1) In what ways does your media product use,

develop or challenge forms and conventions. For our project we had to create the opening 5 minutes of a documentary on a topic of our choice.

In order to get an idea of what our documentary we would have to be like we watched a few examples of documentaries in order to learn some conventions that are common in documentaries.

The examples we watched were A documentary by Morgan Spurlock “Supersize Me” in which he investigated the effects of fast food by only eating McDonalds for 30 days.

And Spinal Tap. This was a fake documentary that follows a fake rock band called Spinal tap. And although this was a fake documentary we still took a lot away from it as a lot of the common conventions we see in documantaries are there.

Existing Documentaries

We decided though the twoi documenatries we viewed had some feaurtes we would like to include, there were things we wanted to do different, as supersize me uses a particapatory mode we wanted to an expesontional mode.

Initial Ideas

Our next step was to begin to plan what our documentary was going to be on we came up with a few potential options but decided to choose smoking as our topic.

Documentaries on our topic

After we decided our topic we then viewed existing documentaries on topic in order to get an idea of what our documentary should be like. We watched 2 examples

• BBC Horizon

• Talking Butts smoking Documentary

Conventions

After watching examples of documentaries we had a good idea about how to make an effective documentary •Opening montage: The first part of a documentary is a feature of the poetic mode the opening montage. This is a series of fast pace clips used in order to attract the audiences attention and give them and idea of what the documentary will be about. It does this by use of short clips from interviews both professional and vox pops, clips of other things related to the topic such as videos of cigarettes etc and information shown through graphics and graphs. All this is accompanied by a voice over to help give more information.

Conventions

• Voiceover: A key feature we used that features in most documentaries especially those of an expositional mode which is the mode ours leans most towards. The voiceover is a sound only voice we do not see the speaker but she is often heard throughout. The voiceover is important as it helps to narrate the documentary and explain to the audience who people are and give key information and facts to help the audience understand the topic.

• Establishing shots: Establishing shots of a location the shot often is taken from a distance and pans in order to give the audience a wide view of the location. We used establishing shots in our documentary to show our audience where we were helping to set the scene.

Conventions

• Interviews: Another important feature that features in many documentaries we used 2 different types of interview in our documentary

• Vox pop: a vox pop interview are short fast interviews with members of the public, this allows the public to give there view on the topic.

• Professional: interviews with professionals on the topic for example we used a nurse, these interviews allow us to get an in depth detail on the topic. This is usefull as it allows the viewer to get scientific facts about the subject from a reliable source.

Conventions

• Shot composure: The way we composed our shots in interviews was Important we set up the shot so that the interviewee would sit to one side looking across the dead space this reduces the amount of the space that’s wasted, we also stressed to our interviewee not to look at the camera.

Looking across dead space

Lab coat and skeleton clearly show she’s a scientist.

•Mise en scene: The mise en scene is a way of showing a persons role in an interview this is because we pick up various signs from the background and what a person is wearing so a good mise en scene helped us show people our profesinals can be trusted.

Conventions

• graphics: Titles and graphics helped us to show other information we could not portray, such as questions for vox pops, graphs. It also helps makes good background footage for our voiceover to speak over

• Titles: Titles help us give information about our interviewees as well as showing the name of the documentary.

Conventions

• Cut a ways: We used cut a ways to make our interview more interesting, by cutting a way to another clip whilist the interviewee is speaking we cut a way to a video related to what they were saying keeping our audiences’ attention as the pace of the fast pace clips is maintained.

• Background footage: We gathered various clips of footage such as over the shoulder shots of people looking at something related to smoking in order to use as background footage, background footage is used so we could have some footage for while our voice over was speaking.

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

House style • Throughout making our documentary, radio trailer and TV listings magazine we tried

to maintain a constant house style. In order to do this we used the music and speech clips from our documentary in our radio trailer as well as using the same person to do the voiceover for both. And we used images from our documentary in our article.

• Target audience: It was important that we knew our target audience in order to make our 3 products appealing. We chose an audience we felt the subject would be important to in the end we decided smoking most effects teenagers so we choose a target audience of between 16 and 26, we felt that the topic effected all genders and ethnicity however so we decided to aim it at both males and females of any ethnicity.

Channels • Knowing our target audience the selection of where we would put our three

products was important as the three we selected would all have to correspond with one another

• Documentary: We felt the best place for our documentary was BBC3 we chose this channel as BBC is a public service and shows many documentaries and BBC3 often shows aimed at our target audience.

• Radio trailer: We selected Radio 1 for a radio trailer as it is the BBC which works well as our main product is being shown on the BBC and like BBC3, Radio 1 is a station aimed at our audience.

• Magazine article: The magazine article was our hardest choice as we felt our audience would not read a TV listings magazine but we opted for the Radio Times as its owned by the BBC so it was consistent with our other choices.

3)What have you learned from your audience feedback

We showed our documentary, radio trailer, and article to a group of 23 students, then gave them a questionnaire asking them what they thought of them.

•The students we asked were all between 16 and 22 which was appropriate as this was our target audience.

•Of the 23 we asked 15 were female at the other 8 were male. 0

2

4

6

8

10

12

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Scores out of 10

•We asked people to rate our documentary out of 10 on average we scored 7 suggesting our documentary was of a good quality.

Doesn't follow conventions (20)

Follows conventions (3)

More people felt our documentary followed conventions that people who did not. This was good as it meant our documentary had a professional look.

Main productWe asked if they thought our documentary followed conventions of documentaries the results are shown bellow.

Combination of products• We asked our 23 students felt there as clear brand

identity between our 3 products. 18 felt it did whereas only 5 said it did not showing the brand identity was fairly clear.

0 5 10 15 20

yes

no

• we also asked if the trailer and article were effective at promoting our documentary 14 said yes and 9 said no. we would of prefer for more people to say yes than at perhaps our other task could have been improved to better promote the product.

0 5 10 15

yes

no

4)How did media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stage.

Blogger

We used Blogger, a blogging website to upload any work that we did for a documentary onto. This was useful as it allowed us to keep track of all our work such as research and planning. However we found uploading things to blogger could be somewhat difficult at times. Though other websites such as scribed and slide share made this slightly easier allowing us to upload in different formats we even had problems with these websites at times.

Recording equipment

• Camcorder: we used a handheld camcorder to film our footage a long with a tripod to enable us to take steady shots and make our documentary look more professional. We found the camcorder simple and easy to use and thought it gave us good results when we viewed our footage

• Microphone: We used a rifle microphone with our camcorder to capture the sound. We did this as the sound recording quality on the camcorder was not very high. The mic however managed to record good quality sound.

• Sound recorder: We used a sound recorder to record our voiceover this is because for the voiceover we only needed sound not video. We used the same mic we used with the camcorder with the sound recorder.

Apple Macs

We used apples Macs for the editing stage of our project. At first I struggled to get the hang of them as I had not used one before and was unfamiliar with it but then we eventually got the hang of them and found them fairly easy to use though we still would of preferred to use a windows computer that we were more familiar with.

Final Cut ExpressWe used Final Cut Express to create our main product. This is a professional editing software designed for Apple Macs.

Log and transfer

The first procedure we did before we started editing using this software was to log and transfer our footage, this involved looking at all our footage and deciding which parts we were going to use and which bits we weren't, then we transferred all the footage we decided to use onto to the Final cut Software.

Final Cut Express

video

Our next task was to put the video clips we wanted to use onto our timeline.

Once our required footage was on the timeline we arranged it into an appropriate order, then if needed we could edit the clips length and speed

Final Cut Express

Transitions, graphics and still images

Final cut also allowed us to add transitions this makes the switch between different clips

We could also add graphics and titles to show information in a textual form.

We could also add still images such as a graph however to make a still image more interesting we chose to add movement and zoom into it

Final Cut Express

Audio

Our next tasks was to adjust the audio. When dealing with audio final cut allowed us to remove existing audio of our video clips and add separate audio clips such as music and voiceover. We found this useful as we could remove sounds from one video clip and replace it with sound form another, this allowed us to make a cut away which we used to maintain the audiences' attention when an interviewee is speaking for a for a long time.

We used a separate video over the sound of interview removing part of the original video.

Final Cut Express

Audio-music and voiceover

We could also add voiceover and sounded to our documentary. Final cut was useful for adding this non diegetic sound.

Audio-normalisation

It was also important that all our sound was level. To make sure it was we had to normalise all our sound. Then by setting each clip to the same level it prevent changes in volume throughout.

Garageband

We used apples garageband software to create our radio trailer. We recorder a separate sound file using the same recorder we used for the voiceover to record the voiceover for our radio trailer.

We used pre recorded music from the garageband library for our backing track, we used the same music from our documentary sound bed.

With garageband we were able to add a new voiceover clips as well as sound clips of videos from our documentary to create our trailer

In general we found making our trailer very easy to do with the garageband software.

Photoshop/In Design • Firstly we had to manipulate our images in Photoshop by changing the contrast and quality of the

images. • Then we placed our images into in design so we could place them into our double page spread

we desired them to create the best possible effect

•In design also helped to manipulate our text where we wanted it on the page.

•Have a masthead and strap line.

•It allowed us to pit our text into columns.

•Have drop capitals.

•Put our text into boxes.