1. EVALUATION OF A2
MEDIA
COURSEWORK
How effective is the combination of your main
product and ancillary texts?

2.  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.

3.  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.

4.  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.

5.  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 isn't 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.

6.  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.