P.P-C - Evaluation: Question 2

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

It was intentional that we designed our print texts to convey the conventions of the genre and the individual style of our artist. For example in the advert and digipak design we can see that the same font as been used on both to reinforce the brand image of the artist and image we created in the music video. When choosing the font it was important to make sure it conveyed the artist in the correct way. After trying out lots of different fonts, we agreed that the font ‘Dear Joe 5 casual’ was the best. This font looked much more personal and as though it had been hand written, almost as if James Morrison has writen it in an autobiographicial manner.

Picture to show the font and font colour used on the advert and digipak

When deciding what colour font we were going to use, we needed to make sure that it would stand out and that we kept the same font and colour on both the digipak and advert to maintain a brand image. White was chosen as it stood out from the image and connotes purity.

For our image that was used in the advertisement we decided that we would use a shot where the artist is looking away. As this creates and connotes a sense of mystery, as though there is an element of the artist that the audience are yet to find out about.

Picture used in Advertisement.

Our digipak conformed of 4 sides;
- Front
- Back
- Two in the middle.
Through our digipak we wanted to create a warm autumn theme. This was to make sure James Morrison was represented as a down to earth character, as this was the general opinion of James Morrison that we gathered in our first audience research on survey monkey.

The two screen shots below help to show the colour and what type of character our artist is. These pcitures create a visual link which is clear that it is followed through in the music video.

Our digipak conveys James Morrison as a solo artist and through the digipak we learn that he is also an acoustic artist, further helping create a brand image. A visual motif that we have used through-out is the guitar; the consumers can then relate this to the artist and recognise that this is a key feature through-out James Morrison’s music.

The Advertisement
The advertisement was designed to run in The Times and other similar newspapers.As our target audience and demographic (for example age, class and gender) were most likely to see the advertisement here. For instance the age of this demographic would be middle aged both males and females, who would come from a middle class background. This would be more successful broad sheet rather than being diplayed in NME. In the advertisement we decided that certain information displayed should be in different fonts, as we wanted to maintain a visual interest whilst making it easy for people to read.

The orange and yellow circle highlight the two different fonts we used in our advertisement.

Therefore we kept the title ‘James Morrison’ and the title of the album the same as we still wanted to keep the personal feel to the advert. The leading line in the advert is ‘James Morrison’ and then your eye continues to read down the page, this is why the most important information is at the top of the advertisement, such as ‘Out Now’.

Dyer's Critical Framework
By using Dyer’s critical framework on the construct of the star image, it is evident that we have portrayed our artist as having a star persona. Dyer states that an artist must be both ‘Ordinary’ and ‘Extraordinary’ and ‘present’ and ‘absent’. We have shown our artist being ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ by showing he is in a park just a normal guy, without the need for materialistic values, however he is ‘extraordinary’ because we can see his musical talent.
We show him being ‘Present’ through shots where he is singing to the audience (first person mode of address). However he is ‘Absent’ as there are also a number of shots where he is looking away. Furthermore there were a few shots in our video where the artist was singing with a white background behind him, this made this shot look much more dreamy.