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Thursday, 1 December 2011

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

For my final evaluation set of questions, I will create an alaysis of my ancillary texts on Photoshop showing which aspects of the digipak and poster relate to the final music video; however as this is the draft I will write out the stages of design that relate to the video.




This was my first design, which during the making process and then straight after publishing it, I hated.

"My feedback sheet given was as expected; I did not like my digipak at all and completely regretted my idea choice as soon as I had completed it, I was expecting the worse in a sense as I was hoping that my teachers would not like it either. I will change my ideas completely and start from scratch taking inspiration heavily from another band's existing digipak.

I was marked a 2/10 for my digipak due to:
Digipak lacks cohesion, the cover is ok but the rest just doesn't work. The burgundy isn't very indie and the window whilst a bit Magritte isn't Magritte. The back cover doesn't need HMV and Apple, it does need legal jargon though. The band sitting down is boring and just seems like a filter and the three panels spanned by 'The Skeleton Boys' seems like a kids party CD.
Following this I was marked another 2/10 for:
Poster. Better, still that horrid colour though. This could work but needs to be more striking and strong (Meg's works because she's ripped off The XX), I'm not sure lower case works. Kerrang and the Telegraph aren't appropriate reviews. I don't think the shadow font is right either.

- I completely agree with the feedback I received and am more than happy to start over again; I did not like my design at the time after I had created it but I decided to receive feedback on it anyway to find out how to improve my general ideas as I could not quite bring it to life.
However I have now been set on track with an idea, and will create a second draft to present to my teachers before finalising my design."

- This quote has been taken from the post I made on my digipak and poster feedback; I am using this to back up the idea that I really disliked my first design. I then went on to change the design drastically as I had a sudden idea that I could simply take an existing album cover and develop it into my own design.

I took into one of my media lessons a selection of existing indie/alternative/rock CD's with their digipaks in; I then sat down with Mr Smith and we discussed which covers I could take inspiration from and how well they each suited the genre and style of the band. I decided on "The Automatic - This is a Fix" album as it shows a quirky image on the front cover that could relate to the edgy, funny aspect of our band and video. This is where my ancillary products relate to the video, as they are both fun, random and quirky. 


So I looked at The Automatic's album cover and decided to almost recreate it exactly, I decided to use the same black object effect but instead of using a group of young children (as I do not know a group of children), I used one of my younger brothers running around a field. Although I edited it to make it look like there were duplicates of him running around so it looks a lot edgier than just having one person...


I really like how my album cover turned out, the lighting of the sunlight was just right as it links through to the video in the sense that there was some sunlight during filming the "Hawaiian dancing in the boat" scene. I also particularly like the style of editing I have used; I created this image on Photoshop so I cut around my brother's outline on every photo and layered them on top of this original photo. The black block took some work as it started off looking too fake so I altered the tone of the black to make it appear more of a matte colour; I also made the shape 3D by adding a slightly lighter shade on the side angle of the block. The final touch to making the block look realistic was smudging the grass to appear over the block; this creates the 3-dimensional, realistic aspect of the block which completes the image well.

I chose not to use any of the band members on my front cover; this inspiration also comes from The Automatic's cover as they have clearly not used any of the band members. Although this does not reflect the video in any way, as we feature the band all the way through the duration of the music video, I feel that this is common among the indie genre as The Arctic Monkeys, Vampire Weekend and many other alternative/indie bands have also featured non-band members on their album covers.



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