Evaluation

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

The documentary is targeted at the age range of 16 – 35 as this is the age group that we thought would be most interested in tattoos. We appealed to the target audience by using a young adult to do the narration for both the documentary and radio advert. They used an informal tone which related to the audience. We chose channel 4 as they have a lot of experience with young adults as their target audience involves a lot of our target audience and also they frequently show documentaries which are by up and coming film makers. So in order to keep with our target audience we did use some stock images of celebrities with tattoos and some young people who explain their opinion on the topic. These are good as they help to keep our audience engaged as celebrities and other young people are a major influence for why people get tattoos and what they get.

A direct mode of address is used in the main product and both of the ancillary texts. On the poster the question is asked, ‘To ink or not to ink?’ almost a rhetorical question, it asks the audience making them think. In the radio advert the listener is asked, ‘do you want a tattoo?’ and ‘do you even like tattoos?’ these questions are informative to an extent as they indicate how the questions might be answered in the documentary.

Throughout the documentary there is theme of black and white. Even though not everything is in black and white, the theme stands out still against other parts. This could be because tattoos are a lot of the time colourful and have lots going on which connotes a lot of things so to have black and white parts it almost creates calm and balances out the colours and the craziness of the documentary. It also allows the filmmakers to be neutral and to not have an opinion, and allows the audience to question and consider what they believe is the answer to ‘to ink or not to ink?’

 

Humor is another part which links the 3 pieces together. These parts can often be seen as exaggerated with the reactions from people taking part in the vox pops. Certain faces they pull allow for the audience to see the humor in how they have reacted, this can also been seen in other parts of the documentary such as in the interview with Dave, the tattoo artist from dark arts, jokes about his personal experiences and things he has dealt with in his job as a tattoo artist. This again helps to relate to the target audience as they would appreciate the humor rather than just a serious documentary. 

The radio advert also has a sense of light hearted humor as we used sound clips from the documentary which would catch the listeners’ attention and make them interested and want to hear more. The narrator also uses upward inflections which make the speech seem more interesting along with the questions which are asked then the sound bites used. The narrator asks ‘have you really thought about it?’ to then two sound clips are next and respond with ‘'you’re gonna regret it because you've not really thought about it that much’ and ‘I ended up with Jake Forshaw on my left bum cheek’. So this adds the humor but also keeps it about the documentary and about engaging the audience.

 We chose to use metal music in our documentary as tattoos have in the past tended to have been associated with people with tattoos. We wanted to use music as a sound bed not only in the documentary but also in the radio advert as we thought it made them both flow easily. A lot of young people may also relate to this music as they may like it which links the audience and the pieces,

Overall the three pieces complement each other quite well with the mix of areas which relate through the ancillary texts and main product. 

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We got some people to watch the 'eye of the needle' so that they could give us some feedback. Overall the response was that the documentary was good and interesting but there were some pointers on how to improve.

 From our feedback we have learnt that people thought that the documentary was entertaining as in response to our question ‘on a scale of 1-5 how entertaining do you think our documentary was?’ one response was, ‘5 because you… gave a good overview of everything like you covered a lot of aspects’ and ‘5 because I think it was really entertaining, cause it was informative but funny’ and ‘4 for entertainment, it had some funny moments in’. The responses linked with our target audience of 16 – 35 and our general view of the documentary being more informal that formal it’s good that the audience relate to this and see the documentary in a serious and fun way.

When asked the question about the professionalism of the documentary in comparison to documentaries seen on TV, the responses were generally a 3 or 4 on the scale of 1-5 as most said it was good as an amateur level but probably not yet at the level of a TV professional documentary.  Another person said a 4 because everyone was professional in it, like it was produced professionally just because of obvious things like you don’t have the same studio and experience as normal documentary makers.’

In response to ‘on a scale of 1 -5, how informative do you think our documentary is?’ one responded with it was ‘very informative although it was a bit general like it just went with the whole tattoo thing, it didn’t really specify one particular part of tattoos.’ And another said: ‘4 and a half because all the information on tattoos was really good and it gave me like a good range of views’ but then goes onto say how she would of liked to have heard more about a certain part which was in the documentary. These opinions are helpful, although the clip they saw was only of the first five minutes and so it is hard for them to give a full view on the content which would appear in the rest of the documentary.

On the subject of the technicalities of our documentary, a lot rated it at about a 4 saying they like the music and how ‘tattoos are normally associated with that genre’ but how there were some faults in the editing. 

When asked to comment on how enticing the opening sequence was in terms of making them want to carry on and watch more, one responded with ‘yeah because I really liked the music, the black and white theme and the drawing on the back because that is what a tattoo is, like drawing on somebody’s skin and I thought that was quite an interesting and different way to look at it because it just brought tattoos down to their essence, like what they actually are.’

Overall we gained good feedback that gave us both good points and bad points which let us know how we could improve on it.

Evaluation Q4 from jodie95