Evaluation Question 2 (Draft)

How effective Is The Combination Of Your Main Product And Ancillary Texts?

For a musician to market a song or album well, everything has to connect, forming a campaign. The album artwork, advertisements, and music videos all have to follow the same line of thought and themes. I have tried to emulate this in my final pieces as much as I can, although occasionally I have forgone this for certain features.

I feel the two pieces of my campaign that connect together the most successfully are my digipack artwork and my advertisement. I made sure that both feature the same kind of imagery, although I was going to base my advert on the inverted crucifixion image inside of my digipack, until I realised that this was too in your face and that something more subtle would suffice. I then chose to take the image most people would see when they thought of the album, the front cover, and then base my advert around that. By showing the entire body of the image from the cover, I feel that I have successfully connected the two texts together into a campaign, whilst still creating a difference between them. It would have been far easier to have just used the exact image from the front cover, but I felt that this would be a cop-out and ineffective as a campaign.

My video is a little bit more different and hasn’t got as strong connections as the ancillary pieces do, but I feel it still connects well as part of a campaign. As the music video is not the only song on the album, its connection isn’t 100%, as it doesn’t copy the artwork themes. It is still however, based around that strong theme of horror that is seen in the artwork adorning the digipack and advert. I felt like this was the most important feature for me to get across in all of my pieces; that scary, fear-inducing imagery. I also chose not to use any photographs in my digipack, preferring to go for purely illustrations. I feel this is reflective of my genre, heavy metal, and that photos of the band would have dampened the horror ideas I was trying to get across. Because of this, I lost a major link between my ancillary texts and my video, as none of the band members featured in the video are shown anywhere in any of the rest of the campaign texts. As I didn’t have this major connection, I had to try and keep the campaign idea between the different pieces, in other ways.

Another difference between my ancillary texts and my video was the absence of any gore in my video. The artwork in my digipack, especially the crucifixion image, was quite gory, however, I felt this wasn’t needed in my video. I wanted my video to go for a more psychological idea of horror, in the vein of Marilyn Manson, rather than a bloody one, as shown in some of my digipack. This means that the two pieces do contrast slightly when seen together, but I feel still form a successful campaign.

Finally, I used a great deal of desaturation and darkness on both my video and ancillary pieces, to create an essence of horror. This means that both pieces fit together, due to their similar colour schemes of dark grey and black. I felt that putting a lot of my video in the shadows, helped to boost the fear factor of it, and then this meant that darkening the digipack artwork combined the two pieces into one campaign, and continued the general theme of darkness and horror throughout.