Planning Ancillary Products: Costume and Layout

Many dubstep artists have very simple clothing that are usually a t-shirt and pants, and perhaps an accessory that has become a part of their brand identity. In BL4KE's case, he wears variants of the same clothes as both the narrator and participant. This wasn't the original plan, but the white shirt, black tie and plain jeans work very well as his dubstep brand image, therefore I thought this would work well on the digipak.

However, when I began to work on a rough copy of the front of my digipak, I came with the idea of merging BL4KE's face with the iconic wall image of the man's face. This is for two reasons. Firstly, I liked the thought of visually portraying the fact that BL4KE is still an underground artist, therefore he is still invisible to people that have not knowledge of dubstep, and thus just a part of the scenery. I thought that an interpretation like this could be written in an inside booklet of the digipak, or perhaps on a bonus DVD explaining the making of the album. This would target fan bases such as the people I encountered on the Dubstep Forum website, who were angered deeply by commercial dubstep.

Secondly, I like the idea of showing that BL4KE is so "in-tune" with youth culture, that he is an iconic image in this "Urban Paradise". Carrying out this would mean his costume would not be visible.

Above is the mock-up of the way in which I aim to superimpose BL4KE's face onto the wall.

Slide 1 - First of all I will use a side profile shot of BL4KE and crop around the face.

Slide 2 - I will then begin to remove the surrounding areas of the picture around the face, up to the neck, and add a texture effect to give it the look of a brick wall.

Slide 3 - I will then remove the background of the wall image, and apply the face as an overlay on top of it, whilst reducing the opacity of the face so that both images are visible.

Slide 4 - The images will then be cropped together and matched up.

Slide 5 - Once this is done, another texture effect will be used to enhance the wall effect and colours.