The student created a music video, magazine advertisement, and Digipak for their media coursework focusing on the musician Secondhand Serenade. They established common themes of love, relationships, and journeys to maintain consistency across all three products. For the magazine ad and Digipak, they portrayed these themes using landscape images and props like candles representing passion. Fonts, colors, and other design elements were kept uniform between the ancillary tasks to clearly link them together and reinforce the unified house style. Through coordinated themes, visuals, and design features across all tasks, the student effectively promoted the music video through complementary ancillary products.

1. How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Tasks?
For my A2 Media coursework, I had chosen a task to do with a partner and it consisted of a main task
as well as two ancillary tasks. The main task that we had to create was a music video and the
ancillary tasks were to create a magazine advertisement and a Digipak.
The research and planning stage was crucial for all three tasks but this was the stage where we could
look and design deeper into the magazine advertisement and the Digipak. This was an extremely
important stage since the two ancillary tasks would be used to promote and sell the music video
itself. Because of this, we designed and created each of the products using the same theme and
house style, which in turn helped to make all three products look professional.
All three tasks had one initial thing in common and that is the musician Secondhand Serenade. Me
and my partner thought this was the best starting point to look at so once we had researched into
the artist, we had come up with themes that could be used in all three so that when people looked
that them altogether, a clear link could be established. With all three products linking to each other,
this meant that if they were to be released to the public, there would be a high chance that the sales
would be successful because of the quality and consistency in the design. The themes that we chose
to use were to do with love, relationships and journeys since most of his songs are based around
them topics. Portraying these was easiest in the music video because the narrative involved an
emotional relationship and travelling.
When it came to the Digipak, we wanted to be slightly more creative and in some ways had to since
our questionnaire’s target market desired a Digipak with props. We spent time thinking about what
props could signify love and emotional journeys as well as to what kind of things would give off a
calm atmosphere which would emphasize the main themes. We found that the use of candles and
lights were effective to use because they represented the sparks and passion within relationships.
This tied in well with the use of the globe as it also represents the journeys that emotions can take
you on but also infers that there is no geographical restriction to the people in the relationship, also
inferring that these emotions are a universal thing.
When it came to the inside of the Digipak, we used the landscape image from magazine
advertisement so that there was once again a subtle hint and link between the two products. This
may not be something that individuals pick up clearly but it was planned to be a subliminal action so
that when people look at the Digipak, they would know that they have seen it somewhere.
In our magazine advertisement, we kept the vintage theme as the Digipak did and the idea of
romance and journeys still remained as we wanted the themes to be strongly represented
throughout all three products. The picture taken for the magazine advertisement is of two people
looking down a long winding road. The bend in the road could be seen to be going somewhere but
that is up to the audience to decide as we cannot see anything in the image. The music video and the
Digipak showed stronger themes of love so the use of the road in the advertisement made the
theme of travel more prominent and kept all themes even.
Finally to ensure that our two ancillary tasks linked together well, we made sure that the same
colour schemes were used in the editing process as well as using the same font, font sizes and
colouring. This also made the house style more consistent, therefore forming a successful set of
products especially when combined with the main task of the music video.