Question 2 Evaluation Emily Phillips

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

When making the ancillary texts, we thought mostly about Richard Dyre’s “Star Theory”; we had to think about how the artist would want to be represented, what ideology they would want to create for themselves and what kind of relationship they want with their fans. We knew that we had to have a strong link between what we produced and so we used the lyrics to help us with our ideas.

The lyrics mainly express the feeling of great regret, and with the feeling of regret comes confusion and questions: why did I say what I said? What was going through my head at the time? What can I now say to make things right again? We wanted to show this mainly in the music video in which we added a quirky conceptual idea into the music video. The music video is filled with different, characters that show strange actions that convey the strange happenings occurring in the artist’s mind; throughout the video, mimes, ballerinas and violinists appear randomly to convey this confusion. The deep regret she feels takes her back to her childhood before she made such a mistake; this is shown through the tea party scene. The scene reflects the feeling of wanting to turn back time and start over but in an over exaggerated, twisted way, making it the most important part of the music video.


The poster


Every music production company would want their artist to stand out from the others to sell more records and earn the company a lot of money. In order to gain awareness of the artist’s upcoming album, advertising is crucial.


We called the album contractions because this linked well into the message of the song. Dyre’s “Star Theory” also states how artists want to be seen as normal people and so by having a title like contradictions, it shows her portraying herself as a vulnerable young woman who has made, and is still making mistakes like any other person.


For the poster we wanted to focus on the artist being easy to relate to and so by having her hair tied away from her face shows this “bareness” of her identity; because she is showing her vulnerability as a normal person. We decided to make the image black and white as it gives off the idea that the emotions she is burdened with are timeless and can happen to anyone at any time.


However, again thinking about the demands of a record company we did want this poster to stand out and to we made her lips a light purple. We chose the lips as the lyrics from “Nobody’s Perfect” reflect that it was what came from her lips that started so may problems for her. It was also the chance to create the artist’s ideology.




The Inside Covers


In order to link the poster with the CD handout we thought that a persistent colour scheme the colours that we used alone would be therefore be recognisable and immediately associated with the album and the work of the artist.



The crucial tea party scene enabled us to create an effective link between the main music video and the CD cover. The images behind the CD and in between the front and back cover shows sections taken from the table at the twisted, surreal tea party shown in the music video. Inside the tea cups are lipsticks instead of tea, a reflection of the mad confusion going on in the artist’s mind over what has happened but it also reflects he artist wanting to better herself after what has happened. Using the same effect as the poster, we made the image black and white and made the object needing the focus purple. By making the lipsticks purple we have made yet another link to the artist’s mouth; the route of her problems and her message of the album.

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