How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? (synergy, cross promotion)

The combination of our main product and ancillary texts are quite effective as we have managed to keep the same themes throughout the making of each. For example both the CD cover and tour poster are similar, as they use the same colours, text style and basic layout. If they were not placed together people could tell they were part of the same package. They also have the same picture on them so have that link to. Both the CD cover and tour poster can also link to the music video. In certain parts on the music video they have club scenes, and dancing just the general message of the music video fit in well and link with the digipack. They all fit in very nicely as a package, as they all sell the artist  and portray her the way we wanted her to be presented. What I would say is that we maybe should have focused on her face as that's what a lot of pop music artists do, but I guess it's good that ours is a little different. I think the CD cover, tour poster and music video have presented the artist exactly how we wanted. Obviously as a girl in pop you have to sell stuff through your looks as well as your music so we've tried to go for a more sexulised, rebelious look on the CD cover and tour poster, focusing on specific body parts. This also links with the music video because it also communicates that she is quite rebellious. The song is about her moving on from her boyfriend going out and having a good time without him and the covers link, showing that also. I think the colours used on the CD cover and tour poster also link into the whole going out clubbing and enjoying life thing as we have used black as the background colour and also the text is bright and we have used a glowing effect which could be seen as looking like strobe lights, or glow sticks, so overall I think the music video, CD cover and tour video all fit in as a package really well.
















In terms of making our Album cover and Tour poster similar we wanted to make sure we used the same conventions in both so you would know they were connected to the same artist or the artist is playing that particular album at their tour. For an example, I have shown Example's tour poster and CD cover above. You can clearly see the relation between them both and that they go together. I feel this is a strong example considering you can see that they are related considering the colours, text and images used. This is what we wanted to achieve in our CD cover and tour poster, making sure that when they were put side by side you could see the correlation between them. Example has used the exact same photo and text for the tour poster as he has for the CD cover. We didn't do the exact same, however we did use the same photo, although we cropped it to make it look like a completely different image. We thought this would still keep the connection between them both considering the cropped image on the CD cover is still featured on the tour poster.

Audio Commentary - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

 

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our music video predominately uses conventions of real media products. When analysing music videos at the start of this project, we had ideas of which we wanted to involve in our music video. For instance when looking at one of Scouting For Girls music videos, we saw that they use a lot of slow motion and have editing quite a lot of the scenes within the video. This is where we got ideas for the types of editing we used in our video, for example when she dives into the pool and the lyrics are 'but i gotta let it go' this shows narrative and is a convention that many artists use in their music videos to get a point across or show an important part of the video.
We also had some shots where our actress was in a bikini, which shows voyeuristic behaviour. Many female artists are known for their videos to be quite sex related. Therefore we wanted to include in our video sex appeal, so our audience isn't just females.


In terms of our CD cover and Tour poster, include many conventions that are used when marketing an artists product. Our CD and poster both feature either a barcode, dates, website, track name, artists name etc. These are all common conventions that you see on advertisement on sale today. The image of our artist on the CD and poster both relate with one another so that they don't look like two separate campaigns. We have made it so the image used on the CD cover is the same as the Tour poster but changed it slightly, by showing just the legs of the artist on the CD and then revealing the artist on the Tour poster. 

Rihanna's tour poster has conventions that we've used in our work. For instance the name of the artist and the name of the album is on the poster, showing who is playing and what music they will be playing, which is something we made sure of in our poster and CD cover.

We wanted the tour poster and CD cover to look similar since it would be that music they would be playing at that particular tour. This is something Rihanna has done with both her CD cover and tour poster, in terms of the colours and text that was used.

In our poster and CD cover we wanted our artist to be stereotypically sexy, being a solo R&B artist. This is a another convention that Rihanna uses in her poster and CD cover being that she shows skin and wears the colour red. Therefore the photo we used for the poster and CD cover was aimed to be revealing and attractive, leaving little to the imagination. 

In the CD cover we just showed the artists legs, but it was the same photo that was used for the tour poster. We thought this worked well together, being that they then both relate with one another.

As you can see, the colours that have been used are the same as the tour poster, also text for the name of the tour and album are the same, this is a convention we used in our CD cover and tour poster. 
Another thing is the appeal of the photo, the image has been taken to look good and attract viewers. Being that it is a close up of her face and once again the colour red being used. 
This is another similarity to both our CD cover and tour poster since she has used a mid/full body shot on the tour poster and then a close up on the CD cover. This is something we incorporated in terms of the full shot of her body and then the close up of the artists legs on the CD cover.

How did you construct new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout the whole project we used blogger to show our progress through the researching, planning, making and evaluating stages of the project. It was a good way of presenting all our work because we could design the blog how we wanted and make it our own. It also made your work look very neat and in order and was very easy to use. The only problem with the blog was that the dates were tracked so you had to keep up to date with it all which was hard to keep up with as you get sidetracked with making the project and forget about the blog,

meaning that you ended up with massive date gaps between each post.

We also used iMovieHD, which is the programme we used to edit our film and turn it into a music video. At first we tried to use final cut pro but struggled using it, so found iMovieHD and found it a lot easier to use. We liked iMovieHD because it allowed you to use effects and transition and all the options were simply placed which made it easier to work with and get the rasp of over a programme like final cut pro. We liked how the programme allowed you to be quite free with the editing, but there was a limited amount of effects, audio effects and transitions so we had to make do with the ones they had, which I think limited us in making the music video better, but all in all it was a very easy and useful programme.

When creating the CD cover and tour poster we used photoshop as it allows you to create unique designs easily. I found it really easy to create the digipack because after looking at other peoples tour poster and CD cover you are able to see that they don't have to be anything artistically spectacular, so I was able to make a simple CD cover and tour poster, without it looking bad. It also allowed me to use the same themes with both the CD cover and tour poster because I was able to easily copy over the same text fonts and photos so they looked similar. The only problem I had with making the the digipack whas that I had to use text from word, as I didn't find any of the fonts on photoshop appealing, but that wasn't a massive deal.

Through the research stages of the coursework we used youtube to look at different types of music video and analyse them. It was very helpful because it was easy acsses to a bunch of music videos and allowed you to look into many genres of music video. The only problem with youtube is that sometimes you are ristricted from watching certain music videos because of the country settings or copyright infringements, which limited us a bit. We were also not able to watch all of Jonnahan Glazer's Mirroball episode becaus youtube had blockd certain parts of it. 

For CD cover and tour poster analysis we had to use Google to look for them different CD cover and tour poster that are already around . it was versy useful and as there were many options you could look for all different types and genre's of CD cover. This piece of technology had no restrictions at all really, the only problem was that they may not have had the specific picture you were looking for, but overall we found everything we needed.

Music Video

When making the music video we realised that the majority of the clips had been recorded horizontally instead of vertically. So to get this fixed we had to finish the music video, then get it rotated. Once we finished the video we went to get it rotated, but they were not able to rotate it all and the only way to rotate it was by putting each separate clip into final cut pro and rotating them on there. The only problem with that was that when you transferred the clips over to final cut pro they returned to their original uncut/un edited form. Meaning that we'd have to re edit and re cut everything and start from the beginning again which would have taken us ages, and we didn't have enough time to do that, as we had a deadline. So the final video looks a bit poor because the majority of the clips are horizontal. We've learnt from this and next time we do a project like this will know to only film vertically or it won't work.

Final CD cover

Final Tour Poster

The making of the CD cover

                                                                        Front cover

For the front of the album cover I used the same image, with the same effect, from the tour poster, but cropped it down, so it was just of the bottom half of her body. I then slanted it slightly an placed it on a black background.



I then added the song name to the CD cover. The effect on the title was done by first using the text tool to type out the song name over the blue part of the picture. I then highlighted the text and print-screened the effect that came out on it from the highlighting. I then cropped the screenshot of the text and pasted it back onto the CD cover, resized it and then added the filter 'Glowing edges' to it, which gave me the text effect shown on the cover. I then slanted it slightly , so it could be placed just above the picture in the left corner.

 

I then added the song artists names to the CD cover and used the same effect that was explained above. and also slanted it and placed it on the bottom right corner on the picture.


                                                                          Back Cover

The text used here was done in the same way as explained above except for 'We found love (remix)' I used a different filter called ink outlines which didn't change the colour too blacks and blues like the other effect did.

I then added light grey Ariel text to the cover mentioning the producers, executive producer, associate producers an anyone else important who was involved in making the song. I also added some important websites at the bottom, which are the artists website and the record labels website.

I then added the bar-code, as every CD cover has one, and placed the logo of the record label, the artist is signed to, at the bottom of the cover next to the websites.

                                                                           CD skin
                                                             

 

This is the blank disc template I got off of google.





I then filled in the outer part of the disc black, by using a shape from Photoshop that fit the shape of the disc.





I then copied the name of the artists from the front of the CD cover and placed it on the disc. I did this because I though it would be effective to use the same colours and themes throughout all of the designs.



The making of the tour poster

I then did the same thing with the dates for the tour and used word art instead of Photoshop. I decided to go with blue outlining this time so the dates stood out from the rest of the text. It also fits in with the colour scheme of the photo.

As I wasn't very keen on the fonts in Photoshop. I went to word and used their word art tool to write out the theatres the artist will be performing at, on tour, and copied them onto the poster. I decided to use the black text with the white outlining because it stands out on the black background.

I then added the artist name and the tour name to the poster. The effect on the titles was done by first using the text tool to type out the artists/tour name over the blue part of the picture. I then highlighted the text and print-screened the effect that came out on it from the highlighting. I then cropped the screenshot of the text and pasted it back onto the poster, resized it and then added the filter 'Glowing edges' to it, which gave me the text effect shown on the tour poster. I then used the text tool, again, and chose the ariel font to write a bit of extra information about the tour tickets and placed that at the bottom of the poster.



The first thing I did while making the 'Tour Poster' was  place the chosen image onto  a black background. I then used the filter tool to add an effect called glowing edges to the picture to give it a bit of an edgier look.