EVALUATION OF A2 MEDIA

COURSEWORK How effective is the combination of your main

product and ancillary texts?

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

As well as our documentary ‘Life choices’ we also created a magazine article and radio trailer which purpose was to advertise our documentary.

This meant that the combination of the three needed to be effective in that they all linked and related to each other.

And that the radio trailer and the magazine article promote the documentary successfully.

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

The three products were definitely effective in that they all successfully represented the documentary as it is, both the radio trail and magazine article included clips from the documentary this combined all three successfully.

Our target audience for the documentary is teenagers and the unemployed so our age group is likely to range from 16-25. our aim was to inform the audience of the problems in the economy, what they should and shouldn’t be doing and opinions on all the above.

We decided to air our documentary on BBC one, I think this was a good decision mainly because BBC1 is a commonly watched channel and regularly broadcasts documentaries. BBC’s aim is ‘to enrich people's lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain.’ this was the exact aim of our documentary we didn’t want to bore the audience so kept it fairly light hearted whilst informing and educating the audience with facts, figures and opinions on the topic.

Magazine article When creating our magazine article we did a number of things to link

it with the documentary; firstly we used images that we print screened from the documentary. The article itself also creates an effective combination with the main product as it is focussing on the documentary giving an explanation of what is included and advertising it. The title of the article given is the name of our documentary, we put the logo of BBC one in the corner because that is the channel the documentary was produced for. An improvement of our magazine article would be the image behind the article to be more relevant to the documentary, as this image of London is significant and can deceive the audience about where the documentary is in fact filmed/based.

Our magazine was for ‘What's on TV’ which is the magazine I had researched and particularly liked the layout they used for the double page spread of doctor who. However we didn’t stick completely following that layout which I consider to be a mistake as the layout is something that would of clearly linked the article to the magazine It was to be in. the reason we chose ‘What's on TV’ was partly because of the bright colours used throughout the magazine which made it bold and eye catching but we considered the fact that doctor who was advertised in the magazine and this is a well known programme and watched by many and so we thought our documentary in this magazine also would encourage a wider audience.

Radio Trailer Similarly to the magazine article we used clips from the documentary in our

trailer. However audio clips. Using extracts of our documentary in our ancillary products helps emphasise the main product and links them all together with the main product. The radio trailer has music in the background and a voiceover. (‘Voice of god’) The background music was also made on garage band and in a similar style to the music played in our documentary creating a link. The voiceover used was effective and we chose appropriate extracts from the documentary to use

Overall I think that the 3 tasks have a good number of common links whilst remaining individual to each connotations of that media style. I think that overall there are many improvements that could be made with our tasks in that we needed to have better time management skills to effectively spend enough time on each product however in terms of the effectiveness of the combination I think the three work well together.