Evaluation- Q1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of

real media product’s?

Steven Crane.

Documentary influenceWhen we planned our idea for our documentary we sat in the group and firstly made a list of as many different ideas as we could. After we had all made a list we took 1 each that we like the most and then had a long discussion on which one would be the most achievable and the end choice was a documentary about Bowling. The main interest to air this documentary on was going to be channel 4 and BBC. We than sat down and made a list of possible interviews, images, videos and cutaways that we could film and use.

Codes and conventions.One of the main codes and conventions we used was putting the interviewees name and who the person was at the bottom of the screen so that the viewer’s knew who the person was and there relevance to the documentary. The name needed to be clear and bold with whom they are and there role a little smaller underneath. This needed to be placed at the very bottom of the screen.

Another code and convention we followed was keeping the interviewee on either the left or the right hand side of the screen, we also had to make sure the interviewee wasn’t looking straight into the camera lens and was looking at what would have been my group’s interviewee. This is one of the main codes and conventions and is preformed through any professional documentary. Also the eye line should be roughly 1/3 of the way down the frame.

We followed another code and convention for documentaries by using cutaways. We have used so many different cutaways in our documentary and this is used to help make interviews more interesting and help keep the audience entertained, they are also used to cover cuts in the questions. Cutaways are a good way of showing exactly what an interviewee may be talking about.

Voice over.Our documentary has a voice over which explains the main points of the story. This is another main code and convention. For our voice over we used a female’s voice and made sure she spoke well so that the viewers could understand her with no problems and not be left confused. Another reason to have a clear female voice is that it helps make the documentary flow and help explain what’s happening in some of the interviewees.

Radio advert.The song in our radio advert was “clocks” by Coldplay, we had previously used this song in our documentary so this helped it connect with our documentary and when viewers were to hear the radio add and then watch the documentary would immediately feel the connection. This is classed as a code and convention as it helps link both together. We also used a voice over in our radio add to tell the audience the channel time and date that the documentary was to be scheduled. We also in our radio add used many different clips from the Voxpops and also a few interviewee question answers.

Poster.In our poster we have a main image which is used to attract and audience and helps connect to our Bowling documentary, it does this by having the main image of 4 bowling balls that slowly fades away and the same effects with a bowling pin. The effect for this was to make the audience be able to connect with the pictures and know that our documentary would obviously be about bowling. We then had the title at the very bottom in bold so that everyone knew the title for our documentary. Another code and convention we used while making our poster was putting the channels logo on the page. This helps people know what channel our documentary would be on. The last thing we put on was a catchy slogan to catch the audience and the date and time of the documentary.