How effective is the combination of my main product and my ancillary

text?By Leo Faulks

Definition of a star• To start this project, I first of all am going to define what it is to be a ‘star’. The

term ‘star’ refers to the semi-mythological set of meanings constructed around music performers in order to sell the artist to a large and hopefully loyal audience. Richard Dyer states ‘Stars’ have some key features in common. He says, a star is not a real person, but an image, constructed out of a range of materials. He claims them to also be commodities, produced and consumed on the strength of their meanings. He claims that stars depend upon the roles of a range of subsidiary media, magazines, TV, radio, the internet etc in order to construct an image for themselves which can be marketed to their target audiences and furthermore states that a star image is made up of a range of meanings that are attractive to the target audiences.

My Pop video• The pop video I produced is named ‘We are from Venice’ and the song

was originally by a band named The Bloody Beetroots. The video consisted of cuts of the star, the DJ, and two gangs of youths causing destruction within a deserted scrap yard. We aimed for a feeling of dystopian chaos which we decided would fit with the song. We gained influence from the video ‘Stress‘ by Justice. Stress featured youths acting violent around a city, disregarding any rules and performing mindless acts of destruction. The purpose of a pop video is to help give off the right image of the artist to go with the song. We wanted to give the artist a rebellious and edgy feel so chaos and destruction seemed like a good style of video to go for.

• This is a screengrab from the video

My Digi pack• The aim of the Digi pack is to attract the customer to the CD when

browsing. It also contains visuals inside the CD as well as the front cover which serves the purpose of once the customer has bought the CD, to be entertained by the visual imagery and perhaps form a better connection with the artist. We used an electronic yet dark feel on the visuals for our digi pack to help reflect the nature of the song and its video. We named our artist D’artagnan after a character in the story ‘The three musketeers’. D’artagnan is the guard of the three musketeers and by naming our artist that, we wanted to imply that he was the guard and a symbol of the

outsiders and rebels, something which the three musketeers were. • Here is a scaled down version of the digi pack

My Magazine advert• The purpose of the magazine advert is to give an

impression to the public of what the artist is like and what to expect when listening to the music. We wondered what type of audience would be interested in our artist, we came to the conclusion that keen musicians and a niche of young ‘rebels’ would be appealed by our artist. We wanted to perhaps look at advertising in mainstream music magazines such as Q as the readers are open to new types of music and also advertising in slightly more niche magazines that connect with a more underground audience.

How they all worked in synergy

• All three products, the pop video, the Digi pack and the magazine advert all work together to promote the same artist and each supply there own way of doing so. The magazine advert can attempt to draw in the exact crowd wanted. The music video can help draw in an unexpected crowd as it will hopefully catch peoples eyes when scrolling through the TV channels. The Digi pack will help the loyalty of the fans as they will hopefully get what they want from the album.

How our artists star image is developed in our pop video

• Our artist’s star image is developed in our pop video through various ways. Our artist is first of all youthful, the other characters in the video are also youthful therefore this helps get the young market and helps the artist become appealing. He is also edgy and rebellious as the video consists of destruction and violence, a deviation from main stream values. He is anti authoritarian and gives off sexual magnetism thanks to his good looks and rebellious attitude. He is original as he is not singing or performing as such in the video, merely ‘spinning’ the DJ decks. He has creativity and talent as the song is dynamic and makes you want to dance, he has managed to create it all himself without a band. There is certainly aggression within the artist which is displayed through the conflict shown in the video and there is again a definite disregard for social values as the gangs in the video display behaviour that is not generally considered socially acceptable.

How the artists star image was developed in the Digi pack

• In our Digi pack we again promoted the edgy, rebellious, anti – authoritarian and disregard for social rules behaviour through the non conventional styling and the slightly negative isolated feel to it. We used a quote by Marianne Williamson about how we fear our own power to give a deep meaningful twist to our artist, hoping that the insightful view will attract the desired audience.

In comparison to existing stars, how we subverted and conformed to rules of star

image• We gained a lot of inspiration from the pop video of ‘stress’ by Justice. Justice’s

star image is one of a similar nature to ours, underground, rebellious and original. The song was originally by the Bloody Beetroots who are a DJ duo who again, give off a similar star image to our artist. Our video is similar to Stress’s video as it contains acts of violence and mindless, dystopian destruction. We wanted to imitate this as we believed it to be a good way of displaying the rebellious nature of our artist. We subverted usual rules of pop videos however as the story was non linear, many events occurring out of order. We did this in order to help establish the feeling of being lost and confused, to only follow the basic lines of the story and rely on the music and visuals to dictate. An image of Justice ‘s symbol

Paradoxes with the star image• Richard Dyer states that fundamentally the star image is incoherent,

incomplete and ‘open’. Dyer claims this is because it is based upon two key paradoxes. The first paradox he claims is that the star must be simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary for the consumer. The second paradox is that the star must be simultaneously present and absent for the consumer, meaning dislocation between consumer and product. He claims that these paradoxes make the audience strive to ‘complete’ and ‘make sense’ of the image and this is helped be achieved through the continued consumption of the star through his or her products. Performance in the music industry seems to promise the completion of the image, but it is always ultimately unsatisfying which means that fans will go away determined to continue consuming the star in order to carry on attempting to complete their image.