Question 2

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

When developing the music video I had a strong theme of money and youthful activity and enjoyment. This is partly because of my target audience and also because of the ska genre itself. Throughout the development and post production stages I was thinking about ways I could create cohesion with the digipak and magazine advertisement.

I started to research photographers and artists such as Andy Sapey and Andy Warhol. These photographers where hugely influential in the end result of my digipak. I did a workshop with the photographer Andy Sapey who helped me greatly learn how to photograph bands and musicians on stage or in a studio, this gave a massive swing to how I initially wanted my digipak to develop. Once my music video was completed I used screen shots from the music video for the front and back panels this instantly created a link between the music video and the print productions. This newly created link means that either the music video is quickly linked to the print productions or if viewed in the other order you know you are watching the correct music video through the synchronicity of print and video productions.

My chosen track was called ‘Money grabber’ which made it easy to transfer the themes across from one text to the other. It also brought me a large amount of inspiration within creating a synergy effect between the two. Given the current economical state, and government I had a huge source of corruption in the British banking and money system. With the riots going on in London and the spending cuts across the nation a huge money grabbing theme was reoccurring across the UK. Due to these ideas I was inspired to create a heavily political digipak featuring ideas and themes of economy and the corruption. Yet I asked my peers what they thought of this idea and they thought that it would have been inappropriate and would have lost the ideas reinforced in the music video so I decided to research existing ska digipak’s and print productions. I found that ska albums often featured large amounts of pictures of the band playing practical jokes and generally a comical theme was carried throughout, I tried to feature a slapstick approach inspired by researching Charlie Chaplin however I did not succeed.

I decided to take it back to basics and took photographs of the band and constructed them in different forms and locations around the panels. I used various different tools on Photoshop to achieve my desired effect, and would repeatedly gain tutor feedback to see how my progression was going, I wanted to keep up cohesion between video and text and was afraid that the more I changed my ideas this theme would be lost.

The magazine advert was more difficult to construct, because I was running out of fresh ideas. I decided to place the front cover of the digipak on the front of the advert to make it clear to the potential audience what the album was going to look like and where they could get it from. I had difficulty finding a font that worked successfully on the advertisement as the font from the digipak was too small and cluttered on the advertisement so I had to change this several times until I found a font that would work to my idea. My magazine advert is designed to be published in more popular music magazines because I wanted a larger audience to view the advert and to buy into the band. The magazines however would not necessarily be bought by my target audience making my magazine possibly not as far reaching as I would have hoped.

Once completing all panels of my digipak I was very pleased that they reinforced the music video and that the music video reinforced it. I had created the link and cohesion I had been looking to create and form across my texts.