How effective is the synergy between your main and ancillary tasks?

By Sophie Stanwix

When producing my ancillary tasks, I had to put a lot of thought and consideration about how I was going to take photos which relate specifically and clearly to the music video as the album was to promote our chosen song ‘Who’s laughing now’. I found the front cover image was effective due to the fact I used the main fictional character in front of the yellow set of lockers which should be recognisable and clear in people’s minds as it is repeated in the music video a few times. Furthermore, this particular image provided plenty of space for me to insert some text due to where she was positioned in the image.

The size of the font on the front cover of my digipak was large. This is because it is an important feature as it informs the purchaser who the album has been made and published by. I made the artists name slightly bigger than the name of the album-this was to keep my digipak as conventional as possible. I wanted to continue the colour scheme throughout my ancillaries to link the products together to make them easily identifiable to the audience and consumers so I copied and pasted the same title which I created for the digipak onto my magazine advert. I attempted to keep the colour scheme the same by taking two of my images with the yellow set of lockers as the mise-en-scene.

For the back cover, I decided to take another image with the main female character because this made it clear to the audience her significance in the video. The purpose of this image was to specifically relate the audience back to the scene with the same mise-en-scene in the video-the idea of this was to help the music video sit in people’s minds making it more easy to remember. This links with the reasons why we decided to repeat certain bits of the video-there was two reasons for this; one was because it fit in well with the repeated bits of the video and the other reason was to make it more memorable at the same time. When I was filming the music video, I realised that a leading line was produced from the hand pole on the right hand side. I thought this was effective and this factor influenced me the most to take the image. I included all the legal in small print at the bottom of the page with the bar code in its conventional placing in addition with website information with the name of the publisher and distributor.

The inside panels where the CD can be found, I took an image of the school building and grounds as I wanted to make it creative, unique and link it directly to the narrative element of the music video. I chose to take this image on a day with good weather because I found this an important factor as the image would not have looked as appealing and colourful if it was taken on a day with bad weather conditions. By doing this, it created a slight contrast in the colour scheme however this didn’t appear to be a big visual problem. In all of my images, I got the main female character to look directly into the camera, particularly on the front cover due to the fact it was the most important image as it needed to immediately grab the audience’s attention. By getting people to look directly into the camera, it directly addresses my target audience.

I decided to continue the ‘Jessie J - Who’s Laughing Now’ title from the digipak to create a continuous logo throughout my promotional package. I also used the exact same text style by copying and pasting the name of artist and album over from my digipak. The aim of this was to prevent any misunderstanding from the audience about the product making it easy to read. The positioning of the texts helps frame the image by covering the negative, empty space which I did deliberately did when I was taking the images. The lead girl conventionally appears in nearly all of the images which shows her importance again. This also creates a cohesive link between the name of the artist and the stereotypical female character shown in the image because she is portrayed as young and fun. The use of the black school uniform also creates continuity with the imaging, text and colour scheme.