Ancillary Text Research

For the music video brief, we are to make two ancillary texts from a choice of three:

• A website homepage for the band
• A cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package)
• A magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package)

I decided to do a cover for a digipak and a magazine advertisement, and started research with simple Google searches into digipaks, film posters and music video posters. This brought up a variety of material that could be used for references, and was helpful to get a general idea for the typical conventions of these products from first impressions.

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Digipaks

Film Posters 

Music Video Posters

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The majority of music video posters were made for the pop music genre, however, they were not legitimate advertisements but were labelled as 'fan made'. They're still very helpful references though into how a magazine advertisement should look. I found that any google searches that contained the word 'advertisement' along with 'music', 'album' or 'magazine' brought up a lot of A-Level media work from past students, which could also be helpful in my own research.

Conventions Analysis 

Below are three PowerPoint presentation slides showing detailled research into album/film posters/advertisements. Since I'll be advertising a music video, looking into a variety of media advertising provided a wide scope of ideas for my own product.
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Above is an analysis conducted on an advertisement for Madonna's 'Celebration' album. I chose this poster because of the use of bold, bright colour and link to my own artist/product due to the genre (electronic). I liked the unusual edit of the main image best, and thought that there were aspects of this I could carry over to my own ancillary texts as they could work well with the overall aesthetic, such as the blending of other images and bright colour contrast.

The second poster/advertisement which I analysed was for an artist by Jessie J. Although the genre isn't quite the same as my chosen genre, it's still variably similar and there are conventions of this genre which closely tie in to electronic house music. It gave me more ideas into potential layouts, colour schemes and makeup/costume elements.

The final magazine advertisement/poster which I analysed was one of a Lana Del Rey album. Although the genre is the least similar out of the three analysed media to my chosen genre (Lana Del Rey is described as a baroque/indie pop artist), the photograph and general style of the advert I thought was quite unique interesting and so I wanted to analyse it. The main image was a particular point of interest, as it's a simple head-and-shoulders photograph that still manages to catch the audience's attention, and so this is something I could look at recreating in my own ancillary text.

Fonts

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An important feature of any digipak, advertisement or poster is the text written on it as it tells the audience vital information about the product you are selling. For this reason, use of font can make a huge difference with your product. 

Last year, I used DaFont for all my music magazine fonts. It has a huge variety that are easy to download, and a handy feature to be able to test the fonts with your own words before downloading them. I used this feature to write the title of the album 'Ghosts' and screenshotted a number of fonts and presented them with their names below. Keeping a track of their names was helpful as it made it easy to go back and find them.

I collected a variety of fonts, including ones which didn't fit with the conventions of my chosen genre (Jerantet 1977 and Kickstop, for example) because I wanted to compare a number of different styles of fonts before choosing ones to use.

Vanadine and Xtreem are two fonts that I used on my music magazine cover last year, and since I'm using the same artist, using them again would create a consistent style that would make the artist recognisable as observed in the above ancillary text research.

Digipak