Evaluation Question 2

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

Hello, I’m Meeghan.
This is my music video to’ First love by the Maccabees’, its from their first album named ‘colour it in’. They are an indie band formed in Brighton. They produce exciting, quirky songs with simple yet funny lyrics which are often very catchy.
Intertextual reference in something which is rare within music videos, I wanted the start of my video to be effect and immediately grab the audience, with my remake of a famous scene from when harry met sally I think it makes for a strong beginning.
The Maccabees are made up of four men, although I knew this I did not want to include a band in my video, instead I used a women to sing the lyrics as I thought this would be controversial and would fit in well with the quirkiness of the band. I gave her red lip colour so that the audience would be focused on her lips. And used a close up shot to further highlight the words she was singing.
The main theme and story of my video was that the different shots mirrored what was said in the lyrics, for example when it says ‘do you miss home?’ lots of different shots of houses and forms of homes flash up. With the words ‘Are you cool?’, a boy comes up smoking and acting in a what that to the viewers they can see he is not cool, a very sarcastic part to my video.
I wanted my music video to have an upbeat tone to it so I used the fade to black/white effect in between shots to give the effect that they were flashing up.
My digipak was something which I found fun to make, but difficult as it had to match up together with the video and my magazine advertisement. Although the Maccabees are a band in their mid 20s who attract 15-30 yr olds of both sexes, I still decided to go with the theme of a pink/peach colour. It went well with the theme of love and also went well with the colour of my image which I used on the front of my digipak, this was an image of the girl who mimed in my video, this helped tie the two together. I then used an image of the back of her head as the back cover of the digipak, quite a creative idea if I do say so myself. The cd and cd holder were basically a mirror of one another, I made it look like the magnifying glass had blown up the girls smile.

Back to my video, I used a quite a few effects within my video, including, colour changers, the kaleidoscope effect, I also changed the brightness and contrast on many scenes within my video. I created the effect of the girl writing on the window in after effects, I had to choose the right timing and the correct direction to write the words as she moved her hand. It went well with the laid back randomness of both the band and their lyrics.
I had designed my magazine advertisement before I had started the digipak, I knew that I wanted it to be quite simple and plain. It took me three attempts for me to get to my final piece that I was happy with. MY first attempt looked to feminine and did not have the look of an advertisement more a childish poster. My second draft was too dark and looked quite boring, the colours I used did not match that of my music promo. My final advertisement used the image of the women who mimed in my video, tying the two together, I gave it a white background to keep it simple. I then went onto use the same text in the digipak, I also edited the image with the same ‘cutout’ effect.
Overall I think I reached the desired effect which I wanted, my music promo, digipak and advertisement are clearly linked with the same style. MY bands style and genre are well suited to my video, with the upbeat edits keeping the audience intrigued and the strong theme of symmetry shown through the different ages of love.