Evaluation Question 2: How effective was the combination of your main product and ancillary task?

For our Media Product to be a success and something that we could market, we had to make sure that our music video and ancillary task related to each other and as a whole created a strong product.

After establishing audience needs in terms of genre, we created a music video that fit into the category of heavy rock. We illustrated this through the 4 micro features, mise-en-scene, and cinematography, sound and editing. Through the mise-en-scene we used costume to relate to our target audience. Clothing is a big part of any genre; a genre connotes a certain style so we used clothing and colour to meet a big audience need, we did this by using a lot of dark colours on the clothing including leather jackets, hoodies and skinny jeans.

Themes that ran through the music video were of rebelliousness, anarchy and being against society. We didn’t want to insult our audience by putting across the message that these themes were wrong, we were supporting them in many ways by showing our protagonist doing these things in the first place. We didn’t end the video with a message of ‘Obey by the rules’, we ended it with the audience deciding what happens next. Ricky clearly has his independence in the video as he walks off into the sunset alone, and our target audience won’t take from the video that they should rebel; it’s more a message about independence which is what the audience of this genre wants.

As the message of our video connoted being against the paradigm that is society, we used breaking the law as a constant theme throughout our video, and so we used it on our ancillary task.

We didn’t want to take just a still image from the video for our digipack and magazine advert, we took a picture that wasn’t related to our video but wasn’t in it. We took pictures of our protagonist doing graffiti which is against the law, so this relates to shoplifting, which was in our video. For the Digipack we used the picture of Ricky doing graffiti as the front cover and we edited it so that he was writing the band name and song title. The magazine cover was a close up of the spray can from a different angle with the information this time printed on the can. At the bottom of each part of the digipack is the record company ‘RoadRunner Records’. We thought this was an appropriate institution as all of the bands on the label are of a alternative/metal/rock genre and the audience of the bands on the label already fall under our target audience as well. The combination of our video and ancillary task would appeal to ‘RoadRunner’ because of the constant themes throughout both that are relevant to each other and to the genre. Overall the combination of our Music video and ancillary task was very effective down to the overall theme running through both.