A2 Media Studies: Coursework Evaluation

Irving Sewell

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of

real media products?

Documentary

The documentary was the opening five minutes of a TV documentary it was called ‘ Cyber Bullying, The Dark Truth’ it was about cyber bullying amongst teenagers. It was filmed in the The sixth form College, Solihull. We also had to make a double page spread for a TV listings magazine and a Radio trailer for the documentary.

This was a factual documentary that was addressing a real issue for many teenagers of today. The documentary was about the growing problem of cyber bullying (mainly through the growing use of social networking.)

Bill Nicholas documentary types

Poetic Expository

Performative Participatory Reflexive

Observational This type of documentary is fragmentary , they tend to use symbols. Continuity editing is not important and they are usually impressionistic

This type of documentary speaks directly to the viewer and they usually propose a strong argument.

This type of documentary is a more personal approach. The film maker gives a view and tells a story

This type of documentary draws attention to the nature of documentaries and more likely to deal with ‘realism’

This type of documentary is fragmentary , they tend to use symbols. Continuity editing is not important and they are usually impressionistic

This type of documentary has no narrative and has minimal intervention. It can be referred to as ‘observed lived life’

Our documentary was mainly a expository documentary, it had a narrator throughout and it was telling the viewer cyber bullying was growing problem and should not be treated as something little

Interviews The majority of our interviews were vox pop

interviews which are used a lot in documentaries especially ones that are on a serious topic. This allows the view to see how different people feel about the issue and see their views.

We also had expert interviews that were used to give the viewer more factual information about the issue

Different types of camera shots

Use of factsThis give important facts to the viewer

Super Size Me

Super Size me is an American documentary we looked at. It was too do with the issue of eating fast food and the affects it has. It was a documentary that followed the film maker round 24/7and showed his journey throughout.

Like our documentary it was addressing a serious issue and displayed facts of the topic such as obesity rates like our documentary showing the bullying facts.

There was a number of things in Supersize Me used that influenced choices on how we wanted our documentary to look.

This is an example of something similar in the two documentaries. When watching Super Size Me, our group thought the way the expert interviews were positioned and the names on the bottom left hand side was a good way to position our own expert interviews.

Comparison to real documentary (Supersize Me)

TV Listings article

In comparison to a real TV listings double page spread (picture on the right). Our double page spread seems to have many codes and conventions of real media products such as the images used that are actually from the program, bright colours to attract readers, bold text that stands out, the name of the programme and the colour seems to fit the topic. However when looking at a real media product on the market our double page spread looks basic and there is a lot of unused space on the two pages where as on a real media product both pages space are fully used. You could say that our magazine challenges codes and conventions by having one page that it just images what is not really common amongst many TV listing articles.

Radio trailer

• We made a 30 second radio trailer on BBC Radio 1. It included voices from the documentary , the time, date and what channel it would be broadcasted on (BBC Three). The Radio trailer was made on Garage Band. Using the same program we created a background instrumental for the trailer.

• We thought BBC Three would be the ideal channel to broadcast the documentary on because BBC is a very popular TV channel amongst teenagers.

• The radio trailer did not really challenge any conventions of a real media product as it was more a traditional radio trailer with previews of the documentary and information on when to watch it

Conclusion

As a conclusion I think the media products our group created was very similar to real media products on the market.

I think they developed and challenged forms of real media products because they were alike but they also had their own individual elements to them which made them better