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

My house style had to include a mixture of both the Pop genre and the Indie genre. This included using bright and clear images one all three products whilst maintaining a 'DIY' effect and the use of instruments to establish my band as musicians, not Pop stars. This will relate to my audience who enjoy the mix of both genres but are slightly more mainstream and need to be kept interested in my products.

Representations
I needed to present my band as musicians, not a group wanting to be famous. Yet I still wanted them to come across as fun and exciting. On my digipack I used toy instruments to make them come across as playful and not completely serious, making an effort to make them look surreal with the white background and over-exposure. This gave a child-like image to the digipack with its sharp greens and stimulating blues. The canted images on my magazine advert also added to the childish, imperfect imagery of the band, making the images stand out in the process. The narrative in my music video is very playful with the two characters enjoying a food fight in a park, the scenes coming across as childish with head and shoulder shots of food being pushed into the girl's face and a bottle of coke being thrown over the guy. I allowed my actors to improvise these scenes so that the playfullness never felt forced. The costume of the girl wearing a flowery dress, stereotypical of the gender and similar looking to a child's dress, once more emphasised a child-like image.
The seriousness of the band came across in my video where I had plenty of close-ups and extreme close-ups of guitars and the drum kit being played to the music, constantly reminding the audience of their musical talent. The performances here were conventional of the genre as rocking movements to the music were incorporated, suggesting a strong attackment to the music, and looking to the camera when singing a word on a beat. This made the band look like they were taking the music seriously. Professional labelling at the back square of the digipack also contributed to this representation as it is something all digipacks include. I added a website address, copyright information and my record label logo with a barcode at the bottom of the square as this is where these features are positioned on real digipacks. I decided to use the record label for Rough Trade, an independant record label who specialise in signing artists who are musically creative and are making music for the fun of it; this once more establishes my band as artists.
I believe that this was successful. The labelling looks professional and I have placed a huge emphasis on instruments throughout all three products.

Cinematography

I needed to make my products attractive to engage the more mainstream audience and so I did this by over-exposing my images of the toy instruments on my digipack and creating a blank background to emphasise the instruments. This looked aesthetically pleasing as the eye is drawn to the bright colours of the instruments. On my magazine advert I brightened up the shots of my lead singer to make her stand out; I again left the background blank to emphasise this. In my music video I used high key lighting on set to attempt to create an intense studio feel. I then shot in low angles and during the majority of the filming inside the studio to try and capture that feel. During the narrative scenes, I began with a long shot of the park to give the audience pretty scenery to enjoy before the narrative became mainly close-up shots and tight framing.

I do not believe that all of this was successful. The on set lighting for my video did not create the intense effect that I wanted. Feedback for my video evidences this.