Ancillary Task

Poster

Digipak

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For my music video, I feel as though it has stuck within the conventions of the genre we were doing, which was garage. A Garage song was a good choice as there was very little garage music videos therefore it was a clean slate for us to base it on, however we tried to stick within what we had seen from the limited selection of music videos, Some parts of our music video may not be seen as conventional garage because there is a fine line between garage and grime music but when you watch the whole video through it fits with the song and displays an understanding of the genre.

With my ancillary task there was a lot more things i could incorporate into my work and i had a lot more control over what was included, I decided to use a green and black colourscheme for my digipak and my poster as these two colours seem quite urban and dance but also compliment each other enough to make other stuff such as fonts used and pictures of ourartists stand out, on the work there is pictures of the artist which is very conventional of garage and we decided to make ours a duo as there assorted garage artists in groups such as, oxide & neutrino, so solid crew and many more.

Sticking to my chosen genre proved harder than expected, Garage can be mistaken for few other genres such as Grime,Rap and R'n'B, Certain aspects of my work have conventions of other genres which is hard to steer clear.

Many of the conventions for Garage are shared with the other genres, such as girls dancing, club atmospheres and A Story with no meaning being shown.

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

I believe that my ancillary task combined with my music video is successful as the poster gets across what the artist is trying to sell which is the album that includes the song of my music video, all three of them have the same theme of our two female artists. On my ancillary task I made one of the artists look a litter nicer than the other as she is meant to be the sweet one and then the other a bit more mean as she is more bitter, this leads into the name of our artist which is Bittersweet.

The combination between the two reaches out to garage fans and would make them want to investigate that artist more, by using urban areas and houses in our music video it made it easier for the audience to relate and aspire to be like them in their future, The use of the explosion on my digipak and poster was to show that this artist is bursting on to the scene, and is new and fresh and will blow peoples minds.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From my audience feedback I learnt a lot, it influenced me to change the fonts on the back of my digipak numerous times so that they fit in with the genre, taking into consideration all the thoughts and opinions on what was going well and what could of been improved i edited in a pattern of squares which was meant to look like a stereo equalizer.

Before and After

From my audience feedback given, i was told that the font used on the front cover for my artists name did not stand out enough and blended into the background, this caused the audience to question whether it was the album name or the artist, taking into

consideration what had been said i decided to make it a lot bolder by adding a bevel and then giving it texture to make it look less bland.

Before:

After:

For my music video, the audience enjoyed a certain line of effects which i applied to each shot and it made the blacks and whites stand out more to make it look more professional and bold, one of the things that the audience did not like in my music video was the many random clips at the beginning and the order in which they were placed, after the feedback given on which should of gone where we then re arranged it and cut them on the beat so it fit in the conventions of a music video more.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The main thing I used for research and planning was the internet, websites such as allalbumcovers.com, dafont.com, blogger.com and wikipedia.org, all these websites helped me plan what i wanted to do when constructing my work as well as the research intothe genre needed to know what qualities my piece of work would need.

I used a digital camera when taking the pictures for my ancillary task and for when taking shots of my group working together, It was a main accessory to creating my ancillary task and made it possible to take photos uses like the one on the middle cover:

The construction of my work i used a lot more media technologies like the green screen, tripods , video cameras, final cut editing software and photoshop.
when making my music video it was a lot different to what we had done in the past as we were using different technologies, we experimented with the green screen and what effects we could make to use in our music video until we were finally happy with the outcome, on mydigipak and poster i used digital cameras to take pictures of my artists and different props which i could then edit in photoshop and include in my ancillary task, Before creating my final i had experimented in photoshop using different filters, effects and tools which were available, I did not use any specific effects on my work however i adjusted hue and saturation a lot to make different tones the way i wanted, i cropped images so they could individually moved around and then placed things where i wanted.

For my ancillary task the main thing i used was photoshop, i had

used photoshop in the past but there is always new things to learn, experimenting using different features was essential to my work as many final things did were mistakes which turnt out well, for my main background explosion, it was original an orange colour which i then used the hue and saturation to change green to fit my genre colour scheme.