Its not all about the main task

Right now I have to wait a while before I can do anymore work on the main task as I need to film and have to wait for the day when all my actors are free. Instead of doing nothing I have decided to do some research into the two ancillary tasks. I haven't done any work on them yet as my focus has been on the main task.

So, what are my ancillary tasks again?? I have chosen to create a Digipack front cover for the music video as well as a magazine advertisement. If I am honest, right now I have no idea what those sorts of things look like, so a little research into current products would be of great help to me.

Digipack front cover:
Admittedly, I have little personal experience with Digipacks, or even music DVD's so when it comes to researching this product I'm not really sure what to look for. Google naturally popped straight into my head, so I googled 'music DVD covers' to start with and got 16,900,000 responses from images. I definitely need to narrow that down. I've decided to find out what bands that are similar to Lisa Mitchell have done for their own music DVD, rather than researching any sort of musician; 'Michael Jackson Number Ones' is probably not aimed at the same sort of audience as the Australian Idol contestant.

Below is a music DVD front cover that I have analysed. Both were found within the March 2009 issue of Q magazine.

But, as I said before, I need to do a Digipack, not a DVD, but looking at DVD's was useful as it gave me a chance to look at different ways music is physically distributed, not just CD's. Now I am going to look more specifically at Digipacks, and see how the information is transferred from CD or DVD format to these.

Looking up what a Digipack is has helped me a lot, and I'm relieved that they are not as complicated as they sound.

Magazine advertisement:

A magazine advertisement is something that I know a bit more about, but it is useful to see how things like digipacks are advertised. Unfortunately, google failed me when I tried to find images to show this, so I am relying on good old fashioned hard copy magazines.

I flipped through a couple of copies of music magazines and found that most of the music orientated advertising is about the gigs an artist is playing, rather than a digipack they are releasing. However, there are still advertisements for the latest albums being released, and it is these advertisements that I am interested in.

I picked two adverts from the March 2009 issue of Q magazine. I looked at an advert for "Fleet Foxes" new album at the time and "The Killers" new album at the time "human".

Straight away I noticed that both magazine adverts use images that link with their album covers in the advert, rather than a random image. They both also had a release date and a snippet from a good review. They also featured a website address for the band.

This was useful research and will be taken into consideration during the planning and design of the magazine advertisement.