The student created a music video, digipak, and website based on pop and rap artists Ariana Grande, Lil Wayne, and Nicki Minaj. Their music video featured Grande's song "Let Me Love You" and they drew inspiration from her album covers and website design. They also looked to Minaj's website layout and color palette. Lil Wayne inspired the initial digipak cover idea. Throughout their projects, the student aimed for consistency in theme and colors linked to the artists. Social media was also recognized as important for artists to connect with fans.

1. Evaluation Question 2
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

2. Me and Kaitlin created a music video, 6 panel digipak and a website all based around the theme of
pop and rap. Our inspiration was Ariana Grande, Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj. These 3 artists work
very well together because they seem to feature in a lot of each other's songs. The reason we used
them as inspiration is because they are probably 3 of the most well known artists that work within
that genre. Songs they have worked on are ones such as ‘Let Me Love You’ by Ariana Grande ft Lil
Wayne, ‘Side To Side’ by Ariana Grande ft Nicki Minaj, ‘High School’ by Nicki MInaj ft Lil Wayne.

3. Ariana Grande
Ariana was the main inspiration that we used for our three products, using what she has created
gave us lots of ideas of how we can create our products in a similar sort of way. Her album cover
of her most recent album ‘ Dangerous Woman’ will be the album i will concentrate on the most but we
also took some inspiration from the album ‘Yours Truly’. The use of black and white between the two
album covers gave us some inspiration to edit ours in a similar way. The album cover image and the
main image on the website are very similar, they are both very consistent and give the artist a
very professional feel. The website and digipack link very well with each other. Her website
doesn’t use much colour and the colours that have been used are mainly black, white and pink and
they are consistent through the album covers too. We used her as our main inspiration because our
music video was created using her song ‘Let Me Love You’ but we also used other artists as
inspiration too. The front cover of our digipak is edited in black and white with a splash of
bright yellow from the bunny ears Kaitlin is wearing. This adds effect because it adds a feel of
excitement to the image and catches the audience’s eyes rather than the image just being in plain
black and white. Our website uses the same 3 colours throughout which are light pink, white and
grey. However, we haven’t used pink on our digipack apart from in some of the images used inside
of the digipak. So in this case our font isn’t consistent between the two products.

4. Nicki Minaj
We did do some research using Nicki Minaj as inspiration and we found some good ideas. Looking
mainly at her website and we found some inspiration from the layout she uses and the colour
pallette and that is stated in some of the research I carried out, looking in more detail at what
her website includes and why. Things such as the different sections to her website and the
interactive features that have been included. The colours that have been used were quite
inspirational when researching for ideas for our website because we looked at a similar colour
palette because of the genre of pop being the main genre, the layout of the website is easy to
understand and navigate your way round. The way in which a banner has been added across the top
which slides across providing the audience with other information to do with the artist. The
majority of Nicki Minaj’s album covers are mainly based around the colour pink and this links well
with the name of her website which is ‘My Pink Friday’. Some of her albums also include the word
‘pink’ in the title such as ‘the pinkprint’, ‘pink friday’, ‘pink friday: roman reload’ etc. This
shows consistency throughout her products and that she is also well known for being linked with the
colour pink. We wanted to show a consistent colour palette throughout our different products and
that is obvious in our website and digipak. We also tried to incorporate this using different sorts
of mise en scene in the music video such as using glitter on the lips, using a pink filter on some
of the shots and using different items of clothing.

5. Lil Wayne
Lil Wayne was firstly our main inspiration when coming to thinking of ideas for our digipak front
cover. We researched different album covers that he had created and found some ones that gave us
inspiration to start with. The idea that he used baby photos as his album covers made us think that
we could do something similar with ours. We researched different ways in which we could take his
work and make it our own such as editing tattoos onto the face of the baby using an online website.
This fits well with the genre of rap and was going to be easy to do but also effective. However, we
changed the idea completely and no longer went ahead with that idea. However, Lil Wayne still
showed us some inspiration when creating the music video because of the lyrics towards the end of
the song in which it becomes a rap scene. When filming that particular sequence we thought
carefully of the location which was a graffiti covered wall which was located on top of a bridge.
Graffiti is stereotypically associated with rap because of artists such as Lil Wayne and the
locations they use. The clothing worn was quite significant when portraying a certain image and
stereotype of rap. Patryk was wearing a tracksuit which is also another typical item of clothing
linked with that certain genre of music.

6. Linking with our work
When creating our 3 products we wanted a consistent theme that was carried through all 3 of the
products. The main inspiration was taken from Ariana Grande and the way her products were made,
this was because she is a very well known pop star, very professional and also the song we re-
created the music video for was sang by her. A lot of our music video research was based around her
as an artist and her most popular music videos. Looking at the main ones there was a few things in
common which was the choice of clothing used, she appeared to be very sexualised in the majority of
her videos but because we are A level media students we had to think carefully about the clothing
we dressed our singer in. Throughout her videos there were a lot of bright colours being used such
as pinks and yellows. We tried to incorporate some of these bright colours into our work using
filters over the camera lens, using brightly coloured makeup and adding brightly coloured props
such as the golden umbrella. For our website we mainly looked at Nicki Minaj because her layout was
different but also based around the idea of both pop and rap because she fits with both genres. Her
website is very much so based around the pop genre but she is also very known for being a big part
of the rap genre as a lot of her songs are featuring with her rapping. We went for a very simple
but effective layout when creating our website because it would be much easier for the audience to
associate themselves with the artist.

7. Social Media
Social media plays a big part in music now a days. It is probably the most common way artists now
share things with their fans. Facebook is definitely the main online social media site in which
artists interact with their fans. Artists have their own pages in which a member of their team will
run for them. Everything that gets uploaded onto this page will effect some of the fans in one way
or another. It is a very easy to way to get one thing out to a massive group of people all at once.
Fans can share this information with their own friends by linking or sharing certain posts which
means that fan bases for artists are always growing. We created social media sites for our artist
which included Facebook, instagram and twitter. Instagram and twitter are also two extremely common
social media sites used by any artist who wants to share things with their fan base. On Ariana
Grande’s facebook page there is a section called ‘featured for you’ and that includes a box that
says ‘like this page to stay up to date’ which is automatically encouraging people to like the page
and be informed with whatever updates are added to that page to do with Ariana. This is
automatically expanding the fan base. Social media is a very important way in which artists of all
genres can have a special connection with the fans. If fans are getting updated regularly it is
going to make them want to pay more attention of what is happening.