Digipak Research

As an established artist for a long time, Johnny Cash's albums have a very similar cover design. Often they feature a picture of him in black and white with the word 'CASH' in large capital letters. It is the word 'CASH' which draws the attention of anyone seeing the album, and is something of a trademark of his albums. Therefore in our digipak cover we will try to incorporate this into our design.

Johnny Cash is also known as 'The Man In Black'. As we obviously cannot use Johnny Cash himself in any photos we take for the digipak, we will use his reputation as the Man In Black instead. This will allow us to shoot a photo in black and white like in his existing album designs, and give a representation of Johnny Cash without having to have a picture of him. For the pictures to go on the inside covers of the digipak we will likely use pictures of religious imagery used in the video, such as bibles and crucifixes.

Decision On Song

Having shortlisted 'Rat Race' by Skindred and 'The Man Comes Around' by Johnny Cash as our choice of songs, we have decided to settle on 'The Man Comes Around'. We feel this is the best choice because of the religious imagery allowing for more and better ideas for the music video to follow. Also there is not already a music video for this song, so we don't have anything to avoid to stop our video being too similar to an existing one.

Choice of Songs

The shortlisted songs we are choosing between for making a music video for are 'Rat Race' by Skindred, and 'The Man Comes Around' by Johnny Cash. The reason for having 'Rat Race' as an option is because of the convergence of different musical genres, being Metal and Reggae, allowing for different styles and conventions to be played with in the production. This choice would allow us a fairly wide selection of possible video themes to follow, be it connecting the images to the lyrics or to use props and costumes that conform to the style of the band. 'The Man Comes Around' is an option because it is quite a different style to most songs which get music videos, so it would allow us to be more creative with the ideas for the video. Also many of the lyrics of the song are bible quotes from the Book of Revelation which would allow for us to include a lot of religious symbolism in the video, which can help with giving us ideas for shots and events.

Analysis of a Music Video: Skindred - Pressure

Another video I'm going to analyse for forms and conventions is Pressure by Skindred, for which the video was directed by Marci Friesland.



Skindred are a 'reggae-metal' band, and so there are certain representations of themselves that they want to present through their videos, such as being laid back, fun-loving and bohemian. The video creates this feel through using an effect that makes the band look like cut out pictures in a collage. The video is a hybrid of the performance and concept forms of music videos, in that the majority of the video is the artists performing, but it is presented in a surreal way.

The video follows genre characteristics of rock/metal videos by being a performance video and showing much of the performance on a large stage playing to a crowd. The video does relate to the music, in that there are cuts, zooms and camera movements in sync with the beat of the song, however there doesn't appear to be a connection between the video and the lyrics. The record label will have been satisfied with the video as virtually the whole video contains shots of the band. Also the bands motif of Jamaican descendance and influence but British patriotism is shown through the large Jamaican flag and the Union Jack morphing together behind the stage. This gives the band a motif which can be carried through into their other videos. The Male Gaze is also present in the video, as there are female dancers throughout the video.