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

For the three products I created for my A2 media portfolio, the first five minuted of a documentary, a radio trailer and a double page spread, I planned to create a clear brand identity linking the three products as part of the same project. There were many aspects I had to consider through the creation of the three products, including the images, text, music and the title itself 'Mental Health in Education'.

Firstly I feel I have achieved making all three products target the audience I was hoping for (teenagers 13-19) very successfully. This was achieved by making the products appealing to young people, along with being informative I had to ensure that they were actually interesting to look at/listen to. Especially with the film and the DPS it was important to make sure they looked visually appealing, this involved using interesting and in the DPS's case colourful and vibrant so to catch the eye of the reader. Both used what I feel was visually interesting content where clearly a lot was going on and the audience had a lot to look at as they took in the information.

As shown here we made sure the content (information) was not left floating on its own in a way I feel young people would find boring if there is noting but large block of text to look at. Therefore on the DPS I used a series of graphics as shown in the image on the left to accompany the text to make the DPS as a whole look much more interesting. The same goes for the documentary shown on the left where when text was shown on the screen there was a time lapse filmed inside the college so there wasn't just text, the screen seems more organic and vibrant.

The radio advert was harder to make appeal to the target audience I chose, this was because there is no visual aspect to it meaning I had to put all the appeal into the audio. This meant I had to make the whole trailer sound powerful and passionate, otherwise the audience would have no interest. However due to the fact that it is based on mental health problems, I could not make it sound too happy, as it is a very serious topic. Therefore I feel that the radio trailer I created would appeal more to the secondary audience of my product, the parents of students. The trailer I created is quite sad sounding while being passionate at the same time, this is something I feel would appear more to parents. This is because something that could be affecting their child presented in this passionate manner would likely peak their interest as they would want to find out more about it. Especially as the trailer uses language such as having students themselves in a sound bite saying there should be more support available for young people.

As a whole the language used in the three products was key to making sure the attention of the target audience was received. All three products used language that would make sure the audience would almost feel worried about the problems with mental health. This was something I hoped would happen as the target of our film is to bring light the problems of mental health within the education system. Therefore all three products used language such as your friends could be suffering and out of 60 million people in the UK 15 million of them will experience a mental health issue at some point in their life.

Here is an example of the language used on the DPS stressing the extent of how many people can be affected by the issue of mental health. Statements such as this will grab the attention of the audience and hopefully make them want to see the film to learn more.

Brand identity was an important part of the creation of the three products. I had to ensure that on face value it was clear that the three products were part of the same project. This involved various things such as using images across the products, mainly the DPS and the film:

Here shows how the expert interviewed in the film has also been used in the DPS. This is effective as it allows people to link the products together simply based on what they see as something like this will be much more recognisable than just using the same font for example. The topic of the film was 'Mental Health in Education'. Therefore for the DPS we wanted to focus a lot on the education aspect, this mean the theme of the DPS turned out to be very classroom orientated. The background for the DPS was a cork board and most of the text appeared to be on sticky notes or torn pieces of paper. This makes the theme of the DPS seem like its lots of random notes being hung up in a classroom. This will hopefully make people link the two products in their head as being very much about education, which was one of the aims of the project as a whole, as the issue being explored mainly is the problems within the education system.

When it came to linking the radio trailer to the film it was very easy, this was because I was able to use sound bites from the film itself to create most of the radio trailer. Besides from the voice over all other sound came from the film. The two products share the same music, clips from the VOX POPs and also clips form the expert interviews.

The aim of the ancillary products created alongside the film was to get attention for the film and make people want to go and watch. This was something that I feel was achieved fairly well by the ancillary products. They both heavily focused on trying to get people to tune in and watch the film, they pointed towards the idea that the audience needed to go watch the film as being aware of mental health issues was something they needed to be able to say about themselves. Both ancillary products both gave teasers to what the audience can expect to see when they watch the full film. For example the radio trailer says young people will be able to voice their opinions, this is the kind of thing that will make people want to watch the whole film to find out more.