Q2) How effective is your main combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I feel that the three media tasks we have produced link well, they have a similar brand identity. All of our products have the same target audience of 14-45. We used the same images in the magazine article as what were in the documentary and to make it consistent in the radio trailer we used those people talking. By using quotes from the interviewees in the radio trailer there was something memorable that the viewer would instantly recognise if they were to hear both the documentary and radio trailer. All of this helped to create brand identity.

Both of these were used in the magazine and documentary

The font was kept consistent in both the magazine article and the documentary whenever text was used. Also the same background music was played in both the radio trailer and documentary again helping to create something memorable for the viewers if they listened to both.

Consistency in font

Facts were used in all three of our media products to help emphasize our topic, we constantly asked questions to make the audience question themselves before hearing it in the documentary, radio trailer or before reading the article.

However where we could have made the three media products interconnect more would have been if we used the same voice over in both the documentary and radio trailer. I think that out of all three media products our documentary is the most successful piece, as we spent longer on this and used different types of editing to speed up or slow down the pace. We got lots of different opinions from a variety of experts and also the general public, this made it suitable for a wide audience.

Here we slowed down some footage we had collected so that we had enough time to say our voice over.

Our radio trailer did this to an extent as we could pick out our best quotes and put them, which helped to capture peoples attention. We tried to make it as interesting as possible but as it was short we could not use everything we wanted.

The article contains quiet a lot of text maybe not making this as eye catching for all of our audience. I think it may loose the attention of people as young as 14 so we therefore could have took this into consideration a bit more. However when writing the article I think we could have been more particular in how we phrased our words making them not too sophisticated using more monosyllabic lexis. This was to make it more accessible for the younger audience. We also made it very clear when and where the program would be shown, helping to promote the documentary.

Promoting when the documentary is being shown

Overall I think that our ancillary tasks combine with our documentary well. They look and sound as if they belong together. They are very clear and effective when promoting the documentary. The radio trailer is enthusiastic and loud making it interesting similarly to the documentary. The article has a good layout making it clear and sectioned.

Three technical decisions we made to appeal to our target audience were making sure the magazine wasn’t dull or boring making it bright and colourful with a variety of images, we put some images on a slant to make it look more attractive. We also used a female voice over as our target audience was aimed at women this made it suitable. We tired to make the voice over in both the documentary and radio trailer enthusiastic and keen, by doing this it makes the voice more appealing. We got a variety of interviews, which were from females as well so this again helped to appeal to our target audience as it was a professional interview that people were more likely to listen to.

Female professional interviews

Q3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

To collect our audience feedback we created a simple questionnaire, handing them out to our class. We created three questionnaires one for each of our media products. We asked them to rate the products on how professional and successful they were. This is a graph to show if they thought the products were professional or not:

Yes No

Documentary 24 0

Magazine 9 1

Radio Trailer 10 0

In our questionnaires we also asked whether people thought all the products were suitable for our target audience (14-45) this pie chart shows the amount of people that thought our products were suitable for the target audience :

As you can see from the results the majority of people said that our products were suitable for our target audience. We found this encouraging to us as we appreciate that not everyone would be interested in appearance. However it showed it that we reached and achieved what we wanted making this successful for us.

Yes No

Documentary 24 0

Magazine 9 1

Radio Trailer 10 0

We were given improvements for all our products for example many people suggested that we could have more voice over for our documentary and improve some of our sound levels. We agreed with some of the responses as we no that some parts of the interviews were quieter than others.

Whereas for our magazine article some comments that people made that were good was the layout of our images and the style in which we laid the magazine out: question and answer. This was encouraging for us to hear as we wanted to make the layout look as professional as possible and this made us feel that we had achieved this.

Questions and answers

Layout of images: images put onto

different angles to make them look more appealing and interesting.

Finally an improvement that was made about the radio trailer was similar to the documentary to include more of a voice over rather than having lots of quotes. Some people thought that this gave away too much information on the documentary.

A graph to show how people rated the mise-en-scene of our shots in our documentary

A graph to show how appropriate people thought our magazine article was to promote the documentary

The overall feedback we got about our documentary was that we had good background footage, good interviews and a good set up of mise-en-scene.

If we were to repeat this work again I would follow the advice from some of the feedback we got to improve upon our work.

To gain our audience feedback we thought of a variety of ways to collect our data: open/closed questions, a series of statements. We used both of these techniques but more closed questions as this made it easier when analysing the data we had collected, this also made it easier for people to fill in. There is also quantitative and qualitative feedback, we used a mixture of these to find out what people thought about the three media products.

Other ways we could have collected our data could have been by doing a focus group some advantages of this would have meant we could be more precise and detailed with our questions meaning the answers we got back would also be more precise. The maximum number of people that would be in the focus group would be between four and five, the interview overall would have been done in more detail, and we would have been able to have a chat about the documentary. Also the type of questions used would have been more open rather than closed.

However some disadvantages of this would me it is more time consuming and we would not have collected as much data. We would also have needed more equipment like a camera or voice recorder to record what they are saying, this could be a disadvantage as we may not have been able to get hold of this equipment easily.

From the audience feedback we received the information given back to us was what we expected. For example for our documentary questionnaire most people rated our sound quality as being excellent or good and we expected them to say good, therefore this was an achievement. For our magazine questionnaire we were hoping people would say that our magazine linked in well with the other two media products, and all 10 agreed that it did. Finally with our radio trailer we hoped that after the audience had listened to our radio trailer they would want to listen to the complete documentary 8 said yes and 2 said no. We had predicted this as our documentary was aimed at women and we knew that there would be men watching it who probably would not be as interested.

Strengths and weaknesses of our three media products:DocumentarySome strengths that we thought were good in our documentary were the sound levels

and the quality of some of our interviews, also the lighting used was carefully considered to make sure it looked appropriate and natural. The background footage used was appropriate for the voice over and vox pops.

Some weakness that we noticed were the interviews with the make up consultant from Yves Saint Laurent,fitness first and also some of our vox pops. As the microphone was not down low enough meaning you could see it moving around whilst we were interviewing, this made it look unprofessional so to overcome this problem we added a black header and footer to the professional interviews to hide this problem but also by doing this it make it look consistent throughout. We also had to redo some of our vox pops as the sound quality on a couple was not good enough.

Appropriate lighting used looks like they are in there natural environment

Here you can see this is what the interview looked like before we added the black headed and footer.

Magazine ArticleA strength of the magazine article was the layout as it looked like a professional

magazine article, many people commented on this as a strength when completing our questionnaires. The font was seen as being appropriate to the target audience, and also the overall impression of the magazine was visually attractive.

To improve upon our magazine article I think we maybe could have used bigger columns instead of small paragraphs, although I think this did work well as it was clear to understand and follow. Also the image used of the lady from fitness first isn’t the best quality as looks slightly pixelated, if we were to do this again we could improve this to make sure it looks better.

Radio TrailerFinally the radio trailer had some strong aspects as it kept to the 30 seconds, we found

this hard as there was so much to say. Although this made us pick out the most important things being precise. When listening back on the radio trailer I think the voice over could have been improved by making it more enthusiastic, also I think we could have tweaked the sound levels as the voice over went quiet in some parts.

Q4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research , planning and

evaluation stages?We used a variety of media technology when creating our three media products,

some was familiar as we had used it before in the previous year other pieces of technology was not, for these we had to spend a bit more time focusing on how the technology worked. Before we could start on our own work we had to analyse and watch several other documentaries, radio trailers and magazine articles. To do this we used standard PC’s . We used the following resources to watch similar things in our groups that were of interest to us: youtube, 4 on demand.

Last year we just used normal PC’s whereas this year we progressed onto using the MAC’s some differences between these two computers were that the MAC’s tended to focus more on the creative approach. It also uses different software and has a different operating system. MAC’s are more specialist so as a result it works more professionally.

We found there were strengths to using MAC computers as we did not encounter any technical problems, large files worked effectively and quickly and it was also easy to import images into final cut express. It seemed like a shorter faster route as you didn’t have to go through lots of different folders.

To import images or video files we had

filmed we simply went to file log and transfer and picked what we

wanted to be put into final cut express.

Once we knew what our documentary was going to be on and we had researched it we started collecting some footage. To do this we needed a video camera which was supplied to us by the college as the technology was fairly new the hard drive was contained in the camera which meant we didn’t need a tape. This made loading the footage onto the MAC’s easier and less time consuming.

As the camera was so small and compact it made it light and easy to transport when moving to different places to get interviews and background footage. We placed the cameras onto a tripod so that the filming would be in focus.

Once we had set the levels so that the camera would be in focus we then had to make sure the sound levels were correct to do this we inserted the headphones into the camera and did a tester with the triga microphone. This was important we got the levels correct as otherwise our interviews could go wrong. A problem that sometimes occurred when using the triga microphones was you could hear background noise and it was sometimes difficult to set the sound balance correctly. We had this problem with the Yves Saint Laurent interview, as someone left the room whilst we were completing the interview.

Some techniques we used with the camera were panning we did this when we did a shot of ‘The Sixth Form College Solihull’, this was half way through our documentary , by using a pan it gave a clear insight to where we had come to. This shot was shown just before the vox pops therefore by having this first a brief introduction was given.

We also used the camera to do a zoom this was when we had interviewed the makeup consultant from Yves Saint Laurent. We zoomed into an advertisement stand which we then used as background footage to put some of our own statistics onto. However we did not use too many transitions as when we watched professional ones we noticed that they were kept limited, we followed this to make ours look as professional as possible.

Pan of college

Another technique we used with the cameras was a tilt also from when we went to do an interview with Yves Saint Laurent.

We thought using a tilt worked effectively as it showed the wide variety of makeup that was sold on that counter. This showed just how many different products were out there for the public, which helped to emphasise just how much pressure is put onto appearance.

When planning we used blogs to put all our work onto via: www.blogger.com this was different to AS work as it was all done via computers nothing was handed in by paper. I found this a good way of working as you did not have to worry about loosing any pieces of work. You could still make your work very visual as you could hand write things then scan them in to the computers uploading them to your blog. Another advantage of using the blogs was that everyone in your group could access the work even if someone was away meaning you could still continue working, this was as long as everyone kept all the work up to date.

However a disadvantage was it could sometimes be more time consuming as when you scanned things in you had to change the format to a JPEG. We also used the internet for research which meant it was easy access but not always reliable and valid information. The quality of what you found was not always the best.

I found ‘Final Cut Express’ enabled me to focus on specific things, I found I could be more precise about the editing techniques for example what transitions we used. Also I could monitor the sound levels of the voice over, background music and interviews, vox pops. Also the viewer was able to preview the video before it was added to the timeline, I found this was useful as if you didn’t like it you didn’t have to add it. We also did the same when creating our radio trailer but it was obviously a lot shorter meaning we had to pick out the most important parts.

Allowed to preview before being added to the timeline.

This is where the sound levels

were monitored, if it touched red

we knew the sound levels

were too high.

This was where out background music was added in.

The image shown here is what would be shown

on our documentary.

This is the browser where everything was held, this is where you chose what went into the time timeline.

When creating the magazine article the software used was Adobe InDesign this year I found it more successful as I could take what I knew from last year and improve my skills. I also used photoshop for the images so I could edit them before putting them into InDesign.

This is the swatches tab used

to colour items

Once you had got your colour swatches it made it

easier to be consistent with colours

This is the toolbar which shows all the

different things you can do in

InDesign

Finally once all three media products were finished I had to do my evaluation which was done on PowerPoint then converted over to slideshare.

I found some advantages of using slideshare was that I could embed the slideshow into our blog, also you can share it publicly or privately. The original file could be downloaded. When uploading it I found it easy to use as I thought it worked well.