Evaluation- Question 2

How affective is your combination of your main product and ancillary texts?


Throughout our creation of the music video and the ancillary products we tried to overlap and intertwine the products. For example, throughout the project our actor Roger, representing the Weeknd, is dressed in the same clothing, this is to put emphasis on him being the main character. This is visible in the music video as well as the images included in the digipak and advert.

We feel that our products link very closely together as we used the same theme and style throughout, the style predominately adopted from the original artist with a few adjustments to make it idiosyncratic to our selves. For example we followed the three tone colour scheme, but instead we used vibrant colours. This is visible in the video as we used black and white effects as well as an effect called "bleach bypass" which actually darkens the lighting giving a chiaroscuro effect but it also enhances the colours. This is then visible in the digipak as we used dark colours such as black and garnet of which is then juxtaposed by the strong vibrant colours in the images such as the girls lipstick for example.

When designing our products we adopted the Weeknd's style by following the conventions found in his album artwork, imagery and posters. We tried to capture the techniques he used to give our own work a professional look.

The advert and digipak are very closely linked, the music video is probably slightly different in techniques used as we tried to create an "enigmatic" appearance anchoring the lyrics to the video. The song deals with taboo ideologies such as drug abuse so we used dark lighting and sometimes abstract imagery to represent this. On the other hand, in the imagery of our digipak and advert, we wanted the images to be very clear so that our target audience, the teenage demographic could clearly identify who the artist was. We tried to imply the same layout throughout also so that our target audience would also identify the artist through the way.

The images on the poster and digipak include very vibrant colours with medium, close up, and extreme closeups to give different effects and representations to our work. The vibrant colours opposes typical conventions of the Weeknd. We also insisted an escapist approach by showing our actors blowing out smoke representing youth, drug abuse and the high life.

We decided to try and adapt our work to predominately appeal to the teenage demographic by including the mode of the internet into the advert. We believe that stereotypically, youths will be more technologically literate and therefore we included things such as a website, twitter and a scanning barcode for smart phones. This then represents the technological advancement of web 2.0 and influencing social interaction.

 Example of chiaroscuro lighting that we tried to adopt in our music video.

Example of the type of imagery and the layout that we tried to adopt in our digipak and poster.

Everything we have done in our music video, digipak and advert/poster was very carefully chosen to target a specific minority or represent something in a certain way. We tried to interlink them as much as we could without creating the same product across the border.