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

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

The main idea of my music video was to have a strong narrative that included a moral that was aimed at an audience. This was about emphasising the impact of drinking, and how this problem is mainly about young adults who take their life for granted. The song I used for this is called Medicine, however instead of being literal about this term; I used alcohol as the key idea, as some people drink as a way to relieve stress and would consider it to be beneficial for any troubles or emotions. I wanted to use this through out both my video and ancillary texts.

 

After finishing my music video, I think that it has a clear narrative due to the simplicity each shot has, yet at the same time these shots state so much. For example after walking away from her boyfriend, the protagonist takes a swig of her drink, showing a rebellious side to her. This small scene tells the audience a lot about how the protagonist is feeling, and this is similar throughout the entire video. The narrative also makes the idea of having a moral to it very clear. It emphasises that choices have consequences, some can be positive and some not so positive. In the situation of the protagonist, I show both the positive and negative option, which allows the audience to see how what can happen depending on the choices someone makes. This attracts the audience to ask a lot of questions and consider the importance of how you live your life and how important decisions can be.

 

To make sure that I continued the theme of the narrative around the issues of drinking, I included strong images within my ancillary texts. My main focus was on glass bottles, which was to illiterate the narrative and keep a consistent theme. The front cover clearly matches with the aim of my narrative of how some people see drink and their own source of medicine to help them. This is shown to the audience by the protagonist taking a drink, with a label inside the bottle saying ‘medicine’. This displays that the content of the bottle is like a form of medicine. The other pages of the digipak also follow a bottle theme. The broken glass on the actual cd represents how things can go badly; the hanging bottle represents being lost and feeling alone, whilst the back of the digipak represents the feeling of choice due to the amount of bottles hanging. Therefore there is a clear message in each of the photographs and they link with the narrative of the video.  

Within my digipak, I think that my ancilliary texts are quite professional in a sense that they display the right information needed. It is important to show the correct and useful information on a digipak. This included things such as where to download the song from, the ratings it had received and most importantly the name of the artist and album name. This makes my ancilliary texts effective by serving their purpose by being an advertisement and letting people know about the album. Linking this to my music video, would allow people to relate to the adverts and know what the advert is trying to sell.

 

After gathering audience feedback on both my music video and ancillary tasks, I think that my music video and ancillary tasks have been beneficial in trying to make people see the moral and how decisions influence everything. Many people said that the video had a clear strong narrative, and felt slightly saddened at the narratives almost slightly negative side to the ending, however I think this is good as it means the audience is relating to the video and is feeling emotion towards it. This enables it to stay in their heads and think which is what I wanted the video to do. The reviews of my digipak and adverts were also good for this. They liked the fact the drink bottles were the main focus, and they could relate this to the story within the music video.