RELATING THE QUESTION TO OUR ANCILLARY TASKS

STEFANO TOWELL

The question of does media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products relates to our ancillary tasks too as it goes alongside our pop promo. When creating our digipak, we performed a lot of research beforehand to achieve a believable yet unique CD cover and poster. Items such as the background, text and colour are all important factors to consider when creating a digipak and poster.

An example of how we challenged the convention is the fact we used a spread of 5 pages instead of the conventional even number of slides, usually in the range of 4-8. We also named the album after the band instead of something completely separate, some well known bands including Paramore and The 1975 have done this. We have used 2 fonts in our digipak which gives a common theme, many artists use between 2-4, any more and the idea starts to drain. We used one key font like many artists to set that theme, with other fonts being used on separate pages. The colour of our digipak also remains consistent. Being black and white, there isn't much colour however we keep it throughout the digipak which is another convention we didn't stray from. We want to keep a solid structure and a sense of familiarity instead of the viewer wandering why there is a different font or colour on every page.

Digipak

Our digipak was followed the common convention of having one disk rather than two which is less common. Albums that have two disks usually release an album with a montage of different songs or ‘The greatest hits’ edition. The last convention we used was the record label company and barcode on the back page of the digipak. This is almost an essential convention as every digipak would have a reference to the record company that released their album as well as a barcode so it could be sold. Aspects such as a parental advisory logo were added extras just to get every little detail we could put on the front cover for a realistic and believable digipak.

With our magazine poster, we took a similar approach to the manor in which we presented it. For a start, a common convention which we have followed is the name of the band being the largest text on the poster. The fact that the album name is the same as the band make sit even more prominent. A convention which is widely seen in many music posters is a quote from a magazine or reviewer, someone with authority or power. We used widely popular magazine NME quoting ‘The most anticipated album of the year’ which would assure the audience that the album is likely to be very good. Using the same theme and colour throughout our digipak and magazine poster is also a common convention as we are sticking with the theme. On the bottom of the poster we incorporated a QR code which is a relatively new aspect on magazine posters but an essential one for advertising as viewers can scan it and it will link theme most likely to the bands website where they can find more info on the new album. Our QR code links straight to Daniel’s blog as it has extra information on the band as well as a Twitter page where more information can be found. We put the release date for the album prominently under the band logo to show when the public can purchase the album. We followed the convention as it is one of the main features on the poster and one of the most informative parts too. The last aspects to discuss are the website and production company logo at the bottom. As mentioned before, we want to achieve the most realistic outcome that can match the forms and conventions of real media products and these extra details really do up the game as the website is a key aspect for band for people to find extra information as well as a reference to the production company, in our case we created the company and named it ‘BCES Productions’.

Magazine poster