How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
When branding our media products, we were very specific about what our brand would include and how our brand would look, as well as how this would relate to our target audience. With regards to our music video we used our characters to establish our brand. We ensured that the two politicians were wearing the same suit at all times, despite filming on different days, to certify continuity. It was also important to make sure our footage had the same light, which we had to alter in Final Cut for some shots, due to the different times of day and weather conditions in which we filmed. The same masks were also used in each shoot as these were a crucial part of the branding and our video.
Within our digipack, branding was extremely important to convey the punk/rock characteristics as well as our British theme. We decided it would be appropriate to use the colours of the union jack, red white and blue, as a constant feature of our brand so our target audience would instantly recognise our product. The image of the union jack is also a key element in our album artwork, as we used it as the background for one of the inserts as well as the image on both of the CDs.
Another creative way in which we branded our product in accordance with our theme was the use of the London Underground tube map in our artwork. The Underground is an iconic British institution and our decision to include this was inspired by the artist called Simon Patterson, who incorporated the tube map into a piece of art called ‘The Great Bear’. As a group we all thought this was a very effective use of a simple image and incorporated this into our digipack. We used the map as the back cover and changed the station names to names of tracks on the album. We also branded a font within our digipack, which we found online and was inspired by the Sex Pistols, another band similar to The Clash who’s music was targeted towards a punk/rock and rebellious audience. This font is effective as it is very eye catching and can be recognised easily.
Despite our patriotic theme, there is also an element of satire included in our media product; in particular our digipack. We held a photo shoot with the two characters and took these images into Photoshop, where we changed them to convey this idea. For instance in one of the images we added graffiti to show some people’s attitudes towards these politicians and the government as well as making the artwork somewhat comical. Other images showing the characters swearing and mocking each other were also effective in creating a comic and satirical tone while also relating back to the song. In the beginning stages of our digipack we had agreed on a completely different brand, inspired by the Arctic Monkeys album ‘Suck it and See’. We all agreed that the bold simplicity of this cover is what we wanted to achieve in our digipack, and that we could use an image that we had used in our video to convey our theme through this.
The idea of using a cup and saucer was chosen and we started to draft some possible covers using Photoshop. After playing with this possible image we then decided that it would not be as effective as our next idea, as it did not stand out enough and convey enough of our themes and characteristics to be recognisable to our audience. When researching ideas for our digipack we came across two examples that we thought were effective; ‘Breakfast in America’ by Supertramp and ‘Sunny Days’ by Kid British. Both of these covers use imagery to show themes similar to ours. ‘Breakfast in America’ used a famous image of the New York Skyline along with a dinner waitress to portray an American theme, and ‘Sunny Days’ is an ironic comment on British weather which many people are aware of.
Our magazine advert was also created with our brand in mind. We wanted to use all of the themes from our video and digipack and put them into one image. We used the same font and text colour throughout the keep continuity and to make our advert stand out as much as possible, as well as using our most prominent image from the digipack to brand our advert identically to the rest of our media products. Throughout our whole product the two characters are portrayed in the exact same way, which we feel is a key element of our brand. Our advert follows the conventions of a typical magazine advert as we have included specific features to make it look as realistic and professional as possible, such as album ratings by magazines which follow the same genre characteristics as our product. We researched this using BARB.co.uk where we found specific examples of magazines which are popular with our target audience. We also included logos as a promotional tool, such as iTunes and the record label.
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