2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary task?
I believe that our main product and the ancillary tasks have a close relationship in which the ancillary tasks which consist of the radio trailer and a newspaper article in the form of a poster share the common goal of enticing the audience into noticing the documentary and in turn getting them to watch the main product. These tasks allowed me use a different medium of communication to get in contact with the different audiences including that of our target audience which was both males and females of the age of 12 upwards. This may seem a broad spectrum but as explained on our blog our research showed us those children as young as 12 from both sexes were drinking in both public places and in private. The different mediums we used consisted of the visual form in terms of the poster which was created with a view to be being put into a newspaper to advertise the documentary, this was an interesting task as I found it interesting learning what essentially makes a good and bad poster as through my drafts I experienced both of these. The verbal element that I implemented in my ancillary task would be the radio trailer I created which was a very engaging activity as I have never created a radio trailer before and every element was something new to me. The radio trailer as a whole caused me problems from the outset in terms of how to set it out but I based it on a simple but effective template; introduce the documentary with time, date, and channel, play a exert from the documentary and then repeat documentary title, time, date and channel. As most people are quick to blame politicians for matters of this sort such as the public drinking ban I was quick to point out via my radio trailer that perhaps everything isn’t they’re fault and they shouldn’t be blamed it the ban is deemed as a failure so I decided to use an clip from paramedic Kim Wheatley’s interview in which he explains that he believes that “A ban is only as good as the policing of it” which I believed to be a powerful statement and apt enough to be put into the ancillary task. For the voiceover in my radio trailer I naturally used the same person who performed the voiceover for the main product to aid with continuity, Toby Marshall. I also chose Mr Marshall as he has what might be deemed by some to have the accent of the masses, meaning that he doesn’t have what could be perceived as an upper-class accent which would make him somewhat disjointed from main audience as it is stereotypically the lower/middle classes from the E, D and perhaps C2 social demographic sections of society that would participate in public drinking. By repeating the time, date and channel as well as the name of documentary within my trailer it anchors the elements within the audience member so as they have a greater chance of remembering and therefore watching the documentary. I would like to think that my poster is unique not because of its format as I have already stated that it has a generic format but in its content and in its efforts to help the main product succeed. When doing my poster I originally was rather lax in my approach as wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to set it out so I simply took some photographs of a friend from different angles with the title over the top and the website in the corner (see Figure 4). Not surprisingly, this was a very poor first draft of my poster which neither enticed nor kept the attention of the audience. I then metaphorically went back to the drawing board and came up with an idea in which I would get someone to pose on a park bench (being in the public area) with beer cans littered around them, this then posed a problem as none of my friends said they wouldn’t be willing to be deal with the social stigma that the photo might bring so I decided to take it upon myself to get my grade to step in and be in front of the camera instead of behind it. I then chose to edit this image using the free photo editing software “GIMP” by de-saturating it, giving it a greyscale effect (see Figure 5) and then in colour to add emphasis I added a no drinking in public sign on to the leg of bench I was laying on (see Figure 6). The combination of these 2 ancillary tasks with my main product therefore creates a somewhat co-dependent relationship between the 2 in that they both need each to be seen otherwise the main product will not be seen without the advertising and the advertising would not make sense without the main product, this then creates a very effective combination.
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