Question Two - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Overall I am very pleased with my music video and two ancillary texts, a promotional poster for a magazine and a 6 panel digipak.
When I first listened and watched the video for 'Things We Lost in the Fire' by Bastille I realised that the use of dramatic and emotional imagery is the key to Bastille's videos but involving the main singer of the band in the video. I wanted to create an artist similar to this so I followed this theme throughout my own products. In the video I decided that my artist would balance out between acting out the narrative and lip-syncing the song as this emphasises the fact the artist can perform and enjoys singing the songs that he has wrote. Also, making sure my artist was in the correct clothing during my video was essential, this was important so that I could get across the ideology of Bastille and 'Jack Moy' very clearly to my target audience. Throughout the video I have included a 'Indie Red' effect this also allowed me to represent a more darker colour of which the Bastille videos normally are.
I wanted continuity throughout my products ensuring that they all worked well together and were recognisable to the target audience of who the artist is from just an image or a clip of the video. To create my digipak and poster, I took plenty of images of both my characters that feature in my music video to ensure continuity and uploaded them onto my computer to view them. I tried out numerous different styles within the images such as: the male stood in a brick shelter that we found on the industrial estate, he sat on the wall of this and stood at the door. I also got jack and mell looking out onto the river of the industrial estate holding hands. After taking many pictures like this I then had an idea of a poster I wanted to create and asked jack to stand in front of me to get a long shot of him from head to toe, I stepped to the left of him to only get half his body in the shot, whilst repeating this with mell (girl actor in music video) but stepped to her right and got the goth side of her body. I wanted to either create a full body using both of them or put them at each side of the poster as well as trying this out for my digipak. I begun to edit images using 'PicMonkey.com' and 'Adobe Photoshop CS5' to ensure that my images looked a crisp quality and I was using my editing abilities to the best of my potential. The images I chose for my advert was the one of Jack and the right side of his body and also Mells left side of her body.
I begun to edit these two pictures on pic monkey due to restrictions of not having photoshop on my laptop at home and wanted to get on with the editing process rather than waiting for a computer at college. PicMonkey did restrict me of the normal editing process of photoshop but it allowed me to do most things that you can apply on photoshop. I felt that Picmonkey was a quicker and efficient way of editing my images.
To create my digipak, I decided to use the images I had taken at the same time as my poster images to enable the continuity through all three products. I decided to use many images but experiment with them using the overlay tool on pic monkey, this allowed me to blend together two of my images and make the picture stand out and look visually attractive. For example I used the image I took of the cobbled floor and blended in an image of Mell and Jack that I used towards the end of my music video.
I took these two pictures and created this image below:
I then begun experimenting with the different layouts and images onto the digipak template using Adobe Photoshop CS5 as well as different styles of font and their positioning on the products. Using the images and then adding the CD on top was not to difficult I just lowered the opacity of the image that i put in the square so that I was able to see the lines for the CD and then copy and pasted my CD into the digipak template placing it in the correct place and then making the opacity of the image behind 100% again.
What I found most difficult was ensuring that all my images linked together on the digipak and worked well together when it came to producing the final product. I had to try and make sure the digipak as a whole linked effectively with my advert and video, so I used the same images, lighting and shades of editing such as an 'indie red' effect or lowering the effect of 'sepia' so it wasn't as harsh of a lighting. I also used the tool 'Film Grain' (which I ended up using on my poster too)
on PicMonkey as I had given various footage in my music video an old film/aged tv effect on top to establish the relationship being filmed and them taking pictures and how these are old and lost memories. I feel the images correspond well with my music video due to costume and taking them on the same day of filming with both actors.
These are examples of me using Film Grain on my digipak and changing the colours.
The laid-back and grungy look was something I tried to represent in the cover of my digipak as this is the first thing the audience sees when buying the album. Using a simplistic black cover with the bright white text in the middle allowed my album to stand out against all the bright colours but also makes my audience want to buy the CD and take a look inside. I feel leaving the images to the inside of the digipak kind of helps with the promotion of my CD as it is almost like the consumers will be getting exclusive images if you buy the CD. However on the DVD CD I used the image of jack and mell holding hands to reflect my music video and my promotional poster.
I also thought it would be important to portray both my magazine advert in a real life setting to make sure they looked professional and related to each other through visual imagery. To do this, I edited my album panels into a life sized 3D image of a digipak as well as editing the album cover onto the popular digital media application iTunes. I figured iTunes would be the most popular way to target my audience and access my artists music digitally. Overall, I think my digipak looks effective placed into real life settings.
Which went on to make me think about more media platforms I could show my album cover on and then this is when I was able to add my album artwork to the song on my iTunes and add my artists name replacing the original artist as you can see below.
I edited my promotional poster advert on pic monkey and inserted it onto a magazine and a bus stop billboard using Pic Monkey as this is how it would be viewed in real life. This showed me how effective it would look to my audience. Overall, I feel my advert looks effective placed in an open magazine as the image dominated the page and stands out through the use of bright colours and the effective visual imagery of the boy being full of colour and a ghostly girl on the left hand side making you question why she is fading out the image. The font is large and clear so the reader can be aware of the adverts intention and who the artist is immediately. I also used a bus stop image as this will open up for a larger market rather than an intended market in a magazine. The bus stop looks very effective and real to some extent. I think that this would look good in real life as it is very clear on what the poster is intending to do and visually attracts the eye. However advertising on things like this would be costly to an artists. My artist intends to be less mainstream than the pop genre so therefore maybe I wouldn't advertise on a bus stop billboard but more like to see it in a certain type of music magazine.
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