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

We as a group spent a great amount of time deciding what we felt would be the best ancillary tasks for us to be able to represent our band through. Due to previous lessons in Media where we read on Collective Identity and studied magazine covers we felt that we had a good understanding of what makes a sellable front cover. We already knew that we wanted to represent our female singer as glamourous and front cover worthy so this gave us confidence to choose a high end magazine, being Vogue,as our template for our magazine cover.
We also looked at the popularity of Myspace and how in the past 10 years it has changed the music industry and enabled any artist to have their music heard. Lily Allen for example began with Myspace. We decided that by making a band website would not only be challenging, but it also would allow us to advertise the band on a larger scale than a designing a poster would due to internet access being so widely available.


Ancillary task. Magazine cover.


Vogue is a fashion bible to many, to some celebrities being on the front cover of Vogue is more comendable than winning an Oscar. It has been said that is is 'the worlds most influential fashion magazine' and is greatly iconic due to its history.

We immediately began researching recent existing vogue covers for inspiration. We look specifically at covers featuring music artists in connection to our task.
Due to Vogue's scope it made it perfect to tie in with our music video as Vogue is centred around celebrity status fashion and beauty and music. Existing Vogue covers show the women who brace their covers in all sorts of ways depending on the issue, some are gerish and loud whereas others are very subtle. We decided to dress our female in a classic black dress and she was wearing little make up, this natural look suggests she is successful but has an innocent side which will help to give her likeability. The image is quite contrasting to how she is portrayed in the music video which only adds to the versitility of the female. The camera shot is a mid shot where she is staring into the lense of the camera, as if she is looking directly at you the audicence member, this helps to attract the audience as it speaks to you on a personal and direct level.

Vogue is a brand which is known world wide and because they have a style which they know works well they rarely tamper with the layout of the cover. We followed this convention and used a similar layout for our cover, consisting of the title at the top of the page with smaller subtitles scattered over the page ranging in sizez and fonts. We used subtitles that would be realistic to a typical Vogue cover such as 'Hottest looks for winter' which was relevant at the time as everyone attempts to look their best in winter especially around Christmas, and '30 things to buy that wont break the bank', considoring Britian is facing a recession at the moment even some of the fashionistas are suffering and everyone is looking for a saving. Yet agian those sort of stories are the sort that would appeal to our target audience and also reflect how we would like the audience to invisage our female singer.


Ancillary task. Website.

Creating our own website was fun as we got to use our imaginations, none of us had made a website before and so to gain some insite into the logistics of band websites we looked at solo female singers profiles for some insight.

Pixie Lott
www.pixielott.com

Beyonce
www.beyonceonline.com

Madonna
www.madonna.com

Miley Cyrus
www.mileycyrus.com



From these websites we noted that there was a general format they all shared which featured a collection of pictures of the artist, a page for fans where they can comment, information about the singer, their music videos and related press. We thought it would be sensible to use a similar format as it makes navagating around the website easy.


The website has a fun and friendly feel to it, which reflects the nature of the artist and the music that they produce. We cordinated some colour patterns from the Vogue cover in with the website and also had some images from the actual video on there too. Our aim was to have a professional look to the website and i feel we achieved this. As we can have our finished music video on the website it creates an opportunity for advertisment.

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