How effective are the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
After completing my RMA research and seeing the codes and conventions that made each product typical to their genre, I found that it was necessary to have connections between all three products to make them recognisable as one. Whether that be colours, fonts, props, costume or locations my main and ancillary products needed to have common aspects that made it obvious they all advertised the same song.
Therefore, it became crucial that we conformed to this commonly found concept and have links to our own work. The main association that can be seen is the use of the same character across all three products, this created continuity and allowed the audience to have someone they could relate to. Also, it highlighted her importance to the storyline as she is the only person who appears in all three elements of the promotional package. Additionally, another feature that linked our products together was the use of a guitar to aid the narrative structure and conform to the typicality of the indie/alternative genre. The use of an instrument is often used by bands and singers in this genre which is clear in my own research, bands such as ‘Fall Out Boy’ and ‘The White Stripes’ made use of multiple instruments from drums, bass and guitars.
Furthermore, certain aspects of the scenery became an important way of linking all three elements of the promotional package. For instance, across both the digipak and magazine advertisement I used the same costume that our protagonist wore in the performance aspects of the music video. I used the same location to take the photos for our digipak and magazine advertisement but made changes with the lighting and camera angle to have some variety in the shots I was taking. I wanted to incorporate the colourful lights as they have positive connotations which tie in with the outcome of the narrative in the music promo. Despite having these bright colours, I wanted to contrast this with a dark black background which appears in all three aspects of our package, as although the song is upbeat the use of dark colours is something that appears frequently in the indie genre.
Finally, I believed it would be effective to not only focus on the big ideas that connected our products but the finer details such as colour and font that made these three products obvious to be part of a whole package. I used a cursive, bold, white font for the band name ‘Fickle Friends’ which appeared on the digipak and magazine advertisement, this stood out and created an impact which was something noted by my focus group. Another font we used was, also white in colour and it was used for the song name itself, tracklist on the digipak and briefly appeared in the music promo itself.
In conclusion, the combination of our main products and ancillary texts were effective as they conformed to our chosen genre, made our promotional package recognisable as one and appealed to our target audience.
