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

The main feature that linked our main product (music video) to the ancillary texts (website and digipak/album cover) was the imagery and visual links. We used the images of a horse and a girl because they are a main part of our music video. The images on all the Snow Patrol Covers are not of the actual band, they are all concept images with meanings behind them, both simple but effective. When researching the meanings of some of the images they tended to lean towards strong emotions such as "love" "freedom" "loss of loved one" they all had touching meanings that were deep and expressive. As the pictures are an important factor in our music video, we chose to display two variations of the same theme, on the front and back of the digipak cover and then on the website also. On the website we used the same theme on all three of the platforms to reiterate a connection between all three of our media products. As our imagery contained several colours, was a fairly detailed picture and had such a strong symbolism and meaning we decided that this was a stand out feature from our design. The idea is that through seeing the music video on television on mainstream channels such as MTV therefore we used this as the main piece that our target audience and consumers would be able to recognize as a key linking feature between our music video, website and digipak/album cover. Where the music video will target new fans as well as loyal fans, the reason behind the website containing the image of the horse are to promote the new album to already existing fans in case they miss the music video and simply investigate the website.

Another connection associated with our three final products was the colours used. This was also a visual link. The colours that appeared throughout the music video were quite fair but warming colours. Therefore whilst designing a common feature that would link our ancillary products we used browny, beige and more darker colours which also portrays the theme of the song deep emotions. When creating these colours for the pictures we used it was done using IPhoto on the Apple Mac changing the contrast, brightness and saturation of the chosen image. This consistent colour theme in both the digipack, website and music video although being a minor feature may instantly relate all of our final products together when viewed by the audience and consumers.

Adding to this what made the combination of our music video and ancillary texts effective was the research that went into all of them. For each one we looked into previous album covers, digipaks, websites and videos from similar bands from the indie genre. Without analyzing Snow Patrol's version of each of our final products we would have not found out what aspects made their products successful. We took details from design, layout, colour schemes, text, costumes, performance features from both their video, digipak/album cover and website and adapted them to suit our on ideas, then interlinked them with each other to produce a consistent theme that our consumers would recognize as our products.