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

Strengths

One strength of our music video is the beginning shots, we come up with the idea when we first planned our storyboard. We knew that we wanted to have a unique beginning, as this is the first thing that the audience is going to see. We have used bright colours, which will catch the audiences eye, and we were also able to sync the letters with the beats of the song. This took a lot of time on Final Cut, which shows our determination to get the right outcome. We also feel that the beginning is a success as is clearly identifies the song title for the audience, this was important to achieve as the more information that the audience had, the more appealing they would find it.

Another strength of our music video is the green screen effects. We spent a lot of time making sure that we had the right background, and also a lot of time on the filming to make sure that the footage was a good enough quality. We feel that by adding green screen effects, we made our video more advanced, as it shows that we not only used Final Cut, but that we also used I Movie then exported it over. Another strength of the green screen effects is that we were able to get any location, without having to actually go and film there, This opened up many more opportunities when we were planning, as we knew that we would be able to find any background. The green screen effect also adds to the narrative of the dancer, this is because we show him dancing quite a lot throughout the video, therefore the graffiti background links all of the different shots together.

One weakness of our music video is that in some parts the lip syncing is slightly slow. We practised a lot to make sure that we got the lip syncing as close to the song as possible, however it was very difficult to get it perfect. We did try to tackle problem by filming a lot of of footage, in order to have a lot of choice when picking what shots we would use. However, on one part of our music video the artist slightly misses the end of the lyric.

Another weakness of our music video is that we did not use a lot of transitions between each shots. Although we used some such as fading, I feel that we could of inserted some more transitions, to make our look more advanced. However, we did discuss this during planning, and we felt that we did not want to add too many transitions, just in case we made our video look to cluttered. Therefore, one thing I would change if we did the whole process again would be to balance the amount of transitions we use, in order to both appeal to the audience, and make our video look professional.

One strength of our ancillary task is that we provide all the key information for the audience. On our album cover we display the name of album and the artists name. This is important as without this information, the audience may be less engaged if they do not know about the album. On our promotional poster we also included the name of the artist and the album name, as the whole purpose of the poster is to promote the artist and their work. We also include important information about key dates, this is again promotion for the artist. We decided to include a rating from a magazine, this is because after looking at different promotional posters, we found that a rating from a reliable source makes the album more appealing to buy.

Another strength of our ancillary task is the inlay layout. As a group, we decided it would look if we included a CD tray on the right inlay, this is because on the A2 productions we looked at, a CD tray made the inlays look professional and appealing. We did have some trouble finding an inlay that would not cover up the brick wall background, however once we found a suitable one, we felt that the inlay as a whole looked very good.

One weakness of our ancillary task is that the font on our lyrics inlay does not perfectly fit with the other fonts we had used on our other productions. We had a lot of difficulty finding a font that would be easily read over the brick wall background, however the fonts that we used on our album cover did not look suitable. Therefore we had to choose a different font, which did not create synergy between all three of the productions. One pattern we tried to follow was using white font on all of our productions, however on our lyrics inlay we felt that the font was not clear in white, due to it being smaller than the the texts.

Overall, I believe that we did meet our expectations as a lot of our planning was successfully created to a standard that we were happy with. I believe that our decision to retake the album cover image shows how determined we were to reach our desired goal; to create a CD cover that would appeal to our target audience. I also feel that our music video successfully conforms to a lot of the conventions of a 'pop' music video, as we put a lot of thought into the type of shots we would use. However, the fact that we did challenge some conventions makes our video stand out more, as it is these changes that the audience would notice. At the end of the process we were happy with how our ancillary texts came out as they fit the typical conventions of our genre. Our CD front cover also supersedes our first idea, which did not really represent our artist. I feel that our second attempt at the image for the album cover looks very professional and gives the audience more knowledge on our artist.