Evaluation 2- How effective is the combination of your main media product and ancillary texts?

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

Our brief was to create a promotion package for the release of an album, including a music promo video, together with a cover for its release as part of an album digipak and a magazine advertisement for the digipak. As a group, we came up with our own production team,  'MELLIE PRODUCTIONS'. As a group we developed our ancillary packages and produced and directed our music video, to our song ' Gone' by 90's boy band N'SYNC.

It is important to note that in many cases not all digipaks and magazine adverts directly link to just one music video. This is because a digipak has many songs on it and therefore has to link to them all and the magazine advert is there to promote the digipak so also will not just tie into one specific video. 

Although this is slightly different for us as we have only created one video and used the shots taken separately for our digipak. Also some digipak/albums have more then one video for the same song an example of this would be U2. 

Another reason for why all 3 texts are more tightly linked would be that in real life example the artwork or shoots for the digipak and magazine advert would be out sourced to separate advertising companies.

An real company that is likely to produce our music video is Epik Music Videos who direct, edit and film  Music Videos, Behind The Scenes Documentaries and Event Filming. Epik Music Videos, mainly appeal to young, up and coming directors. Below is an example of a video made by Epik Music Videos.





Epik Music videos, say they are always looking for new talent to work with, the price of around £1,500 is expected to be paid to Epik Music Videos, in order for them to direct, edit and film the music video.  As with most production companies  
With most companies first you send them the track, and any ideas or storyboards you may have. After you have done this they will get in touch with you in some way to talk about locations and final budget.

You will then sit down with the company and arrange a budget, in which you will stick to when buying props and scouting locations, and when considering aspects of special effects. The budget is generally the most important aspect to consider when making a music video, it will help decide what your video can contain, normally the higher the budget the better quality your video will be.

After you have chosen your budget, you will then look around for locations to film scenes of your music video, a variety of locations are always useful and important way of making the audience more entertained rather than staring at the same location for the full 3-4 mins of the song.

Digipaks are a style of CD or DVD packaging, they are usually made out of cardboard or similar and one or more plastic trays for disks.


A real company that would produce our digipak would be a company such as 'WeWOW'. They specialise in CD and DVD replication and duplication. The specialise in eco-friendly packaging also which means our digipak would be made with eco-friendly components such as vegetable inks. The invented the wowPak. A unique CD presentation pack produced from a single piece of FSC accredited board. 'WeWow' also help you to sell your product as they have close connections with companies such as Amazon.

Again, like with the production of the music video, the group will go to the company with a general idea for the digipak and a budget, allowing the company to produce something ideal for the groups video.


Magazine adverts are very useful tool as a huge number of the population read magazines. Also there are many different types of magazine that appeal to very specific audiences so you can try to sell to your target audience. A company such as Maa Designs, could possibly design the Magazine Advertisement. Maa design in many forms including Brochures, Advertising, Posters and many more. Their designs can include 2D and 3D images placed on them. They have a fixed fee of £195 and promise the total project of 5 days. 


This just shows how the 3 texts would not be linked if this was a professional project.
But saying this usually the group would send each company a small overview of what they want with ideas. This would benefit the artist to create a brand that is easily recognisable with the public. A recurring theme is a good idea.


Applying idea to our texts


In our own work we used a recurring location in all 3 texts we used the moors which is a rural setting and we also wanted to tie it in with the gene conventions. We used a very similar in the mag and back panel and the digipak, this was so people knew immediately that it was Nsync.

Front Digipa

Back Digipak

As you can see the products tie together very well. Due to the similar shots and the clothing worn by our 'young boy band' and actual boy band. We also used flowers on the inside of our digipak and we used a bouquet in our narrative as another tie together.

The clothes worn by the boy band are the same in each aspect, filming and pictures. This was because we took the images for digipack on location of shooting, but it does tie in very well together.

For the inside panels of our digipak as well as having Sophie and Charlie layered in we have placed the boy bands heads, one in each petal which were placed in each corner. This clearly links are two narrative leads with the band, and also with the music video, which you can see above to the right.

Some of the aspects we deliberately made different;

The digipak is black and white on the outside panels- this was done as some parts of the video  are black and white and black and white albums is a very common convention in boy band especially slow songs.

Our teaser was also created in black and white because it would stand out in a magazine against the other coloured pages also so that it tied with the digipak and when we released the actual mag ad it would be different.

The mag ad and digipak location are different, the mag ad is at a memorial, this links in with the idea or the video (the lead girl being dead at the end) it also signifies to the audience that idea of the video featured in the digipak.