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

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

Below are my two ancillary texts, my final digipak and magazine advert for my music video 'Little Lady' by Ed Sheeran featuring Mikill Pane. The song does not fit under just one genre, so is a hybrid of hip hop/grime/folk rock music. Ed Sheeran is quite an 'indie' artist, his songs featuring very few instruments and simple narrative storylines that anyone can relate to, and I wanted my digipak and magazine advert to reflect his simplicity, yet also have the same effectiveness.

My digipak is very simple, following a main colour pattern of black, browns and oranges. The bottom three panels show one photograph, of a bench with a guitar resting on it, split into three sections. I played with the colour of the photograph to give it a faded, brown/orange hue to it. The reason for the park bench photograph is fairly obvious, we decided to call our fictitious album 'Park Bench', as we wanted something very simple which also sounded like it could be the name of an Indie album. I felt the digipak would look more effective if I included some writing, e.g one panel includes the URL of the artists official website, and another panel mentions that this is the artist's debut album and how the music video we have produced has been nominated for a ficticious award, 'Hip Hop Video Of The Year', this is to intrigue possible buyers of the album and make them want to buy it. The font is brown and goes well with the background colour I have made the photo, it is effective in its simplicity. 

The tracklist featured on the digipak is very simple, with a black background and clear, orange coloured font outlining the tracks featuring on the album. I decided to include orange paw prints around the tracklist as Ed Sheeran's guitar is well known for having an orange pawprint on it, here I am giving homage to the artist. The CD panel is very plain, I wanted it to be plain so as not to take away from the other features of the digipak. The last panel is a photo of the girl who features in our music video for 'Little Lady', the photo is black and white - as is the music video - but this stands out from the rest of the digipak which is in colour. 

My magazine advert also features a photo of a bench which has been stylistically edited and colour corrected to look faded with a brown hue. The font stands out drastically in contrast to the background but the colours still mesh well, the album name is largest and in a black font, with the artist's name in orange and overlapping it, but not enough so as to obscure the clarity of the text. The advert mentions our main product which features on the CD, aswell as the fact that is has been nominated for best hip hop video of the year, all of these things are items which would feature in a real magazine advert, and would intrigue the audience into buying the album. I have also included some black paw prints, which as I said before have come to be known as a trademark of Ed Sheeran. I've included a rating of the album from a magazine called 'Billboard' who jokingly give the album '4 paw prints' instead of stars, again with the idea of Ed Sheeran's trademark paw print becoming a recognizable characteristic in which people can familiarise themselves with. 

Overall, I feel that my ancillary tasks are quite effective in combination with my main product, as they are both quite serious and adult in look/tone. They both feature an element of the music video I have produced, the digipak has a photo of the girl who features in the video and the magazine advert mentions the video and both pieces write about the fact that it has been nominated for an award. This shows I am not forgetting about my piece as a whole, which was not to create and sell an album, it was to create a successful music video. I feel that people would see the mature style of both pieces and realise it is not just any generic album, and they would see the praise that the music video is getting, and thus be more inclined to buy it than most albums.