Beginning my ancillary products- Print Advert

 I have recently started to progress with completing the ancillary products to supplement my documentary piece. I began with my print advertisement, as I had a very clear idea of what it was that I would be aiming to produce, from the research that I have conducted into the conventions and styles of existing Channel4 products of this nature. Initially I chose to start with this rather than my TV listings magazine double page spread, due to assuming that it would be something that would not be too time consuming. Firstly I began with making some minor adjustments to the image that I selected from those I had taken whilst staying in Yorkshire of the two show pony producers I will be documenting. For this I only needed to take several shots as I already had a very clear vision of what I wanted; something simple, capturing both of them stood outside of a stable with a horses head reaching over the door from between them.

 

 However I greatly underestimated the time and patience that would be required when adding the logo and text to my advertisement. After finding two very detailed style guides to the rules and guidelines of creating a Channel4 print ad, I decided that in order to make my own production as precise as possible I would follow these exactly. Although I was already aware after reading through these that the measurements and margins involved in placing the Channel4 logo in the correct position and at the right scale would be difficult, I completely underestimated just how long it would take. There were a wide variety of elements that this included, the most challenging of which being constructing the isolation area around the logo. This was something that had to be completely exact to the guide lines given, thus I had to conduct multiple mathematical equations in order to achieve this. However now that I have completed it  I am extremely pleased that I did so, as it has meant that I am confident that I have followed the conventions of a real Channel4 ad as closely as possible.
 In terms of the text positioning, as well as its size and the colour of the text box surrounding it, the guide lines were no where near as strict, meaning that this was the easy part. I simply matched the colour of the text box to that of the logo, (which was the same as the lightest tone of Craig's cap). I then positioned this in the bottom left hand corner, which from my research proved to be the most common place for text to be inserted.

The only major change that I needed to make to my image was to reverse it. When shooting for my print advert I was aware that in the composition and framing of my images I would need to allow room for the Channel4 logo's required isolation area and positioning indicated by the style guides. Nevertheless once I had cropped the image down to the size and frame that I felt was the most effective, I found that there was not enough room to accommodate this, hence the need to reverse the image so that this issue would be resolved and the conventions till maintained.

Titles

A common generic convention of television documentaries is the use of titles and captions so that the audience are fully aware of who, or what, they are seeing on screen in the mise-en-scene. This is particularly common with talking heads interviews.

When editing my documentary I added titles and captions accordingly but was not happy with the initial results; the font was too plain and distracted the audience from the documentary. I therefore decided to use Photoshop to further develop this convention, and establish a further relationship between my documentary and ancillary products. I used the C4 font, and borrowed the colour scheme from my promotional advertisement to construct three titles:

1) AT HOME - the title of the documentary
2) Craig Elenor - caption for the first talking heads interview
3) Sara Parrott - caption for the second talking heads interview.



This is the main documentary title screen.

This is the caption that will appear with Craig is first introduced to the audience.

 This is the caption that will appeal when Sara is first introduced to the audience.


As you can see I have clearly followed the established conventions of using the Channel 4 font, with a coloured background behind. The colours connote the rural setting of the documentary, and also follow a clear colour scheme. The horse icon is playful and follows the documentary's light hearted and 'homely' tone. I was particularly pleased with the results, which you can see below.

Final draft of script

The Craig Eleanor Equestrian Agency. Run by Sara Parrot and Craig Elenor; two of showings most successful competitors. We headed up to their newly established yard in North Yorkshire, to find out more about this promising combination and what lies ahead for the forth coming season.

At the very top of his craft, Craig has taken championships at some of the most prestigious shows in the country. Regularly competing at The Horse of the Year Show, winning the overall Cuddy supreme accolade, with the six-year old riding pony stallion, Rendene Royal Charm.

Also no stranger to success, Sara Parrot is a well-known face in the ridden coloured classes. The non- native pony stallion, Winchester D swept the board for Sara, shown here winning at the Horse of the Year show in 2010.

But what is the day to day running of such a successful showing yard, producing ponies and horses to the very highest standard?

One of the teams open ridden ponies to be shown this season is Severnvale George, to be competed in the mountain and moorland class.

However it is not just about showing the open ponies, a large element of Sara and Craig’s role is breaking and schooling the young horses, preparing them for a potential show career.

Beginning of Editing Review

I have recently started to edit some of the footage filmed for my documentary and began to develop my introduction. Despite having used Premiere Pro once before for my preliminary task, I am still very much new to the software and thus I am still learning about how to use it. Having thoroughly planned my production with story boards and timelines and having a clear idea in my head as to what it is that I aim to create, I have been able to edit footage rather quickly in terms of the order of which my shots will follow. The more difficult part of my editing that I had greatly underestimated is syncing my transitions successfully to my background music, Clap Tap. This is something that not only requires paying a great amount of attention to detail to the song, but also due to the variations of pace, tone and introduction of new instruments, this has in turn been something that I have needed to account for regarding the shot sequences. This is probably the most time consuming element of my editing so far, stressing the need to watch and review my production over and over again to ensure that my shot transitions and pace are edited at exactly the right point.

 
After starting the process of beginning to edit, I decided to make folders within which to categorise all of my shots. Since I had to complete all of my filming during such a short period of allocated time, I re-shot everything several times, to ensure that there would be enough variation of shots to choose from when it came to editing. However this obviously left me with an abundance of footage, which meant that when scrolling through it all to find a particular shot I was wasting a great amount of time.

Analysing Channel4 print advertisments

Annotating channel 4 print ads from Molly Kushner