size template for my digipak, included below; (1000 pixels square for each panel and 40 pixels width for the two spines);

I have taken some photos for my digipak, the originals are included below;

OUTSIDE THREE PANELS:
For my front cover, back cover and inside cover I want to create a visually interesting case which gives off the same type of 'edgy' look as the music gives. These are important as it's the first thing that the audience see and could entice people to buy the album. I have decided to design these panels separately and then put them together into my template at the end as each is going to be quite individual. Below are my cropped and edited photo ideas for my front cover panel;

I cropped each of these images down from larger photos to create a more close-up type feel to have on my front cover, having the main character as the dominant feature makes it more striking. My favourite image is the third one so I have chosen to work further with this to develop it into a front cover design. Below are some of my ideas for this; 

I decided to take my original image and add on a 3D cellophane effect slightly to make it more edgy, I then gave it a 'noise' over the top of the whole image to make it feel quite quirky and indie; to match in with the genre of music.

Above are three different front cover designs I tried out, in the end I decided I liked the first one as it's quite simple and doesn't overpower the main imagery on the cover. This is the design I will use in my digipak. 

  Next I decided to look at how to do the back panel of my digipak, for this I want some imagery alongside the track lists and conventional barcode and record label details etc. Below is the background I chose for my back panel;

This image is one I took of the trees above, I have edited it in the same style as the front cover so that the theme of my CD cover follows through. Below, I have included track listings and other conventional features i found on my researched digipak covers, this is my finished back cover;

The final piece on this row is the inside cover, I want this to be quite plain so I'm going to do it plain but with the album title on it as the band name features more than the album title does. Once I have added this in I just need to do my spines, these will just feature the album name, band name and record company name along coloured bands. Below is my final outcome for these three panels;

INSIDE THREE PANELS:

I have started work on what my inside could look like, here are my first two drafts of the inside three panels;

In the above two drafts I was playing about with the idea of having circular images inside my digipak, which represent the disk shapes and also add a sense of surrealism which relates back to my video and music to keep to one theme. The two outer square panels will be card folder sleeves for my CD on the left and DVD on the right, therefore I have no plastic CD clip holders to ruin my designs and it's more commonly used in all of the digipaks I looked at. I prefer my second design however the middle panel seems a little like it would be found on the back of a CD/DVD as oppose to the centre piece inside. To try to create a mixture of the two pieces I have created my final inside three panels design for my digipak below;

I like my design above as the two circular photographs are quite similiar yet really different in the way they appear, they give off a surreal interesting effect and work well on either side of the Metron$ CD/DVD banner. These inside panels are quite simple, I like this as there's not 'too much' going on as the front and back panels are the most important on my case.

  For the centre banner image inside my digipak here I took several photos along a scene to photostitch together using Canon software to create a more panoramic view. The original image with adjusted levels and effects in photoshop is below;

I then mirrored this image at the centre where the larger dominant tree is to create the banner used (also above), I changed the opacity so it was more faded then added the 'Metron$' band logo ontop, I also added 'CD/DVD' ontop in a more opaque way as it wasn't the main feature. I think this works well almost as though it is a little 'logo' for the band.

Now all I need to do is create my digipak by printing the two images and sticking them on card to make a real  solid copy.