Evaluation Question 2 Victoria

Evaluation – Question 2 Victoria Bray

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

Music Video

We branded our music video by having a colour scheme of bright, bold colours. This is because we found that it was a common aspect within other videos of a similar genre such as Beyoncé’s Countdown video and Lady GaGa’s Telephone video. This is because having a variety of bold, bright colours makes the video eye-catching and memorable. It also portrays the light-hearted feel of the music and aims to have a “happy” effect on viewers, as they tend to be younger and dominantly female who will be drawn to the video with the help of the colouring.

When producing the video, we were inspired by other artists within the pop genre and their music videos. Beyoncé’s Countdown video is a main aspect of inspiration for our music video, this is bacause Beyoncé is a major icon within the pop 
genre. This music video in particular inspires me for the music video in terms of the use of bright colours, variant locations along with costume and make up that you wouldn't necessarily see in everyday life. From watching this video it 
made me realise how many costume and location changes we would have to include in order to get a similar effect that this video has. Katy Perry’s Hot n’ Cold video also inspired myself and the group for our own video. This is again through the bright colour schemes consisting of pinks and blues, as well as the clear, entertaining narrative that runs through it. The video portrays the light-hearted lyrics, which is something we set out to do from the beginning and this video gave us ideas on how to do so. The fact that the music begins and ends with acting helps set out the video with a strong narrative making it easier for younger audiences to understand as the pop genre is listened to by all age groups. We did try this but we felt that we would rather focus on the performance side of the video rather than the narrative.

 Digipack

In terms of the Digipack, we decided to contradict the video with regards to the colour scheme. Though we followed typical conventions of pop music in the video, we felt that the CD would stand out much more among other CDs as it is in black and white with only one colour apparent. We wanted to use the artist’s face as the cover as we would be selling the artist herself as she is the voice. The clean image shows purity and classiness of the artist which is something that the target audience of teen girls can relate to. The inside images also follow the conventions of the front and back covers, each being in black and white but having one aspect in bold purple, this created cohesion within the cover. 

The development of our CD cover began with different images of the artist, we decided which image we liked best for the cover and began to play around with it on PhotoShop, editing out blemishes as well as changing colours and deciding which one fitted best. We wondered what what we should change from black and white, we decided either lips, eyes or her eyebrows. Until deciding on the black and white with the lips in a bright purple colour as we feel directing attention towards the lips helps portray the idea that she is a singer and the mouth should always be the focal point. 

Because we didn’t want to completely disregard the idea of having something else in purple other than her eyes, we decided that we wanted to have her with light purple eyes for one of the inside covers. We felt that it was a powerful image and further shows the artist as different and contraversial. 

With the digipack we felt inspired by the Rolling Stones’ 40 Licks back cover with the way the song names were set out. Though this isnt a pop album we felt it gave the album an 
‘individual’ feel and that she is breaking into something new and different for her genre as she is a daring artist with an edge. We also felt inspired by Adele’s 21 album for the back cover with regards to the image. This gave us the original idea of having a black and white image of the artist on the cover and the layout of the back cover. 

Magazine Advert

When creating the magazine advert, we wanted to follow the conventions of our CD cover to further cohesion through the product. We chose to, again, focus the advert on the artist’s face so we wanted to use another close up image but again in black and white with only the artist’s lips in purple.  We followed conventions of a typical advert for an album with including the artist’s name, the artist’s image, the album name, ratings by other magazines, the production company logo and the iTunes logo to show that it is able to download. 
Again we began with the base image and edited it on the PhotoShop software to make the image clean and to get the correct colouring. We decided to have the image in the centre as it is the main focus of the advert, we want to sell the artist as a person as well as the album. We felt that the second thing to attract the audience’s attention would be the artist’s name so that they will then always associate the image with her name and remember her face when they hear one of her songs on the radio. 
The name of the allbum is obviously another important aspect of the advert. We kept the font of the text to be the same as that of the CD cover to, again give the whole product cohesion.

please see my wix website presentation: 

http://www.wix.com/toribray/youknowjack