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

Thomas Rivet

Candidate Number: 6159

The subject matter of our music video revolves around a narrative; where a young man attempts to persuade his ex-girlfriend to change her ways. The relation between this narrative and our album cover is apparent in the way that a relationship is like an 'adventure' of its own as there are some ups and downs and grins and frowns. As mentioned earlier on in this blog, the title of our album is 'The New Adventures Of...', and from this title, we thought of a theme that would carefully align with it.  We had happily settled on the 'pirate' theme. Although no connotations of this topic have been clearly shown in our music video, many of these connotations have been illustrated in our digipak.

For instance, the front cover of our digipak [located on the right]includes a close-up of a hand-made but digitally edited treasure map.  The treasure map was physically made using a blank sheet of A4 paper. The A4 sheet had been 'tea-bagged'.  This process involves dipping tea-bags into hot water, as if making tea, to then be brushed upon the sheet to create a second-hand effect (as if the treasure map was frequently used by adventureous pirates). Finally, I riped small bits off the edge of the recently altered A4 sheet to come to the end stage of the practical process. I believed that by doing this, it would give it a much more effective finish when combined with the other parts of the album cover.

Following this practical stage, a photograph was taken of it in different position e.g. bird's eye view, side view, diagonal view etc.

Then, this photograph was edited using GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) as well as Picasa 3. The effects used included: cartoon, colourise, posterise and gaussian blur. I believe this combination of various effects generate a suitably realistic treasure map that connotates the 'pirate' theme perfectly. After saving this image as a jpeg, I begun to edit it using Picasa 3; this Windows program was primarily used to add the font in the top right-hand corner of the treasure map. It was placed at an angle to correlate with the perspective of the map, making it seem more like it was actually on it.

The inside left-hand side of our album [located on the right] includes a few photographs that have been combined together, through the use of different angles and colour schemes.  As this is our first band album cover, we had decided that it would be more beneficial to the customers if they knew what our artist/band  resembled.  A large medium close-up photograph had been used on the bottom right-hand side of this side of the album cover.  This can easily be linked in with the minimal spectacle element in our music video; therefore making it all the more effective when seen together.

Next, the inside-left cover of our album cover illustrates a compass. This compass was generated through the use of GIMP, along with the following editing of Picasa 3.  The idea of the compass came from the connotations of our treasure map on the front cover and primarily made to suit the shape and size of the CD-ROM that would be placed on it.  The North/East/South/West text was added to make sure that the One of the ways in which I thought I would make it more effective is to include contrasting colours that could also be connotated from the conventions of the usual soft rock/alternative rock band album covers - my previous market research was very helpful as it enabled to create something that would be - based on my results - appealing and adequate to the eye of the customer. Feedback was given throughout the process, therefore, any changes could be altered spontaneously to make sure the effectiveness of this combination was untouched.

And finally, the back cover of our album was another treasure map, however, this one followed the usual forms and conventions of all [or the majority] of album covers as it included the list of songs included on the CD-ROM, purely to inform the customer. And because of this, there is a greater level of effectiveness in the combination of our music video [main product] and album cover [ancillary text] as the customer will be able to relate our chosen song ['Jump'] to our created album cover with ease. Another point to consider, is the amount of editing involved, through the use of several brushes and opacity levels, the ideal effect was generated. Also, we had tried to align the angle of the text along with the curve of the piece of paper to make it seem like it belonged on the sheet of paper [without any digital editing].


Conclusively, I think that through the combination of the primary narrative subject matter of our music video along and this part of the album cover, proves to be very effective in the way that it may be of greater appeal to the customer (element of mystery and themed narrative).

The 'themed' idea generally came from the succesful band: The Gorillaz, who have got themselves a concrete theme [representating themselves as cartoon gorillas] that does seem to have a great influence on their success in the music industry.