Evaluation Question Two: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?

Digipak

For my digipak I have used a structure following the theme of the imagination. I drew out the front cover alongside using mixed media to create the backing of my actress and the titles. I drew this, this way so that there was a wide variety of things that young girls think about being symbolised; love, affection, chance connoted by the pack of cards, roses to connote romance, an anchor to connect family roots as well as actions to define the passion inside her album and in the song I have used for my music video 'On My Mind'. I chose to use this mode of address as it relates to the audience as consumers and I feel that placing the drawings above her head and composing it the way I did will show the fact she is thinking of them, I chose Imagine as my album title for that very reason. I believed that Imagine was a great title for my promotional package due to the fact that is what people in my target audience age group tend to do. I felt it had a pure anchorage to the word and clearly defines my packages and each product. Ages ranging from 16-26 are the ages that people are most likely to enjoy their time exploring the world, looking for fun and expanding in their future careers. It is a time to find love before settling down with a family for most.
I wanted to use and create a video like this because it appeals to the younger generation as it is a fairytale like video with a soft pop genre. An alternative sub-genre perhaps due to the conventions taken from both genres. I also feel this could appeal to the older generation because it is very stereotypical and the actor and actress in my video is not of a young age, I feel this could work in my advantage and relate to consumers around the similar age group of late teenagers. I think that my media texts have a strong ideology due to the content, appeal of consumers and the group source of the steoreotype; Pop individuals.
Music exists in many forms and has become not only the essence of auditory curiosity but something that has manipulated and influenced people in a visual sense. These musical traits when combined drives stereotypes to exist, indifferent to society and its ways. Music affects what people like and how they look and act. As Levitin puts it in This Is Your Brain on Music, “Each musical genre has its own set of rules and its own form. The more we listen, the more those rules become instantiated in memory” (233). What Levitin is saying is that as we listen to certain music, our moods, actions, and appearance will develop certain characteristics or rules that pertain to a type of music. Stereotypes are inescapable but necessary for people if they choose to use them as a learning experience about the world around them. Tessa Perkins, steoreotypes theorist (1979) quoted one of her five identified assumptions that not all stereotypes are negative. I do not feel that the stereotype that I have conveyed to my audience of the POP stereotype as a negative one. By using a fairytale style video with a feminine gaze I feel I have successfully shown the stereotype for the romantic pop consumers and it will relate to existing products such as Taylor Swift - Love Story.
I enjoyed working with a chosen soundtrack with my personal alterations as it fitted two genres. This gave me a chance to explore both media texts and make something very different and striking to both of the genres instead of sticking to just one style of media text. The mixing of the genres is uncommon realistically in the music industry however main artists still do this, their work is seen sometimes as a type of collectable or rare merchandise for things such as my ancillary text as it is not seen that often.

I have created a music video promo, a digipak and a magazine advert in support of the video release. I attempted to create an effective combination between all three products by giving them shared elements for example the font. I used dafont.com for my prime use of texts before further manipulating them in Photoshop CS6. I wanted to set two styles therefore I felt these two styles 

would be most appropriate for what I wanted to do. Although on paper here they do not look as if they would go I felt they could connect if the top font was smaller and would be used for subheadings. I also felt I could use this for her name whilst I could use the bottom font for my artists album title.
It is very important to keep continuity in house style therefore for all the the production I stuck to using these two fonts from dafont.com only. I also needed a font style for the CD copyright statements therefore I used Cambria for those sections of my ancillary text. I have used Cambria throughout all of my work as I felt it is also, alongside the dafont texts, a professional looking text that doesn't have Serif features such as the curls in the letters but a straight forward sharp cut lettering style that is clear for the audience to read with a simple structure.
I chose these fonts over the rest as I felt it related to my music video well with it being a feminine style, delicate with a gentle storyline I didn't want to chose a dark, bold font as this wouldn't of been as effective as it is with my chosen ones now.
The bottom font I used for my titles I feel has an edge to it. The swirls connote dream like characteristics as it fits with the stereotypes of people twirling or falling into dreams seen in things such as Alice in Wonderland. I believed it was effective to join all three of my products together with as it is a very decorative font that resembles female features.

Another thing I wanted to connect together was the colour scheme of all of my three products. After

shooting my second music video section at Castle Howard, even though it was a cold winters day still the sun beamed so brightly that day and one thing caught my eye, this was Elles hair as she was running in the shots. I thought from that moment I could use Elle's hair colour and complexion as a colour pallet for my ancillary text and certain aspects of my video. This is a direct connection to my video and makes the product stronger as a package as it is more personal to the main artists herself. I also collaborated with golds as I wanted to add connotations of wealth and success in the pallet. This then would be a connection to the audience with how to relate to the work. Women like gold jewellery for example and this is known as symbol of romance if a male buys jewellery for a woman. I felt adding golds in my colour pallet would bring this further and make it more effective to both genders because of this connection that people have with the colour. They would relate and connect to the couple in the video. I used highlights and low lights in the levels adjustments in Photoshop to mess with the opacity and the exposure of the colours therefore I could make it extremely bright or not bright at all.
I used simple colours and added an element of art to express the power yet simplicity of the texts. Unlike many pop texts the pose of my artist is elegant yet describes the narrative clearly.

My location I believe is what pieces my three products together the most. The fact I went to great lengths to be able to produce the dream/fairytale like scenes with the costumes that they both were wearing really makes the piece more extravagant to the eye and could possibly be the element what makes the audience want to watch it again. The location building colour matches my colour scheme, there are a lot of woodland, trees and a big lake to set the scene of being in the country side and also there is the fountain that I have set my actress in front of at the beginning of my dream section. All this mise en scene collaborated with my narrative is what gave me the ideas I had to create the ancillary the way I did. I feel that I have successfully made the package as a whole effective with the use of conventions, colour scheme, house style and mise en scene.

After having completed my digipak, see 'The Making of My Ancillary Text' I had to reopen the PSD files in photoshop of my finished pieces, flatten the images so that all the layers were in one place and I then copied the picture and pasted it on my template and edit>scale>transform so that it would fit in the box. I did this for all sections but had to resize several images so that they were not stretched or to large. 

The combination of my main product, ancillary text digipak and promotional poster in the reality could lead to cross form synergy or cross media convergence, This means different types of media coming together to create related merchandise for example.  My products have a running house style of the gold scheme in all three products therefore you can tell as music package that they all fit together and come from the same album "Imagine". This house style then becomes a recognisable product and fans and audiophiles see them as a collectable of their favourite artists. I feel that all three of my products would work on the pop market and also possibly the alternative market as they are sophisticated but still show the youth that I am portraying in the music video to represent my target audience; the texts would sell well in my opinion due to it having a very different approach on the genre that is uncommon for the pop industry to see.
 My target audience are in social group E so I would price my Digipak at £11.99 which is an affordable price for teens aged 16-24. I as a teen in this age category and demographic wouldn't probably buy an album for more than this price unless it was a special occasion or I got paid from a part time job because a lot of people in this category are students. Students have little money to live on after paying fees therefore I feel this price would be appropriate enough for this selected demographic. I would advertise my video and soundtrack on iTunes for £2.99 again an affordable price for the single choice on what they would like to view. My poster would feature in magazines such as Billboard; big pop magazines so that they attract a wider audience meaning larger artists recognition selling more merchandise products etc.