Question Two – How effective Is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Immediately when constructing my ancillary texts (which came in the form of a digi-pack, and an advertisement) I realised that I wanted them all to contain elements from one style and theme, and feature heavy elements as shown in the video. From the out I wanted to incorporate stills, logo’s and visual elements as seen in the video in all of our ancillary texts. I began about doing this by immediately replicating the ‘M’ as seen in the background of the elements of our video that included live performance and creating a logo for the title of the song (using other elements of the word Maroon, constructed by fans) and used this for the front cover of our digipack. I then also used the band logo ‘Maroon Five’ however I removed the ‘M’ and edited in our own making it a unique piece. Of these two titles I placed at the side and the bottom. Soon after this I screen grabbed stills of the video, including important visual elements seen in the video (such as the thematic writing and parts of both the stop motion and the performance), I discovered four was enough to create the right hand side edge. Eventually I placed all three of these items to form a sort of border around the edge of my front cover of my digipack and was pleased I had taken aspects of all the conventions I intended to use and actually used them (I had included video content, stills, themed logos and some creative text). However I then saw a problem, I had included all my elements and still had some space to fill. Furthermore I realised I was missing a key element as seen in quite a few Maroon Five posters, DVD’s, and cd’s; as well as featuring in most pop music covers. I was missing a sort of band identity. As seen in most of Maroon Five’s CD covers, large images of the band dominate the front, for example ‘MUSTGETOUT’, ‘It Won’t Be Soon Before Long‘ and ‘Call And Response’ all feature this. I felt however that I had already included enough video content and did not want to include another still from the video as this might seem repetitive and boring. I came up to a solution to this and it came in the form of an original picture taken specifically for this purpose. Bradley and myself went to a pier at night, taking a few extras with us for the picture. We used a high angle to capture the photo with a strong flash, we also had out extras walk behind us in order to make it seem like we were stood still in a world that was moving (essentially making us stand out). This took a few times however eventually we had a successful shot and were quite pleased with it, I then placed the shot on the computer and edited it into the front cover, by keying up the lighting and blurring the extra’s a little more I was able to make the picture look entirely more dramatic, and I believe it is rather effective, original and also in keeping with the conventions of our video, the band we imitated and the overall genre. On a little note I had tried editing the still so that myself and Bradley were smudged at the edges giving it the impression we were moving, yet stood still, however after receiving feedback from many saying they preferred the original style of the still I removed this effect.
From then on the digipack became rather easy. I created yet another custom logo for the back of the digipack, added misery related emoticons and the appropriate writing and a bar code. I did not feel I had to include many more of the conventions I have earlier discussed for the simple fact that they were already featured so heavily on the outside upon the front cover.
However when moving onto the inside of my digipack I realised I again could include all these conventions more-over I could include a lyrics booklet to make it seem more realistic. I immediately began on the lyrics booklet, I found an appropriate Romantic style font (as seen on the back cover) and typed the lyrics into the left hand side making sure the spacing and size fit in the with conventions of other lyrics booklets I had looked at from my collection of CD’s. I then added in the band logo for ‘Misery’ and a few stills from the video. I then realised I could fit in another convention from our video. The ‘recording session’ parts of our music video were all shot in black and white as we had discovered this effect to be quite attractive to the watcher in our ‘Film Noir AS coursework’, I replicated this effect and grey-scaled some stills from our music video and also of our unique front cover shot and placed them appropriately into the lyrics booklet. Finally with a little space left over I typed ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Love, Adam’. The reason I did this is because (and I am sure you will agree) Adam Levine (the lead singer of Maroon Five) is quite heavily focused on in practically every aspect of Maroon Five’s advertising, indeed Misery is filmed nearly entirely with him and barely any glimpses of other band members are seen, and one of the more liberal covers for hands all over is of Adam Levine wearing nothing. This use of style Icon seems to show that Maroon Five’s fan base is heavily interested in Adam, I used this to my advantage as it seems a much more personal touch to the fan if it says ‘Love, Adam;’ and would make the product much more enjoyable, also making our product seem a lot more authentic.
Finally I moved onto the last element of our digipack, the CD itself. I realised immediately this had to be simple as most other CD cases are (from what I have seen). I decided to keep this one quite minimalist, using only the thematic writing seen in other parts of the digipack, our standard ‘M’ logo and the bands ‘Misery Logo’,
After doing the digipack I had to begin thinking about my other ancillary text, of which I chose to do in the form of an advert for a live performance of the band. I decided to keep this rather simple much like I had with my CD, the reason for this being that in most adverts you usually see little and large text with a great deal of pictorial/visual elements which is widely seen in the advertisement business as the most effective way to capture a potential purchaser’s attention for long enough to get them interested in the product (in this case a live performance of the band ‘Misery) the advertisement is trying to sell.
Initially I was unsure of how to proceed, so I began with an element I was already adept at incorporating into ancillary texts; the logo. I used the logo ‘Misery’ as I had been using earlier however I edited out all background imaging leaving only the writing itself and placed this in large capital letters at the top of my advertisement (thus in keeping with the convention of ‘Large letters capture attention’ as widely used in advertising). I then added In some photo’s and still’s I had used in the lyrics sheet on my digipack, I did this in order to make it obvious that these two products were of the same style/line, I then keyed out all colour in these pictures and after deciding it looked rather effective (with some input from class members) I was advised into adding more in, and I took this advise even further by completely making the background up of a sort of collage of various pictures incorporating the theme of my chosen band, my digipack and the rest of my ancillary texts. I took pictures from all aspects of my coursework, from the video shoot itself with scenes both in and not in the video, some from my digipack and a few from shots and pictures I had taken outside the parameters of my video. Finally I added in smaller text the date of the performance, the place and how to get tickets (essentially all the relevant information with no ‘waffle’, as in keeping with the conventions of modern day advertising in today’s ‘no-time-world’).
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