EVALUATION: Question 2

Question 2:
How effective is the combination of your main product (video) and ancillary texts (digipak and advertisement)?

I think that there are clear visual links between my music video and my ancillary products. The most significant element of visual synergy is the costume, as the performers wore black and white clothes in both the video and the photos for the ancillary products. We wore different outfits for these two separate products, but the we kept the style of the costume to monochrome. We decided to wear different clothes for the photo shoot as there was no costume change in the video, which was not necessarily a problem, but we wanted a little variety to help us establish our artist image.

Here is a slideshow of costumes we have used:

costumes - slideshows

Along with our clothes, we had specific styles of jewellery on during the video and the ancillary work. We used the gold rings in the video and a lot of other gold accessories. In the ancillary photo shoot, however, we mixed some jewellery that was present in the video with a few other accessories, which were a bit more colourful. This helped us make the transition between the style used in the 'It Ain't Easy' video and the ancillary products, which would be promotional material for not only that song, but a whole album.

In the ancillary photo shoot, while we kept a few gold elements, linking back to the video, we added a few touches of red/purple, which would link to the colours we used in the ancillary.

 Our make-up style was similar in the ancillary products and the music video - same colours for lipstick and eye make-up.


I made sure that the photos I used on the cover of the digipak were clearly showing our image, as the audience would recognize the artists' faces, so these need to be present on the debut album of our group.

The photos of the performers are clear and they are recognisable

As we didn't use a lot of colours in the music video, neither within our costumes nor in the location, I decided to keep the digipak in the same style, although the colours i used for it were different. This is a conventional approach to digipaks, not using more than two or three colours, but this feature did fit in with the style of our music video. I have seen some album covers from girl groups where a lot of colours are used, so the genre of our group would have allowed a bit of colour variety without completely breaking the convention. However, I thought that keeping it at only a few different colours would be better and it would make a better link to our image.

On Stooshe's Waterfalls cover, there are a lot of colours - their outfits are not colour-coordinated. This is acceptable for a girl group, as the pop genre is often represented through colour variety. However, it's rare to see this much colour on a cover.