Evaluation Q1 - Final Draft

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

My partner Rhiannon and I created a director's commentary of our music video to discuss the ways in which our video did this:

Evaluation Q2 - Final Draft

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


Transcript:

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

The brief was to create a promotional package for an artist’s album release. This includes a music promo video, a digipak, and a magazine advertisement. To create a successful promotional package, synergy should be present across all three products. Synergy refers to the interaction and similarities between two products to give a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. Within this brief, the synergy ties together the video, digipak and advert, to sell them as one product. My partner and I prioritised synergy when creating our promotional package to ensure it was successful.

Throughout my partner and I’s research, we discovered that the advert and digipak of a promotional package usually have more synergy than the promotional video. This could be common iconography and illustrations across the products, colour themes or images. For example, Ed Sheeran’s use of mathematical symbols across his advertisements effectively promotes his brand and creates synergy across his products.

We adhered to this convention by creating synergy between our digipak and advert. The most obvious link between the two was the photograph used, both featuring a light in the same location. This unique way of presenting text was highly effective when presented to members of our target audience, who responded with feedback such as ‘I would buy this album’. 

We also used the same font for the words ‘the heydaze’. This was a scratchy font that represents the conventions of the indie genre. Throughout our RMA research, we found that indie promotional packages typically use dark grungy themes. We chose this scratchy font to adhere to this convention. As the name of the band, these words were important to highlight to viewers. We used this font, with the words in a specific layout, to create almost a ‘logo’ that would provide synergy across the products.

The combination of the ancillary tasks and the music promo video is important as together they create a whole promotional package that is sold as one product. Therefore we created synergy between the main and ancillary tasks through creating similarities in the products. Specifically, the video opens with a shot of a tunnel and the words ‘the heydaze’ writing themselves across the screen. For this we used the same location as the photograph in the ancillary tasks, and the same scratchy font. Using this as the opening of the video created almost an introduction to the music video that solidifies it as being part of  the promotional package. 

Overall the combination of our main and ancillary texts worked well together to promote the album. We incorporated synergy and links between the music promo, digipak and advert to ensure the worked together as one promotional package.

Evaluation Q3 - Final Draft

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the entire process from researching and planning, to production of our media products, we used a focus group to gain insight from our target audience. Every initial idea and draft was presented to a small group of people, who gave us their thoughts on it. We asked them for positive feedback, so we knew what our target audience would think, and improvements, to ensure the products were tailored exactly how the audience would like them.

I created this video using PowToon to show what I have learnt. (You may need to pause on each screen to read the text).


We presented our final promotional package to our focus group, as well as other members of our target audience and our music video actors, to gain a range of opinions and thoughts on it. 

Music Promo Video
I asked these people four questions about the music promo video and filmed their responses:

1. What type of audience and what age range do you think this music video is targeting?
2. Is there anything that could be improved in the overall video?
3. Would you watch this video again? Why?
4. What did you think about the balance between the performance and narrative parts of the video?

Ancillary Tasks

I asked the same people some questions about the ancillary tasks and wrote down their responses:

1. Do you think the ancillaries relate to the music video?
2. How successful are they in persuading you to buy the product?
3. Would you say there is brand loyalty/continuity throughout the three products?
4. What aspects of the ancillaries work best?

1. Do you think the ancillaries relate to the music video?

2. How successful are they in persuading you to buy the product?

3. Would you say there is brand loyalty/continuity throughout the three products?

4. What aspects of the ancillaries work best?

Evaluation Q4 - Final Draft

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