Thursday 3 April 2014

Evaluation
The task to come up with a plan to regenerate a local community area was one with distinct challenging aspects but also allowed us to work amongst others and in a team. Within my team consisting of Janvi Bhalla, Megan Byford, Megan Webster and myself, we all managed to contribute our inspiring ideas for Baldock’s future evenly and within our idea to regenerate Baldock’s extremely underused museum into a youth club. We created two forms of linked media products; these were linked print and digital media products which we used in order to reach both our target audience of teenagers and their parents by using what we thought were appealing features on these products. The digital products included our website, short film and facebook and twitter pages and the print products included our 3 leaflets and posters. We linked the two forms together by continuing the same house style throughout. We included our slogan, name and logo on all of the products to makes sure we were recognisable and memorable. We used the colours from the logo (green and red) as a theme for some of the backgrounds and font colours on our products because we thought this encouraged the link between our products and also made the products look more whole and professional as there was a running style throughout. On each product we also used elements of slang and informal language amongst the text in order for it to appeal to our target audience more. Another way we appealed to them was by including our social media links on all products in a clear manor to make sure they were easily visible, as we know ‘stereotypically’ teenagers frequently use them.

To meet my clients brief I firstly did some in depth research into both previous community campaigns and campaigns focused on more of a national scale. I analysed every aspect of these campaigns to see what forms of persuasive techniques they used as well as how they displayed their products presentation wise and which media platforms they decided to use. I analysed a wide range of campaigns with varying target audiences including political campaigns aimed at 18+’s and public safety campaigns aimed at 13-18 year olds. It was astonishing to see the contrasting features used within their media products including which images they chose to include, as well as how many. I found this really helpful for when it came to the group work and expressing each of our own refreshing views on how to lay out our media products as we had all analysed a wide range of successful previous campaigns and so had lots of useful and relevant ideas. Furthermore I also researched the conventions of a campaign because I wanted to know a variety of different features that are typically found on a campaign so we would be able to recreate them when it came to our own campaign designs.
When it came to the group work we did some preliminary research into both the teenagers’ and the general population of Baldock’s views on Baldock’s current state and if they thought that they felt part of a community, and which areas they felt were the most underused. We put our results into graphs so we could analyse them to see what conclusions we could come to. We found from this that many of the people we interviewed, both adults and teenagers thought that Baldock museum was one of the most underused buildings locally and that they felt that Baldock was generally lacking some ‘community spirit’. This was when we first got the idea for turning Baldock museum into a youth club as we saw that lots of teenagers thought it was a great idea, so we tailored our ideas to suite their feedback. All of this research brought us closer to meeting our client’s brief.

Our products appropriately targeted our target audience of teenagers aged 13-16 by, in all forms, including lots of images to inspire them and trigger their imaginations to keep them interested. As voiced before, we also used quite informal language so that they felt as though they could relate to us which we thought was quite an appealing aspect of our media products. We also made absolutely sure to include our social networking links as we are well aware that teenagers are ‘stereotypically’ frequently using these websites on their phones, tablets or computers. We know that it is really important to keep up to date with technology which is why we also made a website to reach out to the teenagers from all areas of technology because it is evident that technology plays a major part in the young generation’s lives. We took the photographs of the museum on a dull and rainy day as we wanted to present it in an unappealing way.

We made sure not to include any ‘sexist’ content as we wanted out products to appeal to both genders in every way possible. This was done by including the correct house style in order to represent all teens as well as we could. We also wanted our campaign to look as realistic and genuine as possible so included all the key conventions of a campaign which we had gained knowledge from in previous individual research.


We scheduled our production of our print and digital products by dividing out the work equally and then making filming schedules for our short documentary. We wrote scripts for our short film and this allowed us to feel more organised and therefore create the most fluent and effective film we could. Finally, we also set deadlines for ourselves in which we would each have to get a certain assigned task done by. This allowed us all to equally stay up to date, and not go off track.

We took into consideration the rules and regulations that might affect some of our images used so we made sure to only use ones that we took ourselves on our official media products to prevent breaking any ‘copyright’ rules.

In our team we found that we were very easily able to share our ideas and develop them successfully together by equally sharing out the work we had to do such as designing the print and digital media products. Although we worked on things separately, we were constantly checking to see the other members of the group’s views on our design to see if it was appealing and attractive enough and to check if it linked in with their designs. My contribution to the group was the production of Posters 1 and 2 which were aimed at teenagers as well as the making and designing of the second page of the website which was the ‘ideas’ page. I tried to link all of these together by having a running house style of similar fonts, colours and layouts. The main colours used were greens, blues and reds as they are quite gender neutral colours so it meant that we were able to target a wider audience and get more people involved in the campaign. I included images of the museum on each of them as well as doodles such as ‘headphones’ which gave small hints as to some of the activities that might take place at the youth club and also added to the stylish design of the products, thus appealing to our target audience of teenagers who are known for their love of style.

In my opinion I think our campaign on a whole was very successful as we were very easily able to communicate and work well in a team as well as being able to create attractive and appealing designs for our media products which suited our target audience. Our ideas also linked to the brief in that we wanted to regenerate the underused local community place, Baldock museum, and turn it into a youth club for young people in order to benefit the community.

If we had had more time I would have liked to of tried out some more short films to advertise our campaigns to see if different music, lightings and images created a more appealing or less appealing effect. I think that we could have also developed our social media sites further and added more posts given more time. However, overall in the time we had I think we created some really detailed and refreshing ideas for the Baldock museum and I think our designs for our media products were both appealing and unique. Our group worked well together and we are very pleased with what we achieved.

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