Official Website

Here is our completed artist website for Cara Smith

Be aware that although the links are active for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you can't access the page fully unless you have an account on the site. Please refer to other posts if you would like to see the sites without an account.

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http://kirstyanneheiss.wix.com/caramaysmith

Digipack in Layout

Official Digipack

Front Cover of Digipack

The CD in the slot completes the faded picture of the umbrella, and the merging of the photo of Cara Smith and the umbrella make it look as though she's opening it

This is the CD with a print of the merged photos on it, the list of tracks and artist name

CD slot without the disc in it. Without the CD, the photo in complete with the shape where the CD goes lightly faded.

The decision to place the Track List inside the album challenges the generic convention of having the Track List on back cover. When designing it, I simply preferred it placed on the inside, with a beautiful photograph on the back, and I think having all the information on the inside makes more sense even if it isn't the tradition. 

Lyrics

The Gallery enables buyers to view pictures and photographs of Cara Smith in action; at JAM sessions, rehearsals, while song-writing and composing and during photo shoots. It's also a nice, quirky idea that offers something else for the audience to enjoy and feel more involved in Cara's career. 

  

There will also a little thin strips of cardboard covering the photographs. This will protect the photographs and provide captions for each of the pictures.

Back cover of the digipack with Parlophone logo - the record label signing and supporting Cara Smith's career.

Digipacks - Process

I started designing the digipack by finding a layout of a conventional digipack with 6 panels, as required by our brief, and brainstorming some ideas. I then began making.

I decided to present the digipacks on Powerpoint, but actually designed them on Photoshoo. Merging the overlapped photographs using the opacity tool was done on Powerpoint, and the photos themselves were collected and downloaded using iPhoto, however, structuring and doing the titles was all done on Photoshop. Although I was more comfortable using Powerpoint, the program limited what I could do vastly in comparison to Photoshop e.g. the Titles looked a lot more professional and editing pictures was a nightmare on even the simplest things such as getting rid of a white background on an image. I was also speaking to Sir regarding my use of Powerpoint over Photoshop, and he said that although it won't make me lose marks on the digipack, it will restrict how professional the product looks which won't help it achieve the highest marks possible.

As a result, I felt the decision was made. Sir gave me a quick 15 minute tutorial on how the basics of using Photoshop were done and I transferred the work done on Powerpoint over to Photoshop. It was fairly easy to use Photoshop once I gleaned the basics and I enjoyed doing it.

When it came to designing the logo for the Front Cover, the group pitched in. We'd established the main font being used for our digipack was Zapfino, and this would be the font her name and title of the album would be written in as a general convention of indie-pop artist digipacks is that the font is feminine and swirly, calligraphic. Interlocking the initials of Cara Smith, "CS" looked good, although we wanted to extend her last name as "Smith" seeing as it looked better, and we wanted the artist to be more personable, rather than a brand. It also looked a bit like a "G" so we extended her name and the result is "C Smith".

However, when I got Sir to have a look at front cover and give his opinion on it, he thought it looked too much like a brand and not personable enough for a twee-pop(ish) artist like Cara. He thought we should instead just have her name down the bottom spelling Cara May Smith. This was too long, though, and so we shortened it to Cara Smith. This worked out in a way because Kirsty, when designing the merchandise for the website had used the logo of the "C" and "S" intertwined, her initials making her name appear as Cara Smith. Re-branded as Cara Smith, we chose this as what our artist would be known as, even if there is a minor variation of her name on the website address e.g. http://kirstyanneheiss.wix.com/caramaysmith  

Pool Scene

We were really eager to have a flashback of the couple swimming and frolicking about in a pool. Although we'd aimed to film it, using Kirsty's underwater camera, it has become much too cold to film with our actors and we are tight for time in terms of scheduling out a period to film. We also have to ask for permission and it has become a real hassle to organise.

After searching "Underwater scenes" on YouTube, we have decided that we are going to use a snippet of footage from the film "Whip It" instead, as we are allowed to use a small amount of pre-filmed footage from another source. We considered the "Romeo and Juliet" pool scene however, we couldn't get a good clip which hid the faces enough to pass for our actors.

I think the time period between 0:58 - 1:50 is the potential clip for our music video

Website Research and Update

Here is what our newly developed website. Kirsty was the website designer and has done a fantastic job as far as creating a professional site that’ll appeal to our target market.

At this stage, she liked the look of the website but felt there was something needed, keeping the audience from gaining a real feel for Cara Smith as an artist. This is how the website looks before it underwent further construction.

She visited the websites of similar artists a second time to see if she could pin point what was missing from  our artist’s website. From doing this, she came to the conclusion that the website was requiring a white background and lighter font colours. Adding these, the website would come across looking cleaner, more inviting and make the artist stand out more, since the audience focuses more on the water-on-glass image previously acting as the background.

These are examples of the websites she investigated of other artists. Generic conventions include white text boxes, spaced-out structure, neat, clean font, large, central images of the artist and clear ways to navigate.

Adding these conventions will hopefully appeal our website more to our target audience and with any luck, garner us a bigger following.

Cast Change!

Our initial casting for the music video was:

Phoebe as Cara Smith

Jason as The Soldier

Eliot as The New Lover







However, when casting, we had no idea how popular Jason was. As a professional actor and very busy person, it was too difficult to arrange time when he would be free to film, and as a main character who'd need to be free for re-filming as well as take days out to do initial shoots, so we decided to go with someone else. Eliot assumed the role of The Soldier and Theo, another classmate, was free at the last minute to act as The New Lover character.

Theo as The New Lover