Thursday 21 April 2011

Evaluation Question Two =]

How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

For our product to work as a whole we had to create a repeated motif throughout our ancillary tasks of a Digipack and poster that held good continuity with our music video as well as keeping in theme with our Indie rock genre by creating a sense of branding.

The first thing we did was a photo shoot of our two actors playing the characters in the video; this meant we could use these images on our Digipack and poster once we had edited them on Photoshop. I feel the images are really effective in reflecting our Indie genre as the characters are in simple black yet feminine costume, shot in a one room location and the images emphasise our theme of abuse. Using the same shot for our poster as the one on the back of our Digipack gave a good sense of continuity for our audience as well as in keeping with the genre for our target audience to relate to and keeping a good verisimilitude as the photo shoot took place in the same location as the music video was being filmed. Below is a film reel of some of the images we edited on Photoshop and the final shots we ended up using in our Digipack and Poster.





Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.




We decided to carry across the costume in each of our tasks as again this keeps with the verisimilitude and continuity of our branding. We kept the costume simple for a shoot with both ‘sisters’ in black, the younger in a black cotton dress with legging and a beige flower in her hair to match her blonde hair and goodness whilst the elder in a black top and leggings with a red flower in her hair to match the red hair and present the evil sister. This sense of simple costume is so the audience focus more on the meaning behind the video rather than the outfits. Yet I think the continuity of costume throughout the products works effectively.






 








The main sense of branding comes from our band name ‘The Rivals’ which is seen on our poster and Digipack. We made the band name stand out on our ancillary tasks by putting it in bold, on the poster it is in white against the black background and visa versa for the Digipack. At first we got slightly criticised for the font choice as the class feedback we got back was that it reminded them of the Barbie brand logo font but after some long discussions we decided to keep this look as the font gave it sharp edges with a feminine look about it which is what we wanted from the band name. When the poster was finished the feedback we got changed and everyone seemed to comment that the font of ‘Rivals’ really in kept with the Indie genre and appealed to our main female target audience. Some still commented that it reminded them of the ‘Bratz’ font but we felt that that was the kind of look we were intentionally going for.






The colouring of all three products also contained a conscious continuity where we kept a slight black and white theme running along the two ancillary products, where the poster contained a black background with white font, yet contained the ripped image of the two sisters in colour, thus emphasisng the image to its maximum capacity, whilst the Digipack had two black and white images of eyes and two dull colour images one including the same as the poster, where the font colour was black for ‘Rivals’ and white for the song name ‘Girl With One Eye.’ Although the video contained no black and white footage the theme was kept through the characters black and white costumes and the colour footage was dull in tone in keeping with the inside left image of the Digipack.



All together I feel all three products create an effective use of branding that will catch the attention of our main target audience whilst emphasising our key theme through the use of good continuity and a prominent verisimilitude.


Evaluation Question One =]



In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?