Evaluation Question 2

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

For this question we set ourselves objectives to achieve:

- Did our product achieve its purpose?

- Does it engage our target audience?

- Are all our productions linked and do they all show connections?

Did our product achieve its purpose?

The purpose of our product was to be an entertaining music video which engages a funk audience. I think we have achieved this as the way we edited the beats and sounds of the song to the movement in the video which is something typical of a funk music video. This comes across as an appealing part of the video to our target audience. 

We see examples of this at 0:44 in our production. 

The idea of having our character changing in and out of different outfits is something we came up with to create a comical effect and something that may appeal to our audience.

Our music video also achieved it's purpose by appealed to our target by the consistency having fast cuts and a quick tempo throughout the whole video. This form for editing is often appealing to a young audience, which our's is. This allows the video to consistently be moving forward and prevents boredom. It promotes action within a funk genre music video. 

Does it engage our target audience?

I think our music video does engage our target audience through a number of ways. Firstly, the use of quick cuts which move the video along quickly and reduce boredom. This certainly engaged our audience. To add to this our cuts are timed to the music and as in the example I previously showed, at 0:44 seconds in the video we see this. This creates a large sense of fluidity and consistency throughout the video. Fluidity is something common to funk videos. We therefore edited our video in this way as we knew it would be engaging to a funk audience and therefore our target audience. 'Atomic Dog' by George Clinton is an example of a popular funk music video which follows the same codes of fluidity and editing. The music beats to the visuals within the video. Atomic Dog is a video that managed to successfully engage their audience. We know this through the success of the song and from looking at how many people have viewed the video (6,600,000). By using similar techniques in our own video, we can be sure of engaging our target audience which is also people who enjoy the funk genre.

Our audience will also be predominately young people from the ages of around 14 to 18. A stereotype of people within this age group is that they hate to get out of bed in the morning. This, as well as a stereotype, we know to also be true. To engage our audience further, we made our lead role a teenage male who, at the beginning of our video we see to be lazily getting out of bed as he has been woken up by the alarm. We had our actor, Jason, portray this by rubbing his eyes and clearly showing the emotion of tiredness. This works to engage our audience by giving them something to relate to as the video start. The relative character instantly draws them in and develops a sense of interest.

  

- Are all our productions linked and do they all show connections?

Our digipak and magazine advert are certainly connected. We designed them both to go together and some sort of continuation of each other. We see how our digipak shows a band members head and the magazine advert features the body. This creates an almost urgency to own both the digipak and magazine advert so the viewer can place one above the other and see the full person. This idea first came to us from looking and books and how authors have used the same techniques and producing book spines. Readers buy them all to then be able to place them next to each other and see the continuation.

We see a good example of this here with the full Harry Potter book collecting and how once each book is placed next to each other and in the correct order, an image is formed. 

Our digipak and magazine advert are connected though the same idea. They support one another and promote the album across a wider range, as once seen the magazine advert, the same person would recognise the the digipak and link it to the same band. Pushing the name and image of 'Vulfpeck' that much further with both the digipak and magazine advert working together with a strong connection.

                          Head on front of digipak (bottom right)

                                    Body on magazine advert 

Our video doesn't link as clearly to the digipak and magazine advert as the magazine advert does to the digipak. In fact we actually went with an almost directly opposite appearance. Both our digipak and magazine advert look quite dark and serious. Both edited and published in black and white and a serious, emotionless expression on the face of the band member on the digipak and the same for the body language on the magazine advert. Despite this, our music video is, firstly with a different band member, in colour and portrays an upbeat and almost comical atmosphere. We created this huge juxtaposition between our product and ancillary texts to break the convention of all three being closely linked. Our video is almost a joke when looking at how serious our digipak and magazine advert are. We have created this juxtaposition also to almost give two brand images within a single brand. The dark and serious side and then also the relaxed, jokey side. The dark and serious side, as shown in our digipak and magazine advert, is there to portray the band as serious musicians who are into the music they play and work hard to create top content. Many people respect this and think musicians should focus their energy and attention on the music they create. On the other hand however, many people feel this is a very arrogant and self centred approach, as if the musicians are pretentious. This is way we also created the relaxed, jokey side which shows how the band aren't self centred and don't take themselves too seriously. They create fun music for themselves and other people to dance to. This also creates an unexpected surprise as after looking at the digipak and magazine advert, most viewers were likely to be expecting a dark serious music video to go along with the convention we have been working with so far. I think this builds the video and makes it even better, as an upbeat video that appeals to our target audience is always going to be a good thing, but even more now that it came as a surprise. This makes the combination of our main product and ancillary text very effective.