Hi everyone, long time since I posted, we just sent the DVD off to be replicated this week, and I posted a bib long blurb on ChristianFilm Makers and thought it would make a good blog post to!
We went to the DVD rental shop the other day to look for ideas (rather than just consulting our family DVD collection like we usually do) and were blown away by how identical the back covers of pretty much every new DVD in the place was. Big picture in the top left quarter, plot text opposite and warping around under. Collage of small screenshots like a belt across the middle 2/3 the way down. The bottom 1/3 consists of more technical and obligatory text that for the most part is obviously not meant for the end user to read but to satisfy various requirements and contracts. It was amazing how predictable this was. (interestingly only a handful of our DVDs at home follow this pastern in its entirety, though don't stray far from it)
It also amazed me how ugly most backs were, most ranged from very plane to ugly and sloppy. Also very rarely was text over an image, if an image was used as the background it blends to a solid or at most a slight gradient so that the ext is essay to read. In the majority of cases the background is black and the text white, interestingly in almost every case the white text on the black is easier to read and more eye catching that black as in dim light (the case in most rental shops and video stores) the white text catches the light better, wile it seems that in good light the white background with black text is easier to read. (we ended up having to go with black text du to the background image we chose.)
For the front cover we noticed a lot of different rents and methods but you could divide the more effective eye catching DVDs in to two categories full image and 2 image split. If they had more images than this they became to busy and to small to stand out from the others, your eye naturally avoided them and was drawn to the bigger images. Over 50% were the two image split, which is want we opted for, a large simple and eye grabbing image taking up the top 2/3 of the image then the tile and the lower part filled with another image of ether the characters or a scene that explains something about the film (sometimes this was reversed, small image on top large on the bottom 2/3-1/4).
We also were trying to keep the christian market in mind, we don't know as much about this market other than it needed to appeal to woman as well as men (which is much easier with the kind of imagery used in the movie). I also wanted a redesign from when we had been using before, the image was nice when full size when when I saw it scaled down and placed with a bunch of other DVDs on CFDB it looked sub par in composition, it wasn't eye catching, you looked at virtually every other DVD before it. We needed to redesign. Taking what
Kyle Prohaska said about the cover's purpose being to get someone to turn it over and read the back, and taking hints from courageous which used family pictures under their main image.
Its kinda ugly was I think, almost like to two designs going on here. I think they made the main poster and found that the families in the shadows were two dark and the image wasn't attractive enough to woman, so they put chugged full brightly coloured image blox, they men see the cops first, the woman see the colourful happy families first.
Anyway, our key art image is carl looking over the valley at sunrise, but it is a landscape image and wasn't working well in portrait on such a small aria. When we cropped in to make carl more prominent we not only lost the sun, but there wasn't much contrast, so we moved Carl over so that he was silhouetted against the sun. It made a much more striking image.
I was still worried that our key image was to dark, but when we added the mountains, blue sky and faces to the bottom under the white tile whole cover brightened up. Hopefully it wont print to dark.
