Evaluation Question 2

How Effective is the Combination of the Main Product and Ancillary Tasks?

For our media project we produced a Music Video, Digipak and Magazine Advertisements of an album to promote our chosen band, OneRepublic.

In order to get professional standard and marketable products out of the final music video, the digipak and the posters there has to be visible and effective synergistic links between them. With this in mind we created a house style that is present across all three platforms.

 Early within our project the group brainstormed ideas and themes to link in to our song choice and came up with the idea of secrets of which our song is named, we then linked this to the idea of confession and religion which became the bone theme for our project. This all became evident across all of our projects.

Our music video was set in a church which was an ideal setting which could portray our themes of confession and religion. The video was also a full performance based production, since this is typical of the indie rock genre that we had chosen. This also allows us help the audience easily identify the band and what instrument that they play.

With the video being a performance based theme we empathise on the illustrations of instruments and portrayal of the lead singer, who is commonly the most well known member of the band.  Therefore we used many close-ups of the singer to connect him to the audience.

After creating the video, me and the group decided how to plan out our Ancillary Tasks, beginning with drawing them and seeing how they would look and if they fitted what we want to present. We also used the planning to make sure we would include aspects to each task which would link them together and help our target audience recognise the band and link the three platforms together after seeing any of the three projects. We mainly achieved this through chosen images of the band that can be seen within the music video.

The Digipak shows the entire band on the front cover wearing the same formal clothing that they wore within the music video, and although on the front cover they are cut out of the background, the inside cover of the Digipak has an image of the band before their performance with the church setting visible.

At first, the chosen images were not used originally on our Ancillary Task. Instead we used a dove pattern and a simple black and white colour scheme. We thought the dove and the black/white contrast would tie in well with the themes of religion and confession, due to the doves being a symbolism of freedom and purity and often referenced within the bible. The black and white colour scheme works with the bands formal wear within the video, which became the house style of all three tasks.

The same fonts were used across the Magazine Advert and Digipak since this would create familiarity and be easily recognisable by the audience, helping the the two products to be associated.

Ultimately the aim of our project was to create a promotional package for the band. We was able to achieve this through using shots and close ups of the band within the video, my group and I then decided to cross-reference the Tasks and transfer across images to the Ancillary Tasks.

We also kept the colour scheme and imagery consistent across our print products that we created to co-aside with our house style.

In order to improve our task more images of the church could have been included in our print products for example a stain window effect could have been used as a pattern. This would have given the audience another clear link to our video and would have also helped represent our chosen themes.