Digipak advice from the exam board

If you look up digipak on wikipedia, you'll see it contains four or six frames. There are loads of examples on play.com and several linked to this blog via candidate blogs.


"When making the music video as a group, is one digipak per group enough or is each member of the group meant to do their own digipak? I know that individual presentations are required but not sure about digipaks"



One set of products per group is fine, but it can be quite good to see each member of the group making their own ancilleries so the group has more to discuss in the evaluation about how to reach the audience. Evaluations likewise can be done as a group, but as always, teachers need to be clear on individual contributions in their marking.



From Kirsty Lowdon: "I just wanted to feed back my own experience of this artefact based on our own coursework component last year. Apologies if it is a long response, but I thought that it might be worthwhile information. There seems to be quite a lot of confusion about it, but I actually think that the students are the ones who get this right, even without trying that hard. My A2 students excelled in their coursework and were very successful with the digipack aspect, many of whom received 10/10 for their attempt.



We felt that it was really important for students to actually get out there and look for concrete examples of digipacks as part of their research and planning. They needed to handle the product and consume it in order to work out what it was. They actually went together to HMV (having asked the store manager) and analysed the digipacks available within the store. They soon worked out the difference between a digipack and a regular CD cover. Essentially that a digipack offers the audience a lot more in terms of content than a regular CD cover.



From this they then produced convincing digipacks which included some or all of the following aspects (depending on the group choice):



Front

Spine

Back

Membership postcard/flier

Lyric section

Disk impression

Band info section/booklet

Free image/poster



My students didn't produce the actual CD that went inside it, and this was not commented on by the moderator. However, some students included an impression of the disk on paper and just placed it inside for the effect. I think it really does depend on what the students feel makes the product look convincing.



By doing this, they were able to construct convincing artefacts which met the criteria. At the end of the day, it is a digipack and not a CD cover that they were making.



I think that it would be prohibitive as a teacher to stipulate completely what is required as this restricts student creativity (something that they might be expected to comment on in their exam and certainly something that the specification promotes).However, I think that it is safe to say that something more is expected than just the front, spine and back in order to actually meet the definition of a digipack.



This approach worked for me this year and I genuinely feel it was because students were made to discover for themselves the various forms the artefact can take