Evaluation 2

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

Here is my video that I uploaded to Youtube:

Here is the transcript for the video:

As I was creating a Documentary about music fans – the first 5 minutes being focussed around an emo fan – when making my two ancillary tasks, the double-page spread and the newspaper advertisement, I had to make a clear link between the documentary and the two ancillary tasks. Doing so, would ensure continuity among the tasks when placed alongside each other so that it is clear that they are linked.

The first five minutes of the documentary was about an emo fan who listens to bands such as My ­­Chemical Romance who, during the height of their career, were associated with wearing heavy eyeliner with black, red and white clothing, which are commonly associated with the emo community. I attempted to link Billie, my main character, to this by requesting she wear a brand t-shirt and eyeliner for the interview sections in order to further fit the stereotype of a typical emo. Additionally, situating the interview in her bedroom with the posters in the background represent a stereotypical emo’s bedroom being covered in band posters and concert tickets. However, around the years of 2007-2010, being emo became heavily stigmatized and was associated with self-harm and depression which I have made a point to not include in my documentary when introducing Billie, as the whole message of the documentary is telling the audience that music doesn’t negatively affect people and being an Emo fan doesn’t necessarily force you into self-harm and depression. Although it is likely that when the audience are being presented with the documentary that they will interpret it in a negotiated way – both accepting and rejecting the message, most likely due to seeing Emo fans who fit the negative stereotype or reading the twisted news stories surrounding the genre -which is an example of Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding theory. Linking with Emo in general, I decided to use the colours of red, black and white associated with My Chemical Romance, in addition to the colour grey, for my colour palette in which I based my double-page spread and advertisement around. All of the colours I used were taken from the Channel 4’s colour palette stated from the document on their website about their advertising style.

As my documentary is catered towards Channel 4, I felt it was necessary to research their advertising style – more so for the newspaper advertisement. When doing my deconstructions of Newspaper adverts, there was one for the Channel 4 documentary series, One Born Every Minute, so when doing my double-page spread, I searched for a double-page spread for the same documentary series. From this, I looked for similarities between the two. Despite being made by different companies, I found that both had images that were associated with the programme, such as the image of babies on the advertisement and the image of the nurses holding babies on the article – linking to the documentary as it is likely that those babies were featured during it – showing continuity between the article, advertisement and the programme. Because of this, I decided to use a photograph of Billie in the article that was featured in the documentary in order to create continuity.

For my double-page spread, I felt that even with the image of Billie, the page felt too empty and disconnected from the documentary and advertisement. Therefore, I decided that the image that I used in the background of my Channel 4 style advertisement would also be the background of my article – however I firstly decreased the brightness of the image and applied a Gaussian Blur to it on Photoshop to make it less distracting to the readers. The image that I used for both backgrounds was a photograph of several piles of CDs to link with the documentary being about music and fans of music. Additionally, featured in the image are CDs by My Chemical Romance which links in with Billie, the emo fan.

Overall, when creating my ancillary tasks, I tried to make them link as closely to my documentary as possible, making everyone fully aware that the documentary is about music without even seeing it and only seeing the article and advertisement. Due to this, I feel that I have been successful in creating links and continuity between the three tasks, although I feel that certain aspects aren’t as effective as others – such as the image of Billie in the article not necessarily making it 100% clear that she is an emo fan.