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

Our ancillary tasks are to produce a website homepage and a digipak to accompany our music video. We chose these as they are two tasks we feel compliment each other well, we feel we can incorporate the music video in to the digipak and promote both of this on the website. Both of these would be used to advertise the artist in a real life situation, in today’s society there is a great need for online presence that anyone can access and look at for information, from a marketing point of view both of the tasks create an identity that will become recognisable from a fan and consumers point of view. We chose a website over a magazine advert as we wanted to develop new skills and broaden our view on the media world. To make a website we used a programme called iWeb, this is a programme that none of us had much experience in but were keen to learn about. Another factor influencing our choice of tasks was that we wanted to use photography and have a range of images to use with in our tasks. From choosing the digipak we were then able to start planning some artistic shots to help promote and make the album stand out. We decided that our website would include promotional shots of our artist so we had to organize a photo shoot. Through this we developed a set of skills using a stills camera, lighting and Photoshop software. Overall, our choices of practical tasks worked well together and enabled us as a group to try out different media techniques.
Before we started planning our digipak we researched into what precisely a digipak was, what was their purpose and how they were laid out. Through our research we discovered a Digipak is a patented style of compact disk or DVD packaging. Digipaks can have as many panels as you wish, we decided upon a 6 panel version as we like the look of this style. The use of booklets within a digipak is not essential so we decided this is something that we would not include. We will however include the main conventions that we have discovered a Digipak includes, these are:
• Cover Image
• Back Cover Image
• Song Titles
• Bonus Feature
• Colour Scheme
• Other Images
Before starting the production of the website task we did research into the websites of the main artists that we had chosen within a similar genre to that of our artist. From my blog you can see images of the websites that we chose to focus on:
• Jason Mraz
• David Grey
• Jose Gonzalez
We chose these artists as our main research tasks as they were the ones that had different features within the website. The main conventions that we found were:
• Links
• Upcoming Dates
• Media
• Easy to navigate
Within the ancillary task our main focus was to link the ancillary tasks with our main production task. We each task was to advertise in a different way yet had to compliment each other. We used the same background for the website as the front cover for the digipak to use this as a main image for our artist like a logo/icon, considering this is his debut album we had to create a recognisable feature/style associated with him. We chose a colour scheme of black and white with the only colour used being teal for the text. We chose this colour scheme as it can appeal to both sexes of our target audience. By creating continuity through colour schemes of our ancillary tasks and the main product we were able to create a real image as if this artist was actually being promoted. We wanted the Digipak to show an insight into the artist and promote his music. To do this we used pictures of Josh, taken at our photo shoot, to help publicise him. Also we included the music video as a bonus feature on the album. This would not only help the album sell, but would also give the buyer their own copy of the video. This linked with the website where we felt we needed to put the latest news and keep audience and fans up to date with the latest information of our artist, we did this using a recent news update and twitter blog, this also made the website seem personal to the artist. A biography about Josh at the beginning gave the reader background information that they wouldn't be able to get from any of the other tasks. Finally, our music video had the aim of portraying the inner feelings of the artist not only through the lyrics but through the action and performance. By using different angles in the performance element of the video the audience are able to see different sides to Josh, also by having him ending the video in shot we can see as a viewer the journey through emotions he has taken through the song, starting off quite happy, but the eventually feeling reminiscent and slightly depressed.
As a group we feel that we did not focus on the ancillary as much as we could of as we focused mainly upon the Video. This was because we viewed the video as more important during the completing stages.