Newspaper Advert - Production

Before I started work on InDesign with my original idea, I came up with a better concept for my newspaper advert. The idea I came up with looked more like a film poster than a radio drama advert. This new concept that I'm going to run with follows more of the conventions of the radio drama ads I looked at in my research.

Basically, the date and time of broadcast will be at the top of the advert, accompanied by the radio station logo. In our group we decided on Radio 7 because it broadcasts the most drama and comedy, and is a BBC radio station. BBC radio stations reach wide and varied audiences across the world. After the information comes the title of the drama. This is following the basic convention of having the text in an easy to read order from top to bottom. I chose the font "More Than Human" from Dafont.com because I felt it was the most striking and best fitted to our drama's genre. I downloaded the font for free and installed it on my computer.

Installing "More Than Human" Font

I decided to come up with a tagline for the radio drama, this isn't a usual convention of radio drama ads, but I added one to make it different. I included on the ad the rhetorical question: "what possessed him to do it?". This makes viewers of the ad ask themselves the question and the only way to find out the answer is to tune in. It also adds mystery to the drama.

After the title comes the main image. From the ads that I have looked at, it's usually one image, in the center of the ad. I have decided to use a portrait of two of the main characters that the drama centers around: Teena and Zane. I have made two different ads, one with Teena as the main image and one with Zane. I decided to use the test shot of Teena that I took because it came out really well. But I re-took the Zane portrait to get a better image. I decided to put the portraits against a white background to make them stand out a lot. The white background will make all the features of the ad stand out. It also adds more mystery by only giving viewers the text and the image to give them an idea of the drama.

I opened the photograph of my model for Teena in Photoshop. Using the Quick Selection Tool, I highlighted her and then cut her out. 

The portrait cut out from the background

I then blurred the edges of the portrait to take the edge off of the cut. From here, I started experimenting with different filters to add a spookier edge to the portrait.

I eventually decided on the filter seen directly above in the screen shot. It makes her look ghostly, mysterious and gives the ad more edge than just a simple portrait. Then once I had finished with the portrait, I began putting my ad together in InDesign, following the layout I had decided on. I found the Radio 7 logo using a google images search.

Once I had completed my ad, I exported it as both a PDF file and a JPEG file.