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

When I was constructing my digipak, I wanted to ensure there is continuity between the cd and the style of the music video in addition to the sound of the song. Keeping the entire product coherently fluid is likely to satisfy the audience and improve the quality of the overall product.

Aesthetic is the main way I have tied my digipak in with my product. The pastel theme is in my album and the music video. They’re both using very soft colours which is a stereotypically feminine aesthetic matching the likely demographic of the fans of the artist. The song is rather calm and does obtain a very feminine feel to it so the pastels reinforce it making the CD coherent to its content. My digipak has an overlaid filter of faint crinkles and my music video has a lot of filters done in post-production in order to age the clips. As half of the video has a nostalgic feel, I felt the image should match the emotions conveyed. The crinkles imply that something has aged as the video is a journey of two siblings growing up apart.

Another thing that I tried to do in the construction of my products was ensure that the digipak speaks to the audience. The audience are positioned with the girl in the video and for the majority of it, her journey of events is followed. The sound of the song is what this decision was based on due to the fact the voice is feminine and soft. The passivity of it is calming which I tried to carry through to the music video and the digipak as it takes a simple image done with muted, pastel colours. The abstract image was inspired by art from the 1970s where shapes and colours were often used in a way of simplicity to provide meaning and evoke thought. Henry Jenkins’ theory of audiences are textual poachers provides a useful way of understanding how audiences are able to create their own unique perspectives regarding deeper hidden meanings and that way, they are able to interpret their own meanings. The goal is to utilise the ambiguity of the cover to provoke wider conversations on social media regarding the subject of the digipak as fans discuss and debate possible meanings which is likely to generally raise awareness of the product. This would also be beneficial to the artist as they are unsigned and relatively unknown with a small following.

I have also included word pictures of two of the bands songs as the inside panels of my digipak as it continues the abstract theme of art. This deconstructs the songs and refocuses meaning upon significant words which could redirect the audience onto alternative representations of what the songs are about. The fragmentation of them conveys the symbolism of how things that are broken can still be art and adds an interesting twist to the passive digipak without sticking out to the point that it looks out of place. This has been done by remaining consistent with a pastel colour palette, mainly featuring blues and purples. Doing this also helps the artist establish their identity regarding the type of content they have to offer to audiences in society. It is important that the digipak depicts what the CD will contain in order to best establish tone so in production, I tried to create a product that did that. As the band produce some relaxed pop songs, I have the digipak a simplistic feel with pastels. Some twists like the textured background add to the aesthetic making it a CD that fans may want to showcase. This will, once again, lead to more conversations about the band.

Andrew Goodwin’s theory of suiting genre is another thing I have done. We kept a clear relationship between the song and its music video. As the song has many points where it builds, we used this to showcase the main parts of the video. This is when the key events happened in the narrative. It is additionally debatable that the sound of the song indicating that a journey is taking place. The high pitched notes suggest excitement which we tried to convey in the video as the journey of two long lost siblings reuniting occurs. Although here I conformed to the conventions of the song, I did change the song as we found it to be too long for the narrative we had. We cut out a chorus due to the fact that we found it to be a little to repetitive. As the band is new, we felt it was of great importance that we keep our audience engaged with the song and ensure they don’t become bored. Doing this will hopefully keep our audience captivated.