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During our research we came across two key terms and concepts both of which are crucial when building separate products that need to function together to form one media item. The first of these terms is house style, this is the name given traditionally to media such as documents or letters, websites, newsletters and other such items. A house style is normally a set of guidelines that are laid out for objects such as the logo layout, colour scheme, font and text size etc. The purpose of a house style is to ensure that media from one company is both consistent, and recognisable as that brand. Having a house style allows large companies to produce consistent documents and media throughout many different devisions of the company, from legal, to customer support a constant theme will have been established that is recognisable to the consumer. This was a very important thing to enforce throughout both the music video and ancillary tasks, this was to ensure that much like a corporate identity everything that we produced would be instantly recognised as the same brand.
The second term we came across was Synergy, we noticed how important synergy can be when having multiple media texts that need to work together, in our case this was the music video, Website and Digi pack (which contained both Vinyl packaging, and CD packaging). Synergy is in many ways very similar to the house style, it ensures that all of your media products have a noticeable brand, and that they work together effectively. The more effectively the media products work together, the more likely the promotion of them is likely to be. To ensure synergy is effective objects between the media platforms needs to be consistent, for example the band logo, photos from the music video, record label logo and other such items will normally be present across the whole marketing campaign.
With our media texts we believed that the most important aspect was to ensure that synergy was maintained throughout through the use of colour, or lack of it. Following the traditional style of Arctic Monkeys, we went down the route of black and white. We felt like this would be the best possible path for us to go down because arctic monkeys videos often feature a vintage, retro film atmosphere. All of the Arctic Monkeys’ existing media follows a very similar theme, they have a very consistent black and white website, and most of their more recent album releases have featured either black and white album artwork or very unsaturated colours.
We used black and white throughout the entirety of our video for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allowed for consistency between shots from different camera devices as they were all shot at different resolutions and contrast levels. Use of black and white masked the white balance aspect, making it easy to keep all clips uniform in colour. Secondly, this allowed us to be in-keeping with the traditional arctic monkeys style and theme. This led to a product that maintained the traditional feel that arctic monkeys fans have come to expect.
Another of our media products that we wanted to be black and white was the website. We kept each page monotone to ensure for easy viewing and reading due to the contrasting tones. We did however use splashes of colour to draw attention to important parts of the site, such as items and offers on the store page. This is an example of our use of synergy as it relates to the style of our music video. This allows for a constant brand identity throughout all aspects of our media products.
Finally, our digipack and vinyl covers kept the moody, dark style of the video and website, rounding our product line off as consistent and seamless. This consistency leads to customers being able to instantly recognise our products at face value, reducing the need to further research the product before they purchase.
We also believed that another important aspect of synergy that we needed to maintain was the logos and branding. We decided that we wanted to use the official Arctic Monkeys logo to ensure that it was as both recognisable and simple as possible. Another logo we used throughout our media products was our own ‘Innovo Music’ and ‘Innovo Records’ logo that we designed to be both easily recognisable, simple, and in-keeping with the style that would be associated with Arctic Monkeys. All of the logos were prominently presented across all of our media items:
The website has the Arctic Monkeys logo top and centre as the first thing that is presented when the site is viewed (it is also centred on the navigation bar at all times). This logo is also the main focus of the start of the music video. Finally all of our Digi pack items have this as the main feature on the front of both the Vinyl and CD. Our Innovo Music logo was also present throughout the whole of the music video as a transparent overlay as it is traditional to present the record labels logo. Another area where our Innovo Music logo is presented is on the back of the Vinyl and CD packaging along with at the bottom of each page of the website.
Across our media products there are many cases where synergy is apparent. For example, on the back of our vinyl and CD covers, it states the website URL and on our website we feature the vinyl and CD on the store page. Our products advertise each other in a successful manner as they link, and enforce a strong coincidence between all of our media products.
To conclude, we feel we have created three very different media products that at the same time follow the conventions of synergy and a consistent house style to result in a seamless collection of items that intertwine and link with each other, allowing for an effective sense of identity and thus improving sales.