Michael Moursi: Ancillary Products

As we are doing a music video for a indie rock song, the ancillary products should match the indie rock conventions. Therefore, the main conventions for an indie rock album cover are:

• Filter effects are often used when real photos are the focus of the cover
• Drawings are often the main feature of the album cover
• Minimalism plays a big part on the text layer
• Most real photos look old and sepia, like a Polaroid picture or something taken with Instagram
• The text in the images are positioned in either the far left, the centre, or the far right
• The band often appear in the cover
• Colours appear crushed in real world photos

We managed to create a quick practice album cover to see what suits our initial ideas for our digipak. So we used  the conventions and created this:

As you can see, the album cover we have created is very minimalistic, but as various filters over it to make it more special. It follows the conventions of crushing down the colours, as we turned down the green and red on the image we used (the field). This creates a slightly vintage feel with a calm, relaxed tone. The surrounding inner shadow and the blurred background emphasis the crisp, vintage look, making it look more professional. A cream border is added as a finishing touch to the image, then finally the text 'One Night Only' is overlayed. This is a very nice example of what we would like. However, we need to make sure we add even more things to our digipak design when it comes to the time we do it. It is too minimalistic, and it does not have an album title, plus it really does not relate to the band as One Night Only's music is a little more upbeat and fun, and the album cover we made contrasts this a little. In the future, we would add the band to the digipak design and more fresh filters and colours to attract our audience.

We also did some research into indie rock magazine adverts. We did analyze these and found out some conventions we need to consider when making our magazine advert. This is what we have discovered:

• Must contain the band name
• Must make it clear what it's advertising
• Either has a picture of the band, or a drawing
• Is either square or vertically long
• The text is big and attention grabbing

This is what we would use in our magazine advert. We have looked at some indie rock magazine adverts for  research. Here is one advert:

This minimalist indie rock magazine advert by The Maccabees shows the use of stylish images and slick text to attract the viewer and to sell the artist. We defiantly would like to incorporate bold text for our digipak cover just like this advert as it is eye catching straight away. Also, on the bottom of the advert, you can see a quote from NME giving praise to the band. In our advert, we would like to have something similar, possibly a star rating. On the bottom right of the magazine advert, you can see The Maccabees website. Again, we want to include something similar to this. Apart from putting the One Night Only website on the advert, we could advertise the One Night Only Facebook fan page, or their Twitter, as the band does also rely on social networking and the internet to increase their consumption of their music, instead of relying on playing in loads of gigs and festivals to get a response. However, this advert does not really include the band members in anyway. In our advert, we will include all of the band members in our advert, but it mainly focuses on the singer.