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

One of the more prominent examples of synergy between our main product and ancillary tasks is the use of vox pop answers in our radio trailer. We used student answers from our documentary in the radio trailer advertising the documentary to help set the context further of the documentary, applying the combination of both the documentary subject and location context also. I feel this was very effective and is also attractive for our target audience as 16-21 year olds may recognise that the voices in the radio trailer are those of young adults, meaning their attention may be instantly more drawn, and they may also agree with the views displayed by the students, making the documentary a media product which they can relate to, giving them more incentive to watch it. Based on this, I feel the combination of the main product and radio trailer worked effectively. However, one example of poor synergy is the fact that we used Finnlea to do the voiceover on our radio trailer. The main reason that this isnt effective is because we got Matt to do the voiceover for our main product. This makes the products inconsistent. If Matt had done the voiceover on the radio trailer, there would have been a more consistent figure to relate the documentary to, which may give our target audience something to remember the documentary by, which may have been Matts voice and figure. The combination of the main product and double page spread is an example of effective synergy also. In our double page spread, we used lots of stills from our main product. Not only is this an example of following the codes and conventions of magazine double page spread in the context of tv magazines, but it also clearly shows how the main product looks to the reader and would hopefully appeal to our target audience. 16-21 Year olds may be more appealed to the double page spread because the majority of the images picture students, in some relevant scenes to an average student. One criticism which I have of the combination of the main product and double page spread is that we did not include enough imagery which clearly relates to our subject; body confidence. This may mean that our target audience or anybody reading may interpret it as a documentary about a college; this is also not helped by the fact that it does not clearly state the title of our documentary anywhere. This is an example of the theory which was introduced by Stuart Hall, the audience reception theory. Our preferred interpretation of the double page spread is that it is clearly a documentary about body confidence, using the case study of a college for further opinions and views. However, a different audience interpretation may be that it is a documentary on a college, with no clear subject, at first. An effective combination of our ancillary texts is that we clearly stated the time and channel which the documentary is to be aired on, meaning that our target audience can easily see this and know exactly when to watch it. Overall, I feel for the most part, the combination of our main product and ancillary texts has very effective synergy and is mostly very clear that they are all related and they appeal to our target audience. Apart from some little mistakes here and there which do bring down the overall effectiveness of the combination, I am mostly happy with how effective our combination of texts and products was and feel as if we did it to a good stand, suitable to the target audience.