TV News: Contextual Research, The Gadget Show

TV News: Contextual Research, The Gadget Show

As part of my ongoing research for this project I made it my mission to look at a variety of news sources and related channels. 

One of the big inspirations for the "Carology" channel and brand was channel 5's "The Gadget Show". Since we are looking at the modern car industry, latest developments in car/electric car technology. The Gadget Show was a great source of inspiration especially since they did an entire episode dedicated to electric cars. 

Since the show has ran for multiple seasons it has had a chance to really build up its brand. It's primary colors are white pink and sometimes blue, similar to our house style, since it represents futuristic and modern technology. There logo also looks similar to a power button as ours looks similar to a car wheel, I liked the idea of having our logo reflect the brand. 

There pieces are always very presenter lead, they tend to guide the audience and inject human personality in to the facts. Alex does a great job at doing this in our project. 

Since they are a news/update show who aim at tech enthusiasts, naturally they have to discuss the heavy facts and statistics. In the electric car episode they discuss the range of models heavily. We also wanted to look at this in our piece as it is an interesting topic that opens up the table for multiple discussion points/opinions. So we wanted to take this one step further and look at the cost effectiveness of electric cars compared to petrol.

When watching the show I noted that whenever they stated facts or compared statistics they always had this visually represented by text or graphics on screen. This is something I had considered but never really given much thought to.

When I brought this up in a discussion with Helen the other day she said that this was an excellent idea; especially if your getting in to fact heavy discussion its important to present this info on screen to make it easier for the audience to take in. I will begin working on this. I was inspired by some of the freeze framing/slow motion shots they used in the episode that allowed facts to appear on screen for a short time. I think I can implement something similar in our project. 

 There were a few other things I noted when watching the show. 

Firstly they always made sure to get a balanced opinion on whatever they were reviewing. They would either do this by getting more than one opinion or by directly comparing it to something similar. This is something we want to make sure we do in our project, we have several interviewees prepared and will work out what order to place them to get a balanced opinion. 

Other things I noted included the use of GFX, (something I'm working on); simple transitions between studio and location; multiple presenters; frequent use of house colors and font; very targeted towards intended audience.

All of which has been useful inspiration for our project. I think I can implement a lot of what I picked up here to strengthen our piece and make it look more professional.