Media Evaluation Question 2

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

Each production task that I created had significant impact on my overall media project. Not only was I creating a music video for a band, but by designing digipacks and magazine posters, it’s fair to say that I was creating an overall campaign for the release of a fictional album. My intention therefore, in creating my 3 separate production tasks, was to create them in chronological order as to how an actual PR company would release the three products.

After doing my research, and using some initiative, I realised that the first thing a band would do is create their album. Now as I wasn’t actually going to sit there and record 12+ songs for my media project, I started off by designing the album cover. Here, I named the album after the hit song that I would be creating my music video, called believe in me. I did this because by naming the album after the most popular song by that band, audience members far and wide will recognise the title of the track and therefore be more likely to buy the album. In regards to the design itself, I intended on basing my music video on the story of a young child, and I therefore linked that idea to my album cover by taking a photoshoot with a young child model and used an image of him looking upset. This relates to the title ‘believe in me’ which for me, connotates a lonely young person who want’s someone to put their trust and love into them. I also wanted my music video to denote the cracks in a relationship and I therefore applied this on my album cover by creating a cracked effect on my model’s face, showing the irony and metaphorical message. I then added a dark background with dull colours which connote loneliness. As the image of the digipack was so meaningful, I didn’t want to add many more effects and decided to leave it at that after adjusting the colours, hue, and brightness. Lastly, I added the title of the album and the name of the band, with again, cracks through the letters, to expand on the message of a broken relationship.

Secondly, after creating an album, a band would shoot a video for the most popular song on that album and use that as a tool to promote the upcoming CD. I therefore decided to shoot my music video next and keeping to the theme of young actors and this idea of broken relationships, I decided to portray a relationship between a child and her father who is never home. The video expresses how much the young girl misses and loves her father and the crack appears when soldiers come to her house and inform her of the father’s death. With these elements present, the video therefore links directly to the album cover in terms of the message and moral issues. However, in terms of visuals, there are also some differences, for example, the young actor I used for my album cover is different to the one used in my video. Also, in the music video I have footage of the artists themselves performing there verses, whereas the artists can not be seen in the album cover.

This brings me to my third and final task of creating a magazine advert. Here I used elements from both the music video and the album cover. On the topic of the artists, in my digipack, the main focus was on the young child, then in my video, the main focus again was on the child however the artists were introduced. Therefore in my magazine advert, my artists became the main focus taking up the most space in the ad. I did this because the advert will be shown in magazines that are viewed by the bands fanbase, therefore by seeing images of their favourite artists, audience members will automatically be enticed and then continue to view the rest of the ad. The remainder of the advert contains a small copy of the album cover at the bottom, logos to websites and shops where you can purchase the album, relevant names such as title of the album and band name, and lastly, a big quote which is a common convention in adverts, the quote read ‘the most anticipated album of 2012’. This magazine advert relates perfectly with my other two production tasks as the order in which I published each task shows the transformation of the band and the best technique to sell the album itself. To keep the same metaphorical message as the album cover and the video, I added cracks to the font in the magazine advert. By keeping this house style, it becomes a theme that the audience become subtly aware of and begin to realise the link between each product.