How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

During the construction of the music video and the two ancillary tasks we had to remember to keep the continuity and the house style between our media products. I wanted an obvious link between the music video and the magazine advert and the digipak, they had to relate to each other but most importantly in my opinion, they had to have specific parts in it that our target market had already experienced in the video. Myself and the group all agreed with this and we took it in our stride to create such a thing, for example the constant use of the rose, black and white scenes, Claire's depressed dark side and also the graveyard.

To create the house style through out are tasks and also to give our product it's own brand identity, our colours, font choices and images had to be used frequently. Using the same distinctive fonts and also using helpful Photoshop techniques like desaturation and the history brush tool, gave us our own brand identity and something our target market will recognise.

I think our main product and the two ancillary tasks certainly do relate very well together, the main icon in all three is the use of the rose. Roses are very romantic and obviously associated with love and happiness, so when researching and planning what could feature in the video, we all agreed that the rose should be a key part. When I leave Claire in the video, the rose becomes me in Claire's point of view, she cradles it at first and then obviously eventually rips it to pieces.The way the rose is featured in the video it would be stupid of us to leave it out as a key feature when producing the two ancillary tasks. I think the rose works well in it's role that it plays in the video and in the advert and digipak, and there is a definite link between the two. It is definitely our brands icon and something that our target market will know when they see it.

As I mentioned earlier the use of the desaturation tool during the production of the ancillary tasks and the music video was particularly useful and we used it a lot of the time. Luckily for us Photoshop and Final Cut Express both had the option of the desaturation tool, this was extremely helpful, simply because we relying on Final Cut to have the desaturation tool so we could keep the house style, and the constant brand identity running through out our three products.

The ancillary tasks and the music video both featured a lot of black and white, the black and white obviously works well with the "The Funeral" connotations that the song holds and also the general feel that the song possesses. We created the black and white effect using the desaturation tool on Final Cut Express for the video, and Adobe Photoshop for the ancillary tasks. The black and white colour scheme were used through out the depressing scenes, mainly with Claire on her own, for example writing the suicide letter, sitting on her own and also the funeral scenes. The Chroma Key effect was also used during the production of the video, this effect enabled us to keep a part of the footage in colour, but have the rest of it's surroundings in black and white, this was very useful for myself and the group. We could show the love and the vitality of the rose but then it contrast to it was the black and white surroundings.

The desaturation effect was carried on during the production of the ancillary tasks, on the digipak three out of the four panels were in black and white. Myself and the group found it extremely important to keep the black and white house style through out our digipak, it all had to relate to the brand we were trying to create! The song being called The Funeral we wanted the graveyard to feature heavily in the video, we decided on using the graveyard as the two inside panels on the digipak. Originally we wanted a long wide shot of the graveyard, but we couldn't do it. We decided on a picture of the graveyard and also the gates that both characters walk through, we certainly feel that the two inside panels work very well with our video, especially as both pictures have been desaturated. Our audience only see the graveyard in black and white, so the link between the two works very well in my opinion.

The back of the digipak links in well with our idea of the rose being at the heart of this video, with it's meaning of love and romance and then eventually terror for our actress as the rose is the only thing left to remember me by. The rose is featured a lot in the video for example, when I give it to Claire, when see pulls the petals off, and also when she rips it up. The rose in the video was usually in black and white and the beautiful red petals were left in colour, but I think the way we have produced the cover the petals of the rose look luscious and very eye - catching, and the red of the petals is certainly the dominant colour.

During the production of the advert we had to keep our desaturated and luscious red colour scheme as the main colours. If we had changed the colour scheme our audience wouldn't understand and we would definitely lose our brand identity. To make sure the advert linked in with the video and the digipak we started with a black background. We also stuck to a small amount of colour on the advert, the text in white and the stars in red. The black and white colour scheme was vital to the success of the brand and I think we subtly achieved that by making a small amount of the adverts text in white. The red we used for the star's was the same shade of red of the rose hanging down in the advert, the same colour scheme was vital to the success of the brand identity we trying to create!

Choosing the correct font to feature on the ancillary tasks was very important, after all the chosen font would be used on the digipak and the advert. The same font on each of the ancillary tasks would really boost our brand identity. We chose the font "You won't bring me down" from dafont.com. The reason we chose this font was because of it's classical edge that it had, we liked the hand wrote effect, and we also liked that the shape of the letters were not perfect, we felt this type of font represented our song well, how it was quite slow and Gothic. We used it for all of the text on our

ancillary tasks, apart from the companies at the bottom of the advert. We used the font for the band's name and the album, the song names, the text on the advert and also the quotes. Using the font the amount of times we did, really bombarded our emphasis for our brand identity, we wanted our audience to know that the font almost belonged to Band of Horses, so when they see it they knew it was Band of Horses.

During the video our actress is featured a lot in distress with her shadow behind her, it gives the audience a sense that she could possibly have two sides to her, and in fact she does, the happy romantic side and the depressed isolated side. Myself and the group really enjoyed the two clips of our actress picking off the roses and also her tremendous shadow against the wall, so we decided to combine the two clips, we filmed just her shadow picking off the roses and it looked really good, Alysha took some pictures and after tweaking them in Photoshop we had our digipak front cover! The idea of the shadow and our actress's two sides were certainly reflected in our digipak and in the video. The other images used were in our advert promoting the band and the album, while we were filming the video any footage Alysha thought would make a good picture she took, so the four images of our actress on the advert are from filming, so straight away I think we have the obvious continuity between the ancillary tasks and the video. The one in the bottom right hand corner is particularly interesting, this reflects what I said earlier about our actress having two sides and how she is trying to break out of them.

The slow pace of our song in parts meant that we used a lot of cross dissolves to reflect the music, we didn't want to use violent rapid cuts, it simply wouldn't fit. Therefore when producing the four images of our actress on the advert we edited the the transparency levels to make the images look lighter and in my opinion it also give them a ghostly edge, this linked with our music video, because after our actress takes the pills we see her wandering through the gates of the graveyard and also standing in front of the gates. We also lowered the brightness levels to make the pictures a lot darker to tie in with our gloomy genre.

What has worked well across the brand?

The frequent use of the rose, to represent the characters relationship, love and hate

The black and white effects used to show the past and more importantly memories between the characters

The colours in the ancillary tasks, using the same shade of red as the rose used

Using the same font for all of the ancillary tasks where text was needed

The overall brand that we have created is obvious to view

What hasn't worked well across the brand? Possibly to many flashbacks at the start of the video, it

could confuse our target audience The poster only promotes one of Band of Horse’s songs