The student created a music video, album, and advertisement for an alternative rock band that all shared a consistent dark purple color theme to effectively market the band's style. While the album cover was brighter than the video to stand out on store shelves, both used a purple tone and distorted imagery to match the genre. The advertisement also featured the band against a purple backdrop, cohesively tying the ancillary texts to the video and communicating the intended dark style and theme.

1. G324 Media Studies – Evaluation
2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
During the creation of our media products, finding a suitable theme was very important to us.
We understood that making all different aspects of our production fit together perfectly was
absolutely vital to its effectiveness and its appeal.
Right at the start, we decided to have a colour theme to our products. The genre of our music
video is classed as ‘Alternative Rock’ or ‘Emo’ and so to fit with this theme we tried to keep
everything very dark. The colour purple was decided on as it seemed to fit everything and
made everything dark like we wanted. The image to the
left is a very early design for our album’s disk cover. Even
though the final design for our disk would be different,
you can see that the purple colour theme was a vital focus
point from the start.
Getting everything to fit together is very important for the
marketing success of a product. If the marketing for a
music album consists of posters and Television
advertisements filled with bright colours and smiley faces,
people who like bright and happy music will be attracted
to buy the album. If those kinds of people went and bought
the album, they would be disappointed at how the music
in the album does not fit with the way it was advertised at all. The band would be alienating
its true target audience and would attract bad reviews.
The images above show the final design for the cover of our album (Left) and a screenshot of
our final music video (Right) and it can be seen that a theme was obviously used. Even though
the album cover is visibly brighter than the music video, it is still pretty dark and a purple
colour theme was used for both. They both also have slightly distorted images. The album
cover is covered in what looks like a coffee-stain to make it look dirty and the music video is
fuzzy and filled with scratches to make it look like it is coming from an old, unclean film reel.

2. The image to the left is the final design for our CD. As you can
see, it still follows the purple theme though it is a lot brighter
than before, almost crawling into pink territory. The coffee
stain overlay was changed to white and a bright yellow colour
was applied to the centre of the album, slowly changing to red
and then merging with the purple of the rest of the album.
We made the choice to make the disk and album cover
brighter than the music video itself to help make it stand out
among other albums. In a music shop, hundreds of albums are
often lined up next to each other for people to easily pick up
and buy. If our album is to compete with others, it must stand out, it must be able to catch the
eye of potential buyers. A dark album will more likely blend into the background than stand
out. Even though the album is brighter than the music video, people who look at the album
will still know what they are getting. What the album offers is still pretty obvious due to the
imagery used on the front cover (The dirty, bloody look) and the rear cover (The heavily
distorted image of the band, again with the dirty look and the names of the songs make it
pretty obvious)
As well as the album and the video, the advertisement
was also an important part of our project. Just as with
the other two pieces of work, it was extremely
important to make the advertisement fit the overall
theme. The image to the left is the final version of our
advertisement. As you can see, it is similar in design to
our album. The background is mostly purple with
some dirty-looking textures and some red blood
dripping from the very top of the advertisement and
the image of the band in the centre. The purple colour
and the image of the band really helps the
advertisement to fit in with our video and album.
Overall, getting all our products to fit together was
very important to us and so we think that we managed
to pull it off excellently. Everything we have done has a
theme (Purple, dirty) and are all accompanied with
images of the band. The combination of our ancillary
texts is very effective.