Evaluation Question 2

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

Here is my group's first ancillary task, designing for a poster advertising a new album by a musician:

After researching acoustic artists' poster designs, we decided to stay with the classic method of keeping the design fairly simple, and having a dominating photograph of the artist.

In our poster, the photo of the artist makes it clear that one single person is being advertised. We added the name of him in the biggest font size out of any of the sizes on the photo and made it a brighter colour than the rest to emphasise his name and make it memorable for the viewer. As you can see, the name of the artist is in a very plain font and is extremely easy to read. The colours are dark and the picture is faded, suggesting that the music is perhaps on the sadder side of moods.

I believe that by using a simple layout and design, my group has achieved the uniform style of an acoustic artist.

In a similar way, my group stuck with the uniform-style of acoustic artists on the second ancillary task; to design a CD album cover:

The album cover gives off a great idea of what the songs featured on the CD would sound like, just by acknowledging the pictures.

The top half of the finished album cover features one single male smoking a cigarette by a pond. The picture itself is not very uplifting and gives a sense of loneliness, but can also be seen as relaxing by the male smoking the cigarette. The colours are quite drained on the same half of the picture, though the brighter colours are still easy to see.

All of this gives off the sense that it is a solo album, written and sung by the artist on the front cover, and it has been linked with the first ancillary task, keeping a uniformed style to the artist 'Joshua Radin', so that his potential audience knows what music he does and what it is likely to sound like.

Group S.A.G FINAL CUT from Alex Newcombe on Vimeo.

The ancillary tasks almost give a still-frame preview of what the final cut has in store for the consumer. The poster created for one of the ancillary tasks actually contains a photo from a shot that used to be in the music video. Even though it is not now, the dress sense is the same and the overall mood of the shot is kept in both forms of media.

The creation of the 2 ancillary and the final tasks made our whole idea in to a Multi-platform Brand. This initially means one idea split in to separate selling points. In my groups case, this is the poster, the CD digi-pak, and finally the music video. The objective of this in a real selling scenario is to entice the targeted audience with all of this digital media so that they will pay for the end product such as the artists album, for example.