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

Oliver Rossetti

Candidate No. 6164

Our music video genre is predominately spectacle and narrative based, telling the story of how a woman leaves her boyfriend and finds someone else while her boyfriend attempts to persuade her to "come back around". Then in addition to this we show the rock side of the artist through the spectacle effects that are used throughout the music video.

We decided as a group that our album name should reflect that of the genre and how the man experiences a journey through a relationship and its goes ups and downs. We the influence of our original artist who made the song - Get Set Radio; we came up with the album title name of "The New Adventures of..." reflecting that of the adventure the man (the artist) travels upon through life.

The idea that we have soft rock genre of song, we wanted to find an advert that best related to this genre. We looked at several magazines and then I found the advert of Linkin Park's - 'A Thousand Suns' on the first inside page of the new Q Magazine. This gave me the idea for the magazine advert of positioning and how it is particularly eye-catching with a distorted picture in the middle and bold titles at the top and bottom of the magazine page.

I then continued through the magazine and found a perfect advert where the artist is known for his songs based on stories such as "Stay the Night" and "You're Beautiful". The advert for James Blunt interestingly was split up into two and one half was a picture of the artist himself but torn up into strips while the other half was the album cover (as seen on the right). I found you could immediately tell that this album was narrative based as the torn strips show how he, himself, has caused the "Some Kind of Trouble" I suggested the strips would be a great touch to our already developing magazine advert as the picture could be of our artist looking out upon a sunset and the horizon - having connotations of remembrance, love and ultimately, the telling of a story behind it.

Now you may have noticed I have not talked much about the album cover in relation to our music video or the magazine advert. We paired off to tackle the creation of the two ancillary products to make the most efficient use of our time but always keeping in communication about progress and ideas through regular meetings every couple of days - making sure we kept on the same style for our marketing aspects of the music video. Lucy and I decided together that we did not want to fully link our magazine advert to the album **, as we felt the consumer would be better caught by having more a bold complex picture encrypted with clues to the album which would be different to the album cover as the consumer would first wonder what the brightly coloured picture is trying to advertise before seeing the smaller shot of the album cover below with text beside saying that its available to download and will be sold at HMV Stores on release date.

As our album is called "The New Adventures of...", we decided to focus in on the "Adventure" part while keeping in mind the genre of our music video to create our album cover. The first connotations of "Adventure" that we all came up with are as seen below:

     

Picture: The yellow highlighted designs were my first suggestions
towards the connotations of "Adventure". The remaining are designs made by my group.
The blue highlighted design was the final album cover design that we came to by collating our ideas.

After reaching our final design, I suggested that we make the actual map so that it looked naturalistic but then we super-impose the artist's name, "Get Set Radio", and the album title, "The New Adventures of..." as I felt we wanted the artist and album name to stand out from the image as I had seen in analysing album covers at HMV. On top of this, it also made it far easier to create as Tom did not have to spend a lot of time drawing and perfecting the font style. In terms of font style we chose to use "Andre SF" as the style, we felt, related to our adventure theme that we were focusing on and we wanted to make this title stand out and what better way than through the font.

I feel that both our album cover and our magazine advert for the album have been successful, combining with our music video with the theme of "adventure" as the predominate theme running through all three, mainly linking the narrative style of the video and the album name.

Research in the shops!

Today we set off to look at album covers in their entirety, looking at the cover of CD's and Music DVD's - seeing what succeeded in grabbing our attention on the shelves and what failed in attracting browsing customers.

We went into our nearest HMV Store and browsed the CD shelves, letting our eyes travel to see what CD's stood out to us. One particular CD that we all agreed attracted us to it was 'Calvin Harris - I Created Disco'. This attracted us as the main colour was bright yellow with a picture of him on the front with techno style, shiny glasses. Then the font used for the title was spaced out and vertical on both sides - making it easy to read from a distence. Without knowing Calvin Harris as such, you can instantly tell that he was a techno artist, thus this shows that to attract customers you need to show your genre through the album cover and where possible, make it brightly coloured.

We then looked at other CD's and music DVD's, below are pictures of certain ones that stood out to us:

Kaiser Chief's Album - Yours Truly, Angry Mob.

Kaiser Chiefs
'Yours Truly, Angry Mob'

'Yours Truly, Angry Mob' is a very well known album of the Kaiser Chiefs. The font they use for their name is bold and in capital letters, much like their other album covers. However the title of the album is done in a curly, old-fashioned font saying 'Yours Truly', suggesting the songs are based around a story of letters to, possibly, a lover who then goes off and has an affair with another person - 'Angry Mob'.

The background is very plain with only the band members at the bottom in black and white, all alluding the idea of a newspaper article and that they are a band who have been established for a while. There is also one of them winking which tones down the seriousness of the facial expressions and in a sense it is their way of trying to entice you to buy their album.

Take That's Album - Nobody Else

Take That

'Nobody Else'

The cover itself is completely different to what they normally do on their album cover's. The cover for this album, has a boarder representing a picture frame, with a golden boarder, with a gold plaque at the bottom stating the album's titles "Nobody Else" as if it was the name of the picture, with the band name, "Take That" located at the top of the frame. 

The picture in the frame is of the 5 band members, Robbie, Mark, Gary, Jason and Howard as plastic dolls,  surrounded by iconic Christmas toys. This parallels the iconic "The Beatles" album cover of "Sergent Peppers lonely heart club". 

I personally prefer this album cover to their other album, of just them standing there posing for the camera. This one has more colour, and more things to look at. It would also draw the attention of people when being displayed because of the colours.

The Killer's Album - Sam's Town

The Killers
'Sam's Town'

The album cover for this album included their motif font on a white background. This background also had several 'messy-looking' black splattered paint, as you can see below.


Moreover, an unknown lady was standing on the right side of the title of the band and of the album title.  This lady had a two-piece bikini on, which we believe would attract more of a male audience. On the other side of the title, on the floor, a sitting ram aimlessly looks away from the camera.  This ram could symbolise  the mountainous and isolated setting of fictional 'Sam's Town'. 


This album cover is mainly monochrome, with the exception of the old-school font of the album cover name which is red. Red usually represents passion, love and danger; three possible characteristics of this imaginary town.

Album Cover Research

Pink Floyd
'Dark Side of the Moon'

The Album cover features a prism in which a single ray of light is being separated into all the colours. This is a confusing image as it does not explain the type of music that it is be represented. It is also confusing as to whether it is a solo artist or a band. The colours that come out can be perceived as being the new songs or new style coming out of the old style/music of the time.

There is no text and is mainly black apart from the the white triangle (spectrum) and the light that comes out.