Question 2 - Evaluation - Lucy Clark

Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The term 'branding' means to identify a product, and we feel that our video displays significant usage of branding. We have done this through the use of masks, probably the most recognisable and memorable pieces of mise-en-scene used in the video. As well as the masks, the 'British' theme also adds to the branding of the product that is our video, as we have used props that would be associated with Britain. The importance of doing this was to capture the attention of the British audience, and familiarise other countries with our country. 

The lettering and font used in our video reflects the anarchistic behaviour that the genre portrays. The font is very similar to that used by Sex Pistols on their infamous 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols' album which too displayed that of rebellious behaviour, fitting alongside the genre characteristics. We chose to use this font as The Clash and Sex Pistols were from the same genre and shared similar traits in what they stood for. The font is familiar to its audience and therefore we believed it would be suitable to the audience. For example, if a teenager was looking at CD's in a shop and they were familiar with the Sex Pistols music and they saw our album cover for The Clash, even without knowing about The Clash, they would be more likely to pick up the album simply because of the font. The red and the blue colours used in the font also add to the British theme of red, white and blue which is effective in supporting the British ideology. 

We chose to do a simple design for our digipack cover and magazine advert. This is because the simplicity is often the key to gaining an audience. It stands out and is eye catching because of the colours used and the picture used, not because of a busy background. Therefore we felt that is was most appropriate to stay simple because of these reasons. The colour scheme throughout the video, digipack and magazine advert has remained realistic and continuously of a British colour-scheme, purposely done for continuity throughout. 

We began putting our ideas together in September 2011 where as a group we did various mindmaps and written timelines of our ideas. Further to this, we did a powerpoint presentation to our class which included our ideas, about our group, costume ideas, a wordle mindmap of associating words to do with the genre characteristics, an analysis of the lyrics by us, the time line, inspiring videos and a printable questionnaire in which we asked all class members to complete afterwards. The questionnaire provided us with supporting ideas from our peers and what they liked and didn't like about our ideas so far. After we had considered the ideas from our peers, we put together a storyboard of shot ideas on yellow post-it notes. We then individually photographed them and uploaded them to the mac computers and then to Final Cut Express, our editing software. We were going to make an animatic storyboard, fitting to the music so that we could clearly see how long the shots needed to be and how many more we needed to add (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/blog-post.html). We realised that we had vastly underestimated the volume of footage we required and spent several hours filling in the gaps, drawing more images, uploading them to the computer and adding them to the animatic storyboard. This gave us an excellent idea of how much footage we would need when it came to actual filming. We are so thankful that we did this task or we would have not realised the amount of footage we would need.

We were then aware of what we needed to film and so began to film our video footage. It took us several days and trips to London to complete as well as an evening at school to film the performance footage. It took longer than we had originally planned for because of the bad weather in November and December and only being able to do the filming on weekends because of school. We edited the footage we had gained from the weekend in the following week of school and made note of other ideas we could film. We did this for several weeks, and we eventually finished filming in the Christmas holidays. We had a deadline of January time and as a group we like to stick to deadlines and ended up being the first group to finish our music video, before the deadline date. This gave us time to reflect on our video and get audience feedback for our evaluation without rushing. 

During the editing time, Ellie G put together the digipack. She worked hard on creating ideas and re-drafting until we were all happy with the finished product. This teacup design was our first front cover draft. Our influence for this design was Arctic Monkey's 2011 album 'Suck It and See'. The album cover was a plain colour with just the album title written on it, plain but very effective. We loved the idea of doing a similar design but adding something British to it, which we chose to be a teacup. However, after the design was nearing finishing, as a group we decided against it because although the artwork worked by Arctic Monkeys, we believed that for our digipack to match the theme of our video, we needed to create a design that was more eye-catching and reflective of the albums anarchistic nature. This led to the creation of what eventually became our final digipack cover after many re-drafts (http://gliscoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/digipack). Because me and Ellie S finished the video on time, we decided to create the Magazine advert using Adobe CS4 Photoshop. We drafted the advert 3 times until we were finally happy with the product. 

Our digipack is a typical 6 square digipack that you would find in your average modern day CD. The digipack usually would be made of a card or paper outer binding, with one or two plastic trays to hold the CD. We did not opt for the use of brushes because of the simplistic idea that we held. A big inspiration for the idea of the back cover was 'The Great Bear'. Artist Simon Patterson used a tube map to group people, rather than the names of the stations. This idea was a big influence on our final back cover, sharing similar characteristics. 

After looking through magazines such as NME and Q to gain inspiration for our magazine advert, we realised the importance of including star ratings on the advert. This is one of the main features on adverts alongside the inclusion of where the music is available from and the bands web address. Therefore, it was important to include these in our advert. Our overall piece is similar to your average magazine advert for an album, consisting of the necessary information and conventions as others. This is important for the branding of not only the album, but the band too. 

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