Evaluation Q.2 How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The Written

The main purpose of our music promo and our ancillary texts was to advertise the artist and the album to the right target audience. Prior to the creation of this project, we made sure to carry out research and interviews for our target audience, so that we had a perfect understanding of what is required when producing a successful promo. Throughout our research, we discovered common iconography was used across all indie genres; the use of dark colours, referencing to nature and simplistic locations were used to combine the texts. We met these conventions in our texts by using black and white in our music promo and also in our digipak, while also continuing the eye catching colour red throughout all three texts. Another aspect that we noticed was that there was a common illustration that would appear throughout certain bands promos, for example, Ed Sheeran’s use of mathematical symbols throughout his advertisement, accompanied by the use of the colour orange; this is a clear relation to his ginger hair which is now associated with his colour theme. Futhermore, the use of the frequency waves for the Arctic Monkeys, the common illustration of the waves have now been made their own and are now associated with their band. We created synergy in our production by linking our promo with our ancillary texts in many ways, however I believe the most obvious connection was the red rose. The roses featured in every product in some way or another, the importance of the roses in our digipak was emphasised by the black and white effect which we applied to our star image, while keeping the flowers in a prominent red. This showed that the roses had more of an importance than our star image which conformed to the stereotypes of our indie genre, where you will find that they rarely feature the band on their front cover. The roses are the front panel for our digipak and also the whole magazine poster, the rose is a symbolic feature which represents the love between the couple, but also the notion of death as we watch the rose slowly decaying throughout the video. I think that using the rose enforced the xx’s recognition and gave the audience something to connect with; the use of this synergy helps the band identity sell the album and get the audience talking. Indie videos normally focus on the performance in a promo, whilst touching upon an interesting narrative to keep the audience interested. As you will see in our promo, we decided to keep the video primarily narrative based with conceptual aspects feeding into it; we kept the performance to a minimal by only featuring lip syncing without the feature of instruments. Challenging these conventions meant that we got to have our own twist on the band and also have the change of creating synergy through an inanimate object. We filmed in simplistic locations which we discovered was a key feature of an indie promo, this could be because of their low budget which they have to film with; we found this useful when it came to production as my partner and I also had a low budget. As for our magazine poster, I believe it is attractive yet informative and is clearly a part of the three production texts, this is obvious through the entire red theme and obviously the featuring of roses, to expose our conceptual theme, we decided to edit the photo of the roses onto our front cover and have the image against a white background. The white background reminds the audience of the male parts in the video and also brings a sense of simplicity to the panels as there isn’t much going on, meaning there is no chance for clashing colours. We used the same font across the two ancillary texts to create familiarity and recognition of the bands identity; this striking black font worked well to show the indie genre as it is quite edgy and not particularly bold.

Overall, the combination of our main product and ancillary texts are clear and attractive, its obvious there is a connection between the three as there are common themes which run throughout and the common mention of the roses helps.