The Presentation of our Artist

When we begin to process our ideas for our digipak, we need to consider how our artist wishes to be portrayed in the market. Being able to portray our artist sucessfully will allow us to gain the attention of our specific demography. Every aspect of  digipak covers or album covers is critisised to ensure that the mise en scene conveys them in the certain way. When we are designing our digipak we will take this into account and ensure that we represent our artist correctly.

There are hundreds of album covers juxtaposed next to each other in the retailing venues such as HMV, Supermarkets and WH Smith. We need to make sure that our digipak cover stands out from the crowd, but for all of the right reasons.  

We have completed some research into existing album covers to gain and secure knowledge on what is conventional. One of the main characteristics that we found was the relation between the artist and their audience. This relationship is more evident in solo female artists as we have found that their audiences look to them as more of a role model figure, and someone who they idolise.

We need to represent our artist accurately so we decided to look back at some audience research that we carried out when we first chose our song. People said that the song was 'catchy and had an upbeat feel'. They described the artist as sounding young, energetic and fun. They described the song as having a 'pop/rock feel but not being 100% mainstream'.

The following mindmap has all of the characteristics that we want to convey in our digipak:

How we could present some of these traits:

Confidence is a crucial element to portray in our digipak. There are various ways in which we could convey this, the most obvious one being the post of the actress. Body language is a really simple way of portraying this however from our research we have found that it is conventionally only the head and shoulders of the artist on the front cover. Another way inwhich we could connote confidence is through eye contact. If we have a direct line of strong eye contact, this will portray her confidence.

For example Pixie Lott's album cover conveyed confidence through her gaze which was representative of her authority and power throughout her ablum songs. However Adele, has a less confident feel to her songs, and this is portrayed on her album cover. She is looking down, avoiding the gaze of the audience.

It is also important to portray the genre of the song in the mise en scene of the digipak.  Our demography described our song 'You you you' as being a pop/ rock song. We can convey this in numerous ways for example int he clothing, hair style, makeup, lighting, background and pose. We will use all of these characteristics in our digipak to ensure that we portray our song and artist correctly. A convention that we found in our existing research was the use and exaggeration of makeup. A common known fact is that makeup has to be exaggerated for a photoshoot or film to make it recognisable. Our actress will have smokey eyes on the cover, however we will expand the flicks further out, and also we will use more blacks over softer coloured greys. This will help to gain the overall rock chick/pop look more.

Therefore, before we take the photo for the digipak cover, we will consider and use the mise en scene of the shot to portray the artist correctly. We will also use the gaze of the artist to promote her confidence and to engage the audience.