Throughout the project, we had to remember that we were not just making a product, but a brand. The brand was the band, “band of horses” and the task was to create a promotional package for the release of their album “cease to begin“, including a Digipak, a promotional music video for their song “the funeral” and a poster promoting the release of the Digipak. This brand had to maintain a consistent house style throughout. This meant using related fonts, colours and images which gave our brand its own identity. This identity would cause the target audience to remember our brand and recognize it.
I feel that our main and ancillary tasks compliment each other really well. The main link which all three tasks share is the icon of the rose. This rose is shown throughout to be a symbol of the love, the cause for the character’s suicide in the video. The fact that it is used so constantly throughout our video, magazine advertisement and Digipak shows how constant this love is. It is a brand icon and the use of it would instantly remind the target audience of the band.
We used the desaturate tool a great deal throughout our coursework. Firstly, it was used in our video to give a real funeral istic tone to the video. It was used for many shots, primarily the ones which were shots of despair and doom; such as the writing of the suicide note, the argument and the funeral scene at the end. This gave a sense of the blandness of the character’s life without the love of her partner, and was used as a prolepsis of what was to come. Furthermore, the chroma key effects which we used throughout captured the vitality of the love which the two characters shared. The contrast of the red against the black and white really showed how the love had been taken out of the characters’ life and showed no escape for the character without it.
These ideas were continued throughout the ancillary tasks, through the desaturating of three panels of the Digipak. Furthermore, although we did use colour for the back of the Digipak, the redness of the rose which we used for the back of the Digipak linked with the use of chroma key in the video, where just the rose was in colour. We carried this theme onto our advertisement, where we used a black background and the only prominent colour was that of the rose. We carried on this colour theme by making the rating stars red as well.
We made sure our ancillary tasks connected by using the same font. This was called 'You Won't Bring me Down' and was downloaded from dafont.com we used it for the majority of the writing on the advertisement and for the writing on the Digipak, including the song names on the back of the Digipak and the title on the front. We considered using it for the title at the start of our video, but decided against it because most professional music videos have a plain serif font for the title.
The use of cross dissolves in our video was vital to reflect the slow pace of our song. We carried this on as we made sure the images in our ancillary tasks were not too harsh so edited the transparency.
We also had the task of choosing the album name. We eventually chose a name which had actually been a band of horses album name, however, not the album which our song “the funeral” was actually from. We looked at other names, however eventually chose this name because “cease to begin” actually fitted in very well with the song “the funeral”, as the death which was suggestive of the song in “the funeral” literally meant that it “ceased to begin. We could really imagine the song being on this album in the media world.
Finally, we maintained our house style by using location shots for the Digipak. The gates were a feature of our music video and would remind the target audience of the video. We also used a picture of my shadow picking the petals of the rose for the Digipak, this linked in with the clip where I am actually picking the petals off in shadow. The use of shadows created an eerie and ominous tone. We also used the same picture of the rose on the actual CD and the advertisement.
The use of similar effects and icons throughout our three products resulted in a strong link between all three products. This created an effective combination as our target audience would really recognize all three products as being linked and the combination really emulated the tone of the video. It was important to use the icon of the rose throughout as this represented the love which the characters felt for one another, therefore through using this we displayed how constant this love was.
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