TOM REILLYA2 MEDIA EVALUATION

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Using forms and conventions of real media products

My media product follows typical conventions of a traditional advert, lasting around 30 seconds meaning my message has to be put across quickly. These adverts have become increasingly targeted to a niche audience, which is a convention I have used. This is denoted in my product as it is masculine, connoting its aimed specifically at males through san serif font, an iconic representation of boldness and power. This representation is connoted further in the Powerade advert, with the protagonist being a male, which is another convention I used for my product.

Male protagonists Another convention typical of traditional sports

adverts, is when the audience is introduced to the advert with close up shot to establish the sport that is being played right from the start which I recognised in my research of the Golf Pride advertisement. I used this shot also to open my adverts as it makes the text easier to comprehend and digest. I also incorporated the variety of shots the Golf Pride advert uses in a short space of time to show the action shot of the golf ball being hit and the football being kicked. This creates pace within the filming which I believed made the texts engaging to watch, which is vital for a traditional 30 second advert.

Golf Pride

San Serif fonts

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Developing forms and conventions of real media products

After researching advertisement to broaden my knowledge, I came across the advert for chipshot.com that shaped part of my idea, of denoting that my product Max Relax improves performance by including the bad performance and the good performance after using my product. The chipshot advert shows similarities to my campaign when the man in the advert demonstrates a bad golf shot. However, I developed my advert further to improve my products representation by denoting that Max Relax also improves performance by including a shot of the athlete hitting a good golf shot/football kick, connoting the product brings about success rather than failure which could be represented to some in the chipshot.com advert.

Chipshot.com Max Relax improving golf shot

In what ways does your media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Developing forms and conventions of real media products

Another convention that I developed within my campaign for my product was to maintain speed in the shots where the football and golf ball was hit. During my research, adverts I analysed altered the speed of shots. This is denoted in the Powerade advert when Wayne Rooney kicks the ball into the goal. The speed of the ball is reduced, which I had the option to do on Adobe Premiere by changing the speed/duration of the clip. However, I felt that after analysing this advert, the slow motion effect made the shot in the Powerade advert unrealistic and therefore connotes a degree of postmodernism. Therefore, maintaining the speed of this shot in my advert not only made it fast paced and engaging, but increased the adverts verisimilitude, which would build trust towards my niche audience.

Powerade - slow motion

Max Relax – maintain normal

speed

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Challenging conventions of real media products

To some extent, I challenged the conventions of real media products by using non diegetic music in my campaign. Although the Powerade advert did have non diegetic music, all the other adverts I analysed which were sport related didn’t have it. And relied on the sounds of the sport. I chose to challenge this and include non diegetic music once the product had been used. I felt that this added excitement connoting that the audience would be more engaged and want to watch or listen to the rest of the text.

Furthermore, another challenge towards traditional conventions of real media sports products, was attempting to apply humour towards my main adverts. This is something which is rare in traditional sport adverts as the purpose of the product has to be denoted to the audience in a short time, which in some cases can be difficult for sport related activities. However, I challenged this in my football advertisement by making my protagonist fall over when demonstrating the bad shot, which I hoped an audience would find funny.

Protagonist falling

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

To a large extent, the combination between my main adverts and ancillary texts such as my sponsorship sequences and radio advert are very effective. Researching helped me to recognise the importance of relationship between texts to help create a successful campaign. This is known an SYNERGY – “ The interaction of two or more agents so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects” My two main adverts denote large synergy through a variety of aspects. These images denote that in both the football and golf adverts, the product is held up identically, at roughly the same point in each advert, connoting that this shot would be recognisable to an audience.

Furthermore, parody is another theme within my two main adverts which makes them interlink. This is because comedy is used when the footballer and golfer miss the ball. I used the same idea in both adverts because it binds the adverts closer together with more attention to detail, which I believe will make the adverts memorable.

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

Furthermore, both adverts and sponsorship sequences denote combination through the use of bricolage, when bits of existing material is stuck together in another piece of material. This is evident in the main adverts and sponsorships when the two protagonists use the exact same pose to denote their high status at the end of the texts which helps to recognise that in the campaign synergy has helped to create a relationship between texts.

Main adverts

Sponsorship sequences

Furthermore, effective combination between the main and ancillary texts is denoted further through the non diegetic music. The music which I found from Garage Band was called Headspin which I used in my main adverts, sponsorship sequences and radio advert. This connotes a form of intertexual reference as the same music is used throughout my campaign, helping my niche audience to become more familiar with the music and recognise it is related to Max Relax.

Not only does the non diegetic sound denote synergy, but diegetic sound does also, as in the main and ancillary texts, the same voice over is used to say the name and slogan of the product, a traditional trait for a successful advertising campaign.

Headspin music from Garage Band for radio advert and main adverts

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

A combination between my texts is denoted again within my radio advert. Further synergy is evident by including the sound of the golf ball being, a sound from garage band at the start and finish of the advert. This connotes synergy has occurred because the sound reinforces the sport genre that is the focus in my adverts and sponsorship sequences, which builds a relationship between all my texts further. Therefore my niche audience of males who play sport can recognise my radio advert as part of the Max Relax campaign.

However, the effectiveness of my main and ancillary texts combination could have been stronger, but sometimes I missed opportunities to do this. An example of this is when I used a close up shot in my main adverts to show my products logo. However, in my sponsorship sequences, I didn’t include a shot of my logo, which may result in my audience not recognising the product and its combination relation with the main adverts.

My sponsorship sequence does not include my logo like my adverts.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Constuction

In order to film the footage for my texts, I used a HD camera, which I learnt how to use last year in AS, which gave my confidence from the start of this years project. This camera gave me high quality footage so my main and ancillary texts appeared professional. I filming locations were at a golf club and football club, both of which I am a member of so gaining permission to film here was easy so I could get started quickly. The only flaws with the equipment was the weather problems which on some days were windier than others, creating continuity errors in my sound. The main media technology I used in the construction of my production was Adobe Premiere Pro. This programme allowed me to upload footage and organise it in sequences. The editing of clips I found fairly easy as I also learnt this at AS level, although it still took up a large amount of my time as I needed my adverts to be edited smoothly to make them look as good as possible. Tools I found useful in Adobe Premiere Pro were the dip to black and dissolve tools as it pieced clips together nicely and made the end of my texts look pleasing to watch. Also, this programme allowed me to fix the sound problems due to the wind in my filming, as I could take sounds from my other clips to cover the sound of wind where is created a continuity error. Garage Band is what allowed me to construct my radio advert. It offered a variety of sound effects I could drag onto my podcast. It also recorded, which meant I used Garage Band to record my narrator in my texts. The only sound that wasn’t from here, was the sound for my the car alarm which I got from www.freesfx.com, connoting Garage Band helped me produce the majority of my radio advert. Not only for this, Garage Band also allowed me to convert sounds from there to iTunes, into Adobe Premiere, which is how I got my non-diegetic music for my other texts. Adobe Photoshop was a programme I used vaguely to produce my logo for my product. I drew a template which I scanned into Photoshop. Then I had access to many tools such as text, colour and lassos to help me accurately create my final logo design. Lastly, from Adobe Premiere, I exported my footage onto iMovie whichwas a programme which allowed me to embed my final adverts onto Blogger via You Tube.

Adobe Premiere – Sequence and Dip to

black tool

Garage Band

Adobe Photoshop – Lasso tool

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Research

I used a variety of new media technology to research and therefore learn more about advertising to build up an idea of what I want to achieve. YouTube was one of these, which allowed me to research, watch and analyse videos of all types of adverts to build my knowledge on the subject. Then I could use it to watch sport adverts specific to my idea. YouTube also leaves comments from adverts which I noticed under the videos which I read to get audience feedback so I understood what an audience expects from sports advertisement.

Blogger was another media technology which helped me to researching advertising effectively. This is because after watching the adverts on YouTube, I could analyse them by blogging which helped me to build up a more thorough knowledge the subject.

Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook also helped with a small part of my research. This is because initially, when I first began my project, I had a limited knowledge on advertising, so I used these sites to see if my friends could provide me with useful information I could take on board.

Audience Feedback

I blogged on Blogger after watching

adverts on YouTube

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Planning

After thorough research, I could begin to understand who my target audience were and therefore plan my initial ideas. These ideas started by creating mind maps about advertising and things which I have found in my research to be successful and that could be incorporated into my idea. With these mind maps, I paid close attention to sport as this was the topic I decided to focus on early into my research.

After building up a variety of ideas with my mind maps, these ideas influence me in the designing of my logo. Originally my design was of muscular structures in the body as my product was to relieve sporting muscular pains, connoting I was binding all parts of my project together. Ever so slightly, my logo idea developed and progressed through more mind maps until I had my final design.

Body parts design

Mind map for logo

Mind mapping initial ideas

The final stage of my planning consisted of designing my storyboards for my adverts. I drew them up on A3 paper which meant planning how I wanted my adverts to look visually. Here I could figure out what shot distances, angles and shot locations I needed and in what order they would appear. Once this was done, I took photos of each shot and imported them to Adobe Premiere to create my anamatic for my adverts. I found that storyboarding and producing anamatics gave me a good starting point before heading into the construction stage and allowed me to dwell on my chosen shots and improve them before my first filming session. Storyboard and example of

over the shoulder shot idea

Progression of my logo

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluating

In the evaluation stages I used Google Docs to create a questionnaire which were specific to my texts and that my audience could answer, feeding back to me what they thought of my adverts, sponsorship sequences and radio advert. I posted the link for the questionnaire onto my blog and then posted the link for that specific post (Saturday 7th April) onto social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, instead of collecting my feedback on Facebook and Twitter themselves. This is because I felt doing this would mean I’d receive unhelpful comments from friends which would not help to evaluate the success of my final texts. Whereas having my feedback sent to me via Google Docs and putting the link onto my blog meant that feedback was anonymous and therefore was most probably more reliable. Another media technology used in my evaluation stage of

my project was Slide Share. I used this to upload my complete evaluation to my blog. I used this previously on my blog when blogging about my progress so far so was confident on using it again.

To conclude, I would expect to find my adverts and sponsorship sequences on sports channels such as Sky Sports, where the audience would my interested in sport and therefore likely players too, connoting that Max Relax would appeal to them if they had a muscle injury. I would expect my radio advert to feature on radio stations such as Five Live, in between breaks when events such as football matches are being commentated on, as again the conventions of my radio avdert suit the sport genre and consumers of sport.

Audience Feedback