HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE COMBINATION OF YOUR MAIN PRODUCT AND ANCILLARY TEXTS?

For my main product, I have created a music video which I had to promote by creating two ancillary products, a digipak and a poster. When using synergy and linking these different mediums together to get one complete product, I had to consider different aspects of each of them and how they can be tailored to match each other but still look good. Aspects to consider are colour, font, themes, images and visuals, and references to each other.

The products I have created have been made with the rock genre in mind, they have been moulded to fit that criteria, which is ultimately the key way of making sure that these separate mediums come together to create one well woven pieces of work. As the main product of my work is the video and this targets audiences of the rock genre, it makes complete sense that I would decide to render ancillary products which reflect the rock genre too. This in turn would mean that my digipak and my poster are appealing to the same audience as the music video and thus helps the products as a single entity to appeal to my audience.

From the start, as can be seen in the ‘Initial Ideas’ section of my blog, I looked at well know album covers to come to a definite idea of what I wanted in my final didpak cover to look like. What I found was that there was a simple, glyphic like image in the centre of the cover which related in some way toward the rest of the artists’ work. I liked this idea and I also decided that I wanted something round on the front of my digipak, this is because from the images seen above, shapes are easy to create and work effectively. For example, the circle holds everything together in the YMAS cover, the colours, the title, the band name and even some shades. And so, I solidified the idea of having a circle on my digipak cover.

After developing a plot for the narrative section of my music video, and coming to the conclusion that it would focus on money and inequality, I realised that coins would play a major synergistic role across all of my products. My music video was designed, in both the narrative and the live performance sections, to feature money or references to money and so, the idea of a round coin on the front of my album cover further allowed me to progress with the idea of a circle on my cover. But, in addition to the music video affecting the cover, the cover affected the music video. The deep black colour, that was used to contrast with the coin on the cover, started to look odd when held next to the colourful music video and so called for some action to be taken. As colour was not used for any purpose in the music video, and it is a rock video, I felt that making the video black and white helped take away the horrible contrast between the colours of the video and the black and gold of the digipak cover.

When I started work on my poster, I took heavy inspiration from my two existing products, to keep the genre of rock consistent all the way through. I had the coin, from the cover, in the centre of the poster and the dark colours, from both the cover and the video, from top to bottom. However, the solid black on the poster looked very boring because it was simply adding nothing to the poster other than instilling the idea that it is of the rock genre. So, after scanning the internet for something interesting I could add to the poster, I found a scuff mark effect which added a kind of wear and tear kind of look to the poster. This made the poster look even more rock, because people from rock bands are typified as violent and angry, by making it look like there has been a scrap/fight.

As a result of the augmentation the scuff brings, to making the poster look more like something you would see in the rock genre, I decided that I would transfer this technique to the digipak cover thus bringing the two ancillary products even closer to looking like each other.

As there are only two member in the band Royal Blood, who I was making a music video for, I had to decide whether I wanted to keep the band at two members or increase it to a conventional four or five. After a lot of thought and no closer to a decision, I moved on to adding the finishing touches to the coin I was making for the front cover of the digipak and the poster, I found myself subconsciously embossing the image of the two band members of Royal Blood onto the coin. Because of this I made my decision to have only two band members in the video, to match the coin, and thus my music video became a reflection of my poster and cover. Having the coin embossed with the image of the two band members provides a direct link to the real band and thus adds some actuality/intertextuality to my ancillary products that the video lacks.

Lastly, to keep continuity between the two ancillary products, I opted to use the same font for the poster that I used in the digipak. This is a good way of making sure that nothing looks out of place and the two product are distinguishably a pair. The upper image is taken from the digipak front cover and the lower one is taken from the poster. As you can see, bar colour and blur, the images are the exactly the same. Having this font extend from one text to the other allows audiences, who view my products as a single body, to come to the unequivocal conclusion that, with the help of theme, images, text, etc, that they are of the same genre. Which is ideally the aim of this project, to use convention, challenge them and avoid them completely to depict the genre I am trying to represent correctly.

Overall, I think that the use of conventions and the transference of conventions across my work has helped me greatly to represent the rock genre. From analysing same genre album covers, to get a good idea of what to put of the cover of my digipak, to smoothing off ancillary texts, with the use of the same font to establish that they are of the same genre and work together, I believe that I have efficiently used all of my texts to play off of each other and to create the right theme and genre that I was aiming for, the colour of the poster and digipak was able to seep into the music video and ultimately helped to fix the colour problem that I had. The scuff mark effect coupled with the dark tone and colour of all of the texts helps to solidify its place in the rock genre. The narrative aspect of the video, which most music video goers have come to yearn for, was a pivotal point in starting the train ideas that lead to the final outcome of the main product and the two ancillary texts. And thus, to reiterate, I believe that the use of each individual text to further augment, develop and better the others has been done very well and I am very pleased with the final outcome for each element: Digipak, Poster and Video.