Creating the poster

Myself and Conor thought it would be beneficial if we done our own seperate mock-ups of potential adverts for the documentaries and then we could then compare eachothers, recieve feedback and seek ways to improve eachothers, possibly by using ideas from eachothers ideas and putting them together.
I did not have a great experience of photoshop before beginning this task, however spending some time with my teacher and with some help from Conor I was able to understand the different tools and what they do.

I learnt quickly how to change the colour of fonts, and important elements such as the Channel 4 logo, by using the shortcut Ctrl + U. This helped me significantly to make my adverts. I also learnt about the magic whip tool and layers.

Channel 4 documentary in a newspaper

In this post I will focus specifically on a Channel 4 advert which is published in a newspaper, this is because our advert is intended to feature in a newspaper or magazine.

This is a picture taken straight from a newspaper which shows an advert of a documentary which is focusing on the pregnancy of certain women. This advert has the same lay out as the typical channel 4 advert, for example it has the large image to capture the consumers eye, which also can be slightly controversial (babies on a conveyer belt). It also has met what is expected in terms of the same colour for the Channel 4 logo and the background for the text.



This is a picture of the same advert just from the view of the whole two page spread, therefore you can see the size of the advert in relation to the pages.
As you can see the advert is the size of half a page, which I believe is a good size. I say this because as you can see there is a Ryanair advert on the other page however, I believe this size would not enhance the documentary advert, because the size would not be the same, however the large Ryanair advert may draw consumers to that page, which is a bonus for Channel 4, as their advert is right next to it.

Therefore when myself and Conor are preparing our advert we will take this into account, with regards to the size of the image and what its surroundings are.

Channel 4 documetary adverts

As myself and Conor thought it could be best to assosiate our documentary with Channel 4, we thought it would be wise to analyse their previous documentary and to look at the features of these products. We have shortlisted channel 4 documentaries to assosiate our product with because we feel they have produced a few in the past, which also specifically relate to missing people which is what ours is also about.

One main thing I have noticed about still adverts for channel 4 documentaries is that they are all very similar in their own way.





As you can see with these four still adverts produced by Channel 4, they all have the logo for this channel somewhere in the image. I believe this is so they do not need to use space on the advert to say what channel the documentary will be on, because this logo is seen to me known by many people. Therefore by being a popular logo and also representing the number 4, consumers will know what channel to sign into, which I feel is a good, smart way of telling the viewers what channel to tune into.
With regards to this logo, it also seems to fit in well with the colour scheme of the advert. For example three of the images have a white logo, which fits in well with the fairly bright image in the background. Whereas the one which has a black logo is about crime and bank robberies and is a darker image in the background, therefore the black logo fits the mood and the image better.

With these adverts the logo also links in with the limited writing there is. This is because the dominant colour of the logo is the same colour as the background for the writing. I feel this is a good technique because it makes the advert look neater I feel, which may appeal to the audience's eye, which in turn is their main aim.

Furthermore with regards to the text, Channel 4 have tried to limit themselves to use the least amount of text as possisble, this is because they do not want an advert with a huge amount of writing which could lead consumers to not look at it, as it may look boring in their eyes. Therefore they try to limit the amount of text as much as they can with only including the bare minimum so the consumers can understand what the documentary is about (possibly via the name of the programme) and when it is on.

As you can see in the previous images some of them have the title of the programme, some also have a little pun such as 'who wants to be a millionaire'. They also say the day when it is on and the time, and as you can see three of these documentaries are being shown at 9pm, which Conor and myself will have to take into account when creating our own advert.

However despite these previous features of Channel 4 documentaries, I feel the most important aspect is the image in the background. I believe this because this is the main aspect of the advert which is supposed to catch the eye of the consumers. The images need to relate to the topic of the advert yet they can also be a bit perculiar and possibly seen as controvesial, still with relevance. For example the advert about britains lost children shows a young girl being sucked into the floor which could make her dissapear, which many people may not be comfortable with seeing, however it is likely to get their attention, which is the main point of these adverts.

Therefore to conclude, I believe these adverts are seen to be fairly simple, with a lot of meaning behind them. I believe the main image will be the most important asset for us, however I also believe we need to find the right text to use in our advert and need to follow the features of these adverts to hopefully get our advert to be just as effective.