QUESTION 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In order to construct the ancillary tasks we had to go thorough research into what the ‘norms’ are of producing album covers and advertisements to be able to produce our own one that reflects on the similarity and ideas of others.

We used the idea of our ‘motif’ of the roses to maintain that throughout the video to the album cover to enforce continuity between our products and show the reflection of the idea that the flowers die in the video in the same way the friendship does. Since we didn’t use many props, other than for the purpose of scenes, we didn’t include them into the album/advertisement because they don’t show much relevance to the artist other than for the purpose of the given scene, for example, the cup to enforce the deep thinking that the actor had on the outside bench.

For the video, we decided to choose a neutral setting that the audience should be familiar with because the park is for everyone and so is the song that we are promoting. However, the performance, the album and the advertisement both reflect on the more exclusive and ‘glamorous’ lifestyle the artist has. But not only it allows negative space to surround the artist, it enables all the focus to be on her and it means that she gets all the attention by being positioned in the centre of both of the adverts and the album cover, with high resolution photoshoping through good quality images showing professionalism. The home setting is a setting that the audience should be familiar with and the ‘exclusive’ setting should be the one they want to aspire to be like, helping them to diverge from reality.

Since the same images were used, the album and adverts show costume that is ‘feminine’, ‘showing a bit of skin’ enhancing the male gaze which expresses sexuality but shows the artist to be confident and have ‘power’, an idea enforced showing ‘women’ aren’t powerless. This shows the artist to be open to her audience. We had a similar idea of costume getting inspired by the Beyoncé cover where she is wearing a fur jacket that doesn’t fully cover her body enforcing that being ‘feminine’ and almost girly doesn’t lose out on the idea of her confidence.

“Heavy make-up” has yet influenced the video by portraying these audiences’ expectations of what is considered as ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ but also enhances the ‘feminine’ features.

The hair has been styled to be ‘glamorous’ on the covers and advertisement to show the ‘celebrity lifestyle’ but the chance for ‘personal identity’ in the video where the artists hair represents ‘everyday’ hair. Costume, hair and makeup are more everyday so ‘normal audiences’ can relate to the audience.

In the video facial expressions and body language are ‘natural’ to show a storyline and a narrative as a main focus. But in the performance in the video and on the cover/advert it shows to be more ‘feminine’ and girly showing the delicacy, confidence, power the artist has. We needed the visuals to be of something the audience can immediately relate to and create convergence rather that divergence because you see things before you hear them so we need to build on the audience’s interest into the music before they hear it.

Klaudia Gil

All throughout there is high key lighting poster/cover/video bringing everything together that allows audiences to ‘get to know the artist’ by visually observing. Colour in our work is effective and shows a relation/connection to ideology we created. Black and white shows images that are from the past enforcing ‘how things used to be’ and colour shows the ‘happiness’ in the new situation and ‘in the moment’.

The artist is in central positing so they can have all the attention paid to them, the album cover doesn’t have much negative space for this reason, so the audience attention can be grasped immediately through the use of min shots and the plain background wouldn’t ‘be a distraction’ to them.

Cursive font, showing the femininity of the artist, with white being considered with purity and innocence. The ‘red’ is a bold stand out, idea taken from Taylor Swift, the statement colour. Sizes are not too big but most at a 2:1 ratio compared to the image to make the images the bold statement because that’s what catches the audience’s attention first. The larger the text the more importance it has and significance the media. The rest of text is in “Serif” (American Typewriter) showing a bold statement and making the text clearer and bolder like the song titles and release information as well as the text on the video.

Black and white enforces a statement where colour brings the piece to ‘life’ unlike the video which has high key lighting and colour visuals to balance the flashback with reality.

The USP producing adverts for many different formats gives access to the acknowledgement of a new album release on many different platforms, almost doesn’t give them a chance to not know about the cover making everything come together promoting the newly released single.

Klaudia Gil