Georgia Surridge Evaluation Question 2

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




A brand is a name, design, symbol or other feature which allows people to identify a specific seller's good or service, which will be difference & distinct from other sellers. It is important to have a brand as it allows consumers to recognise & identify your product. This makes it easy to market your product as people know who you are & what you are producing. Branding elements that we have used within our music video included our theme of nature & love which is evident through our use of locations & mise-en-scene. We have also branded our artist as quite quirky, which is shown through our use of costumes & her name, ‘Lenka’. These are some of the costumes we had our performer wear to brand her quirky style & natural theme.

We have followed these branding elements through to our digipak with our choice of fonts & colour scheme. The colour scheme for our CD cover & back cover was pink, purple & white. These fit in with our theme of love & natural simplicity. We also developed a signature font for our artist which we downloaded from the internet. We wanted to do this as it would be an instant identifier for our artist & was a way to brand our artist. This is the font we used -

We liked this as the hearts around the letters matched our romantic style well & is easily recognisable for consumers to identify our artist.

We carried out extensive research into CD covers & magazine adverts before we began creating our digipak. I looked at Lady Gaga's album cover & magazine advert. General findings included a signature font which were used in both products. The colour scheme was also the same, & both the album cover & magazine advert looked very similar so you could instantly recognise them. Here is the link to my detailed analysis:
Lady Gaga album cover & magazine advert analysis
I also analysed Chris Browns front & back album cover. I found that the same theme was carried through from the front cover to the back cover. The way he is branded was also shown on both of the covers. Here in my in depth analysis for his front & back cover:
Chris Brown digipak analysis


Carrying out this research allowed us to see what common elements were used & the small details which make digipaks & magazine adverts look realistic.

Our digipak also followed the forms & conventions of real media products due to little details we added to make it look realistic. For example, on the back cover we added a bar code & small print. We also used photos of our artist in our digipak which is a common feature of real media products. We made sure that the image of our artist fits her style as she looks innocent, girly & fun which is how we wanted her to come across.  We also made sure that the digipak is appealing for our target audience through colour scheme, mise-en-scene & fonts.

Again, we were influenced by Ellie Goulding’s CD as she was our main intertextual reference. Her style is very simple but targets her audience in an effective way. Her CD used small font which stated her name & the album name. We liked how simple it looked so we decided that we would use our artists’ signature font & just show our artists name & album name.  We used the font to make it cohesive with our other media products.

We followed through the branding elements to the magazine advert by still using the same font to make it cohesive & to allow our target audience to recognise our artist.  We also kept a pink & white colour scheme as it is girly matches our digipak.

Here are some photographs of our progress throughout making the magazine advert, digipak & music video;

Magazine advert progress;

This was our first draft of our magazine advert. As you can see, it does not fit with the branding elements we wanted & looks very amatuer. The colour scheme is too dark & it does not have the typical conventions of other magazine adverts.

This was our second, basic draft as we were playing around with different fonts & backgrounds. We were unsure whether to give the background a gradient or to leave it plain. After testing many different colours & gradient types, we felt that having it plain white would look more professional, like other real magazine adverts. However, we did decide to stick with this font & use it as our artists signiture font.

This was the basic structure of our final magazine advert. We liked the layout & colour scheme of this draft as it fitted in with our chosen branding elements &, we believed, looked quite professional & realistic. At this point, we needed to look in more detail at other magazine adverts to pick out subtle details & other conventions which we could add to our own magazine advert.

Here is our final magazine advert. It includes all the conventions of magazine adverts including a star rating, quotes & photographs of the artist. Everything we included into our advert was purposely chosen to target our audience & fit in with our artists brand.



















Digipak progress:

This is a basic drawing of ideas we had for our front cover & back cover. As you can see, we wanted them to be quite colourful & include images of our artist.

Here was our first album cover. At first, we wanted to use this as out final album cover. But after extensive research into real album covers we realised that it did not look professional. There was too much going on with the background which took away focus from the artists name & album name, which are the most important elements of album covers so they are easily recognisable. Also, it did not fit our brand, it was very random. Therefore, we scraped that idea & decided to start fresh.

We had decided that we wanted to use this photograph with Ella blowing out the letters of the artists name. We knew the placement of the photograph & the letters so we then needed to begin adding the other elements around it & making the cover look appealing. This proved to be quite difficult as we struggled to find a background that went well with the photograph & the font.

 This draft includes the finished background & text. However, many things needed to be tweaked & changed to make sure the cover looked realistic. For example, we needed to remove the date in the photograph & colour correct it. We also needed to add the album name.

 This is a draft of our back cover. Again, we knew that we wanted to use this photograph, which makes it look like the artist is holding the song names between her hands. We also knew we wanted to use this font & the stamps. Yet again, we needed to colour correct the image as it was very dark & looked slightly grainy.

 This is our final back cover. As you can see, we adjusted the colour of the photo to make it lighter & also edited Ellas face to make it look professional. A barcode & small print was also added, as these are key conventions of real album back covers.

These are two sets of completed digipaks. The top one included the front cover, back cover & one inside cover. The one below shows the disc & two inside covers. We used a purple colour scheme as it is girly & fits in with our branding elements.

Music video:

This video below is our first rough cut which we made.

Here is our second draft to our music video. There are several blank bits throughout.




Here is our final music video. You can see all the branding elements within the video, aswell as our artists style.

PLEASE CLICK ON MY MULTIMEDIA EVALUATION

http://www.wix.com/georgiasurridge/georgiasurridgemediaevaluation#!question-2