Main Products and Ancillary Texts

Creating a Cohesive Brand Image We have set out to create a cohesive star image to promote the album through a consistent

aesthetic across the digipak, magazine advert and the music video. Emerald’s costume and make-up is consistent across all three texts as is intense saturated red

of Emerald’s dress and lipstick is eye-catching, which are all iconic motifs. The black headband is appropriate of the 1920s period setting and features in all three texts.

Both the print and digipak use high key lighting as part of the glamorous nature of electro swing as a genre, and the video uses this where it is tonally appropriate, such as in the performance with the stage lighting.

Creating a cohesive brand image The colour scheme is consistent across each of the texts, primarily we

use intense reds, sharp yellows (particularly for the print work), contrasting blacks and whites, and in the advert and video, softer blues.

We use the same font across both the advert and the digipak

The font is the same across both texts but the yellow is much more saturated and intense in the advert to make it stand out more in the advert to make it more defined and thus more eye-catching as it is more commercialised and less personal than the digipak would feature in a magazine, where it would be up against other adverts.

The soft hue of the blue matches the softness of the colours in the other texts, but in the video they are designed to look more ominous. In the digipak the soft colours are designed to make the viewer feel more at ease, and showcase a less intimidating side of the artist

Links to the Video Both the advert and the digipak link to the video through the use of

period details such as the costume, with the Charleston headband and the pearls.

The colour scheme is consistent across the three aspects of the campaign, red being the most distinct and defining colour, but yellow and darker tones also play a significant part in linking all three texts.

Magazine choice Our advert was designed to run in Time Out magazine, as a landscape

half page spread. Time Out is the most widely read entertainment magazine in London,

with 1 million readers a month, but they are committed to supporting up and coming talents like Emerald, and as such she has achieved enough success for a half page spread, but not enough for a whole page spread.

However this wide circulation means that they need general appeal and have a target audience with a variety of tastes they have to cater to, and as such do not prioritise any particular genre, which means genre hybrids like electro-swing have a fair chance of being included.

They have run articles and pieces promoting Emerald in the past, which is strong evidence that they are interested in her as an artist. For example this piece promotes Emerald performing at Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith: http://www.timeout.com/london/music/caro-emerald

Design Choices

The direction her eyes are facing point the viewer towards the more specific information about the album, which forces them to take in the artist's name, and finally the most important aspect of the additional information – that the album is out

The title being covered slightly by Emerald's head leads on to look at her face. However this should not catch the viewer's eyes first as her hair and the edges of her figure are blurred. The reading path in the

print advert is created through size, the sharp, saturated reds and yellows of the title are designed to catch the viewer's eye first as they are placed over muted, distorted colours in the background

The platforms the album are available on are out of the way, in the bottom left side of the screen, so that they don't interfere with the core reading path, but the information is still there so that if they are interested in the album, they can still buy it

Design Choices The title design on both the digipak and advert anchors the sophisticated elements of

Emerald's persona, “The” and “Miss Emerald” uses a font that looks neatly hand-written and elegant, and “Shocking” has another colour and pattern layer over it as if it is plated with metal

The white borders in the corners of the digipak's panels were partly inspired by the video for Alice Francis' “Gangster Love” (2013) which has white borders around the entire video. These are white, and ornate looking, and we expanded on this for our digipak by adding more detail to them, but also shrinking them down and limiting them to the borders so that they did not letter-box the image and clutter the frame.

Design Choices The font is also sans serif to give it a kind of smoothness and clarity which

is fitting of swing as a genre. This is especially evident in the text for the track listing, which uses the same font as the digipak for “Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor”, one of Emerald's previous albums.

The colour scheme is also consistent with this, the text alternates between yellow and white for each word on a red background, and our advert does a similar thing, alternating between reds and yellows on each line.

The colour of the text alternates between two complimentary colours to clearly define how the text should be read and to create an overall aesthetically pleasing image.

Meta-narrative By applying Dyer's critical framework on the construction of the star

image to the three aspects of our campaign, it is evident we are trying to contribute to Emerald's star qualities of glamour, dominance, and expanding on her meta-narrative by emphasising additional star qualities such as talent.

The glamorous side of Emerald is primarily shown through her costume which uses bold saturated colours and smaller accessories such as her rings which are visible on the front panel of the digipak. There is an element of more traditional star qualities within this, such as materialism, but the three texts emphasise how these elements contribute to her sense of style rather than relying solely on the expensive nature of her costume. The rings in the final

production are blurred and behind the title but they complement the elegant and glamorous aesthetic of the text by still being visible through the gaps in the words

Meta-narrative

Emerald's sense of dominance is present in her previous promotional material. This is demonstrated in the video through the narrative where Emerald leads the group of vampires in the band during the attack during the climax and is the first to bite anyone, and more subtly in the advert where she is given greater importance than the band, who are out of focus in the background and who she is paying no attention to.

For example on the cover for the “Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor” digipak, her posture reflects her dominance in relation to her target audience, as she is viewed from a slight low angle and her head is very purposefully turned to the right.

She is almost in profile, but angled in such a way that both eyes are visible so that it is very obvious she is looking almost dismissively away from the viewer

Her hand touching her chin emphasises her eye line and her domineering attitude.

Meta-narrative This concept of dominance most obviously ties into the importance of

hegemony in creating the star image, as Emerald directly keeps aloof of her audience, and this is a significant contributing factor to the incoherence of her star persona. This dominance allows her to distance herself from her audience which makes it impossible to “complete” her image as she will always be above them.

By hiding Emerald's eyes in the digipak and having her look away distantly in the advert she we create the paradox that she is both present and absent, as her lack of focus on the audience make her seem so distant that she seems as if she is not entirely a part of the image.

Meta-narrative The star quality of talent has been present in Emerald's promotional material in the past, such

as in the “Tangled Up” video, where the location she performed in reflected how her talent has earned her enough interest to be performing at a venue of a decent size. However, the narrative does not fully support this as she was not the focus, and the leading characters' love triangle took priority, which was conveyed through the dance choreography. We expand on this in our video by having Emerald as the focus of the performance and giving other characters little screen time.

At the performance in our video Emerald is generally framed in a close up, giving the audience little choice but to focus on her singing. The character blocking at the performance in our video builds on what “Tangled Up” established, as there is a greater number of people at our performance, emphasised by how densely grouped they are. They are all dancing, and they are all there specifically to see Emerald perform, but in “Tangled Up” she is more a part of the scenery, and there are fewer people dancing and engaged in her performance.