Evaluation Q2 - Draft
- 1. G324 Media Studies – Evaluation 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? During the creation of our media products, finding a suitable theme was very important to us. We understood that making all different aspects of our production fit together perfectly was absolutely vital to its effectiveness and its appeal. Right at the start, we decided to have a colour theme to our products. The genre of our music video is classed as ‘Alternative Rock’ or ‘Emo’ and so to fit with this theme we tried to keep everything very dark. The colour purple was decided on as it seemed to fit everything and made everything dark like we wanted. The image to the left is a very early design for our album’s disk cover. Even though the final design for our disk would be different, you can see that the purple colour theme was a vital focus point from the start. Getting everything to fit together is very important for the marketing success of a product. If the marketing for a music album consists of posters and Television advertisements filled with bright colours and smiley faces, people who like bright and happy music will be attracted to buy the album. If those kinds of people went and bought the album, they would be disappointed at how the music in the album does not fit with the way it was advertised at all. The band would be alienating its true target audience and would attract bad reviews. The images above show the final design for the cover of our album (Left) and a screenshot of our final music video (Right) and it can be seen that a theme was obviously used. Even though the album cover is visibly brighter than the music video, it is still pretty dark and a purple colour theme was used for both. They both also have slightly distorted images. The album cover is covered in what looks like a coffee-stain to make it look dirty and the music video is fuzzy and filled with scratches to make it look like it is coming from an old, unclean film reel.
- 2. The image to the left is the final design for our CD. As you can see, it still follows the purple theme though it is a lot brighter than before, almost crawling into pink territory. The coffee stain overlay was changed to white and a bright yellow colour was applied to the centre of the album, slowly changing to red and then merging with the purple of the rest of the album. We made the choice to make the disk and album cover brighter than the music video itself to help make it stand out among other albums. In a music shop, hundreds of albums are often lined up next to each other for people to easily pick up and buy. If our album is to compete with others, it must stand out, it must be able to catch the eye of potential buyers. A dark album will more likely blend into the background than stand out. Even though the album is brighter than the music video, people who look at the album will still know what they are getting. What the album offers is still pretty obvious due to the imagery used on the front cover (The dirty, bloody look) and the rear cover (The heavily distorted image of the band, again with the dirty look and the names of the songs make it pretty obvious) As well as the album and the video, the advertisement was also an important part of our project. Just as with the other two pieces of work, it was extremely important to make the advertisement fit the overall theme. The image to the left is the final version of our advertisement. As you can see, it is similar in design to our album. The background is mostly purple with some dirty-looking textures and some red blood dripping from the very top of the advertisement and the image of the band in the centre. The purple colour and the image of the band really helps the advertisement to fit in with our video and album. Overall, getting all our products to fit together was very important to us and so we think that we managed to pull it off excellently. Everything we have done has a theme (Purple, dirty) and are all accompanied with images of the band. The combination of our ancillary texts is very effective.