Media Evaluation- Question 2 How effective is the combination of your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

When looking at the complete set of products to brand our band Passonfontaine you begin to see the intertextual motifs used throughout. We wanted to use the idea of; loss of identity with each band member. We took inspiration from found images on blogs and existing music video we chose to analyse. Bands such as Crystal Castles have promotional images in which their faces are covered with novelty masks, and videos such as Passion Pit (which I spoke about in Question 1) use a paper bag over characters heads. These ideas of creating unidentifiable band members seemed to be popular with our chosen target demographic which artist Banksy and DJ Deadmau5 gathering cult followings, yet being a complete mystery to their fans. With these ideas in mind, we transferred them over to our two members Pat and Lorna. The images from our ancillary both use photos in which the faces are either blurred or covered. In mine I used paper bags so disguise the members, to create more of a character I drew on faces, the expressions were blank, keeping the lack of identification. Abbie used photoshop to create a blurred image this disguised any features keeping any facial identities hidden. In my opinion a posed shot in a studio of an artist can look forced or unauthentic, something that isnt popular with our audience. Despite keeping our bands identity hidden within our ancillary texts, we reveal their faces in the music video. This is to allow us show performance shots and for the members to connect with the audience. However the loss of identity theme is used in our final product too, we did this by repeating the bag head motif as part of the video. Although the shots are brief or subliminal images which appear for a matter of milliseconds, it allows a connection between final and ancillary texts to be created; a factor which is vital when trying to create a new brand for a band or artist. We were able to receive feedback from peers and fellow students on our final piece. A percentage of these shared the same view on the disjunctural elements of the bag headed character, in which they didnt understand its significance and that it seemed unnecessary showing no link to the bands image. We found these comments understandable as they had not seen the ancillary texts thus making no links between the intertextual motifs. On the other hand, in reality a viewer of the music video would be a fan of the band and would have, normally, already seen the images from the album artwork or magazine advertisements. Therefore they would understand the use of the characters within the music video.