Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

 

Apart from creating a music video, we also had to make from scratch a digipack and magazine advert for our artist. The aim of this was to try and promote our artist in a creative and appropriate way whilst keeping in mind our target audience.

I feel that the combination of our music video and our ancillary task flowed together and worked well. As a group we thought it would be a good idea to use an upcoming artist. We decided to use the song ‘4am’ by Melanie Fiona. The song belongs to the genre of RnB and the artist is seen in several music videos to act out love scenes or to have trouble with  her love life but at the end of the day is able to stand strong as an independent woman. We felt that it was important that we show this through both our ancillary task and music video, whether it was thought the colour or even throught the image. In most cases it is hard to relate a music video to products such as magazines and digipack when it comes to music, but I guess there must be at least one aspect, no matter how small which could be seen to be consistent in all three products. We took this into consideration and thought about little things we could include into our music video to help us when we started our ancillary tasks.

 

When it came to making the digipak and the magazine for our ancillary task we found relating them both was unproblematic, whereas when we attempted to related it to the music video we found it quite complicated. It was around this point of our produton we realised that there was one thing that could be used to bring all three products together with ease, the image. This i guess was great for us as we had put our ancillary task in the back of our minds when making our music video and had taken the initiative to use some of thefilming days as not on ly a chance to film our music video but to also use it as a photoshot. This meant that we were able to include some of the clothing that was used in the certain shots in our music video also in our ancillary task. After successfully finding a way to connect our three products together we had to use our research into the connections of digipak/album covers and magazine adverts to find a way to capture our readers attention.

 I guess looking into the detail of what a album cover and magazine cover consists of was helpful. We found that most of the music magazines had certain and specific details such as the date of release, where to buy the music from, the name of the album, the name of a well known hit in the album. This could also be seen in album covers where they included the price, list of tracks included, name of artist, barcode etc. All these small and simple pieces of detail accumulate and help seek and capture our consumers attention.

What we also thought was essential to adopt was the use of housestyle across our two products. Initially our first attempt to do this failed due to several complications and communications, but we were fast to make up for the lack of housestyle and soon produeced a piece that showed some sort of consistency. We made sure that factors such as font size, text positioning, font style and images had some sort of consitstentcy throughout our three products. We had to show that housestyle was a very important, this was mainly because most artists are identified by hoiusyle of products, this could be related to the promotion and the branding of an artist. So the use of housestyle was essential when it came to meeting the aims and objectives of our project as if they did not show some sort of promotion then being able to identify our artist through our three products would have been hard and difficult.

Another way we related our anciliary to our music video was through the use of colour. This was pointed out a lot in our interveiw with our target audeince. What we did was that we did was before our music video we did a photoshoot with our artist. We made sure that the camera took in as much colour as possible for example lipstick, chain colour, earings, hair colour and the obvious. We were then able to transfewr these pictures to photoshop where we delevoped them further, making sure that certain colours stood out. We tried our best to make colour a representative when it came to our viewers identifying and relating to our artist. Althought the quality and use of colour in our musci could have been a bit better, there is still some relationship between it and our ancillary task.

Our initial album cover and magazine cover did not meet our expectation as a team so we had to redo them. This time we had time to consider the images and coours we wanted to use. We decided that we would use slightly similar imagaes for our magazine and algbum cover to make sure that it was effective and related. In order to do this we picked images for both of our products with our artist wearing the same clothing but in different outfits. This was good i guess as it allowed ouro audience to identify the artist with ease. It was also a great idea as our audience were also able to relate our music video to our ancilalry task because the clothing is also used in the music video.