Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

A2 Media Studies – Unit G324: Documentary

Evaluation

Alongside the required main task of producing the five minute opening of a television documentary, we were also required to produce two ancillary texts. The products required are a double page spread article designed to feature in a TV listings magazine (e.g.Radio Times) and a radio trailer. These products would combine forces to advertise our main product (the documentary) through different media. Of course, the ancillary texts must have some stylistic linkage to the documentary for the products to work well together and ultimately, appeal to our target audience.

Introduction

Target AudienceThe target audience for our documentary is mainly a middle class aged between 20 and 55 with mixed genders. While our documentary’s target audience is somewhat more defined due to the fact that we’re focusing more upon the stresses of lacking time or responsibilities such as children, we know that from most of our feedback, that the topic is quite easy to relate to whoever you are, which allows the documentary to appeal beyond our target audience to secondary audiences. The topic is based solely upon the issues of health & fitness in a modern society, but with a more sophisticated and mature tone for the slightly older primary target audience.

While some documentaries based their target audience upon other factors such as race, ethnicity, religion and so on, ours is specifically designed between an age range of 20 to 55 due to the likelihood of having such responsibilities and a full-time job to work around.

Magazine Article

The double page spread article develops and uses stylistic devices similar to the documentary. The first image that grabs the attention of the reader is the main image, which followed by the caption of ‘hitting the health & fitness myths’ creates strong linkage both between the image & caption and between the image & the documentary. Various quotes are also used in the body text itself, from the documentary from voiceover speech, which further develops the dominant linkage between the two products.

Even the words ‘Health & Fitness’ are show multiple times across the spread, almost as if you can’t avoid it. With the repetition and use of secondary imagery with ‘Health & Fitness’, the idea that this is a serious issue is constantly reinforced. Of course visuals are of the utmost importance upon first glance, and so the combination of main and secondary imagery, as this gives the reader a small insight into the contents of the documentary without revealing too much.

Magazine Article

Magazine Article Audience

For this particular ancillary task, an important decision had to be made upon which TV listings magazine to feature our double page spread article in, and so we chose the ‘Radio Times’ after plenty of research. The Radio Times is a very well known magazine and is popular with a large majority of the public. This alone raises the likelihood of the article being read (due to the increased spread of distribution) and in turn, the documentary being watched. The Radio Times was established in spring 1923 and has evidently been running ever since, and so should our article be featured in it, we can be sure that the company will advertise our documentary well. With a target audience of 15-44 it covers the majority of our age group which is ages 20-50 , which is very important as our only defining factor for our target audience is age. Also, luckily for us the ‘Radio Time’ has a split of 46% males and 52% females, which is a great split of gender as our target audience does not specify a gender.

Magazine Article Audience

Radio TrailerSimilarly to our other ancillary task, many features of the documentary are upheld in the radio trailer. With regards to background music, we have used the same website (www.freeplaymusic.com) to specify a genre and select music from it. This allowed up to include an energetic and lively feel in both the radio trail and the documentary, as the background music both based around funk music. Furthermore, we use extracts of our voxpops in the radio trail, which allowed us to present the audience with almost an intrigue as to where these extracts fit into the documentary. Another convention that we followed to create strong linkage was using the same voiceover; this would allow the audience to identify the tone of the documentary easily. Very similarly to our double page spread, we include the date, channel and viewing time for the documentary but using a different voiceover, which is conventional to radio trailers whilst delivering the same information that would have been delivered from the magazine article.

Radio TrailerThe use of extracts during the opening of the radio trail creates an immediate sense of intrigue with the listener as they are clueless to the documentary’s motive, but they have an idea of topic involved and so this leads them to listen onwards. As the trail develops, the listeners becomes more knowledgeable of the motive of the documentary and so gains further insight into it. In using the extracts of voxpops from the documentary itself we are able to feed the listeners information whilst retaining most of it from them to reveal later on in the main product, but at the same time we can create this real sense of intrigue and curiousity.

Radio Trailer AudienceWe have chosen for our radio trail to be aired on ‘BBC Radio 5 Live’, largely due to the emphasis that this radio station holds upon sport . The radio station has been averaging weekly listeners of ‘6,200,000’, a significant figure and will hopefully result in a more widespread distribution of information, resulting in an increasing likelihood of more viewers. The radio trail works effectively with the double page spread article to create a combination of set target audiences through the chosen methods of distribution, which should lead to the highest possible awareness created for the documentary.

ConclusionOverall the ancillary texts do a fantastic job of creating strong links to the main product not only using the same extracts etc, but using very similar style s and following a scheme. We have decided to publish the documentary on ‘Channel 4’, the double page spread article in ‘Radio Times and the radio trailer on ‘BBC Radio 5 Live’. The effect is that the media that we have created is more likely to reach our intended target audience as well as secondary audiences due to the similarities in target audiences for these publications, resulting a massive increase in the likelihood of widespread viewers.