Lauren Coles - Media Evaluation

8/7/2019 Lauren Coles - Media Evaluation

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Advanced Po rtfolio EvaluationDocumen tary: Thinspiration The Size 0 Trend

1) In what ways does your m edia product use, develop orchallenge codes and conventions of r eal media pr oducts?

Prior to planning our documentary, we created a mind map of typical mediaconventions . This successfully boughttogether all of our own ideas as well asconventions we had picked up fromanalysing documentaries, in class and at home,of a similar style to the one we were going tomake as another form of research andplanning. The task required us to plan andcreate a five minute documentary on final cutexpress and two ancillary pieces; a radio advertand a magazine article. We aimed to include asmany of these conventions as possible inorder to make our documentary lookprofessional.

The first decision we had to make was how toopen our documentary. A montage was apopular way to open a real life documentary sowe decided this would be appropriate for ourdocumentary. We decided that this would also give the documentary a fast

paced beginning therefore keeping the audience engaged .

Our next step was to decide what clips we would use in the montage. Thistask was important as the opening sequence of a documentary is the partwhere viewers get a first impression of whether they would like to continuewatching or not. As well as engaging the audience it had to give an insight asto what the documentary is about.

We chose two of our professional interviews and a voxpop combinedwith filming of relevant items such as clothes labels and food labels whicheffectivelyjuxtaposed one another. The voxpop we used relates to our radioadvert as her speech, everyone wants to be skinny is a key feature. We feltthis successfully summed up the problems explored in young womenthroughout our documentary from the mouth of a member of our targetaudience.


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This opening is similar to that of Louise Rednapps documentary Truth AboutSize 0 which opens with a montage of images. We believed video clips wouldengage the audience more than still images.

Underneath the montage was a sound bed of slow tempo music whichemphasised the seriousness of the topic. To make it more interesting,however, we then had an upbeat section of some girls from our target

audiences age group holding up signs with sizeand a number on. We sped up the pace of thefootage. This created an unusual and excitingintroduction with fast paced music and a

female voice over . We felt in Louise Redknappsdocumentary, the use of a female voiceover allowed us as the audience to relatemore to the speaker which is whatinfluenced us to use a female. A voice overseemed more appropriate to theexpositionary documentary rather than a

resenter.

ntary, the sound of the sound bed would never

y with

gers of anorexia.

pWe had to make sure that the sound bed was perfect in terms ofsoundlevels. In a real docume

Speeding up pace to mirror music

drown out the speaker and would always be balanced therefore we had tomake sure we displayed this in our documentary by raising and lowering

sound levels where appropriate. To matchthe conventions of a real documentary,especially for the first 5 minutes the volume was louder during the montage and droppedduring an interviewor voice over .

The music itself that we selected had toattract a young target audience. We believedquite a heavybass and fast tempo wouldreflect this. We opened our documentar

slowtempo music to represent the underlying seriousness of the topic andthen bought in the fast tempo music when the young girls came on screen.This along with the short clips sped up the pace making it look moreinteresting. We kept the slowtempo music, however, for more seriousinterviews such as the nurse talking about the dan


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We had to think carefully about our opening graphics . We wanted them to beinteresting but appropriate to the topic of the documentary.

We used a picture taken from a magazine whichwe thought showed how skinny models are andwas an attractive image which would attract thetarget audience. The voice over mirrored thegraphics to emphasise the title and make it stick in

the viewers mind and we used aclear but contemporary font.

This decision played an important part in the rest of ourdocumentary as we liked the idea of the typewriter as a modern, contemporary andinteresting font and we used thisthroughout for, for example, statistics.

This added to the continuityin ourdocumentary.

During our interviews, we had tostick to the codes and conventions of a documentary. The framing of our

professional interviews was an important exampleof this including their whereabouts in the frame and miseen scenes .

This example exhibits the similarities between Panoramas interview withprofessional Louis Walsh and our interview with professional nurse CeliaPhilips:

Caption to the left of the interviewee in blankspace.

Clear font and neutral colour used.We developed this idea by adding her job title

in underneath her name.

Interviewee situated to the right of the framelooking over to the left.


Medium close up shot.Relevant mise en scene scene in Nurses

workplace.



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We followed these main conventions in our otherinterviews: i.e. Jodies interview was in front of a whitecurtain which is the background at a modelling castingwhich is a topic she mentions in her interview. The

mise en scenes in Regan Okeys interviewconsist of the Topman logo around his neck. Wealso kept this consistent during our voxpops keeping the framing correct and using mise enscenes such as lockers to show that these girls arestudents therefore can relate to the target audience of femalesaged 16-21.

During the interviews, we used cutaways to ensure the audience stayengaged. This helped keep a fastpace which matched the tempo of themusic. In Jodies interview we used similar footage to the establishing

footage that introduced her, of her readinga magazine she is in. The media mise en scenes behind her was relevant in showingshe works in the media industry as a modeland the magazine also reflected this. Thismade it visually more exciting than justsimply footage of the interviewee talking.

We also made use ofstill image mo ntages as this is a typical documentaryconvention, especially

when the voice over istalking to make itattractive visually. Theuse of zoom made thismore attractive towatch on the finalimage.

We also used typical conventions in our transitions during this montage. This time using straight cuts when we wanted a fast pace and fade to blackat other

times to make it seem more interesting to watch. We found it would bedifficult to develop these conventions so followed them.


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Our ancillary tasks , a radio trailer and ma gazine article also has tofollowcodes and conventions of real media texts.

Images anchor headline text

Grab quote

Colour pallet continuity

Stand first is in a different sized font and thedocumentary title is in capitals and a differentcolour to make it stand out.

documentary will be aired and onwhich channel

By line explains to reader when the

Paragraph cross heads different colour

Headline

In our radio trailer, to anchor thedocumentary, we used voxpop andinterview extracts. To make this moreinteresting, we used a separate sequence on Final Cut tocreate a montage of people in our documentary saying size then put themall together to create a rapid audio montage and exported this toGarageband . After this we challenged the conventions of using extracts inthis way by manipulating the sound of everyone wants to be skinny by using

the echo tool. This, again, sped up the pace of the trailer which wouldattract our young target audience. The voice over was a

female which, like in our documentary, meantthe female target audience could relate tothem better than a male voice over and

we used fast tempo music to anchor themusic on our documentary.


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2) How effective is the combination o f your main pr oduct andancillary texts?

I feel our three products connect well, especially our radio trailer anddocumentary.

Documentary & Ra dio Trailer:During one of our voxpops, a college student said in her answer just

everyone wants to be skinny. We believedthat this summed up our documentaryreally well. We ended up using this in thedocumentary opening montage and inour radio trailer. This kept continuitybetween the two products. The rapidmontage used in the documentary, Ithink the average size of a UK woman

is is a memorable part of thedocumentary therefore we used this sound

in our radio trailer. This mirrored the fast pace of our documentary againattracting the same young target audience. Not only this, but we used thesame voice over and music in our radio trailer so that they relate to eachother better. We want the radio trailer to attract the same target audience as the documentary and we believe the voice over and music were the firststeps in achieving this. When analysing advertisement radio trailers we foundthat use ofclips from the program/radio show was a keyconvention and wedeveloped this by taking difference sections from the documentary to createthe montage as well as manipulating it with the echo tool. Another

obvious convention we used was to explain when, which channel and whattime the documentary was on which added to the professionalism of therad io trailer .

Matching Music and Voice Over

Documentary an d Ar ticle:

There were many parts of our documentary that were used in our article suchas the theme of Elle magazine and the opening titles image of models in aheart shape. This would attract the appropriate target audience as is likely tobe an interest of theirs (magazines).


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We also used the grab quote Just everyone wants to be skinny which isused in our documentary opening montage as well asour radio trailer.To improve the connectionbetween our tasks I believe the

article could have used theconsistent type writer font

used throughout the documentary and perhapspictures of memorable interviews to give thereader more of an idea of what to expect.Our audience feedback, however, did suggestthat the article linked in well with the documentary.

3) W hat have you learnt from your au dience feedback?

We found that Channel 4 was the most popular channel for this age grouptherefore chose to air our documentary on there. Of the audience whowatched programs on Channel 4 we found the most popular radio stationwas Galaxy FM. However during our filming period, Galaxy FM formed ahorizontal integration with Capital FM creating a national radio stationcovering a larger area over the UK. This is a much better form ofadvertising as it will reach a larger audience.

Our target audience is predominantly females between the ages of 16-24of all ethnicities because we believe the issue of body weight effects thisage group. The social class we have chosen is C1/B and it will probablyattract those interested in fashion and beauty as these are the types ofpeople who may feel pressure to look a certain way.

We put our formal proposal on our blog to outline what we were going todo and who our target audience were going to be.

TAR GET AUDIENCE:

To receive audience feedback, classmateswatched our documentary, listened to our radiotrailer and saw our article. Half of the audiencewere female and all of them were ofour target agegroup . We askedour audience ifthey found ourdocumentary has

good technology, goodsound qua lity, suitable music and a goodrange of interviews .


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It appeared through our results that realism in our documentary was verygood, good, on a few occasions average and never poor or very poor. Wespent a lot of time perfecting our sound levels so we were pleased with theseresults. We understand that good sound levels are an important feature of arealistic documentary.

When we asked for comments, the following were given:

The documentary was too repetitive

The article didnt really fit in with the other media pieces

The radio trailer sounded real and upbeat which would attract ayoung audience

Transitions were smooth and professional

It definitely would of attracted females of a younger age group whichfits the target audience

The article was a ll over the place and didnt look professional

There was a good range of voxpops and the interviews withprofessionals were good

There wasnt enough males in the documentary

The typewriter was an effective way of keeping things the same andmaking writing more interesting

The bass was too heavy in the music and the beginning sounded too scifi

We learnt from this that although there were many good aspects of our media

products, there are also improvements that could be made across all threeareas. Although there were negative commentsabout the music, our choice was limited tocopyright free music and we thought this mostsuitable as it was upbeat and had slowertempo sections which we thought appropriate aswe wanted it to be upbeat and interesting as wellas later showing the seriousness of the socialtopic. However contrastingthis, the questionnaire

results showed that our music choice was suitable.Although comments were made about the article notlooking professional, we believed it held conventions


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of a real ar ticle and the audience appeared to like the radio trailer. Anotherissue we realised was something we could improve on was the gender bias,as the whole documentary opening was focused on females. Although this wasthe target audience I now feel we should have included more male voxpopsto show their opinions. However the male interview at the end did leave scope

for more male appearances in the rest of the documentary. Also, there was anegative comment about our documentary being repetitive. This wascontradicted by the questionnaire results that there was a good range ofinterviews.

To us, the most important question was Do you believe the documentaryattracts the appropriate targetaudience? as the target audienceare the people who will be watchingthe documentary.As this pie chart shows, only one out

of the 22 people watching said no.This is encouraging as we workedhard to make our documentarysuitable to our target audience and it appears, despite a few flaws,we succeeded.

talking about.

4)How did you use m edia technologies in the construction andresea rch, planning and evaluation stages?

Documentary:

When producing our media products we used a rangeofmedia technologies. Some we had used previouslyand some were new to us.During the planning stage, we used televisions andcomputers to watch and analyse other documentaries.The internet was a main part of our research andplanning. For example Google was used as a research toolproviding us with thousands of pages of information.

Blogger.com was used to upload researchmaterial and sites such as 4OD and youtube were

used to allow us to watch the documentaries whichwe then analysed. Youtube even allowed us to

embed videos onto the blog to show exactly what we wereOur blog had to include analysis of different documentaries to help usunderstand the codes and conventions . As we had done this in class, weused a scanner to scan in our analysis. Not only this but we scanned in ourstory board and magazine articles which we had analysed to makeour blog visuallymore interesting.Once we had completed our research and planning, wehad to move on to the filming process which was kepttrack of on our blog. We used Canon HD videocameras (HG20) which used a hard diskmaking itquick and simple to upload footage onto the Macs.


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The cameras were easy to use and we made use offeatures such as zoom in our montages. We also useda tripod so that the camera was still, adding toprofessionalism , and a hand held microphone

with headphones to make sure our sound was as goodas we could get it. This was especially useful whenfilming voxpops outside with a lot of backgroundnoise. These same microphones were used to recordour voice over in a quiet room to avoid background

noise. We then transferred the sound onto a new sequence on Final Cut andcopied and pasted it onto our documentary in the relevant place. Final Cutallows layering of sound therefore we could have the voice over and musicplaying at the same time allowing the music to act as a sound bed. Once wehad filmed, it was time for us to produce the documentary itself. We did thison the Apple iMac using programs such as Final Cut Express, Garage

Band and In Design.

Text Overlay who is on screen

Documentary in Final Cut Express Cross-dissolve transition

Voice over audio clips

Varied sound levels

Cutaway

Music Sound bed

Final Cut Express was the program weused to produce and edit our documentaryopening. After getting used to it, we realisedit wasnt too difficult to use. The process oflogging and transferring was the firstthing we had to do. This transferred ourfootage onto our project allowing us torename the footage we needed to makeediting easier and discard any footage we didnt want. After dragging theseclips onto the timeline, we had to put them in order of when we wanted themto appear before putting transitions , graphics and montages etc in. In

several clips we zoomed into the shot, or moved the shot slightly in order tostick to conventions and cover errors.

Logging and transferring


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For example in one voxpop the microphone wasslightly visible in the corner so we zoomed in tothe interviewees face to hide this mistake. Wealso found we couldedit the speed of a

clip. We used this tokeep a fast pace

and to keep the footageinteresting. On clips thatwere too long or that wewanted to cut, we used thecut tool to split and delete clips. The cross fade toolwas useful where it didnt sound professional or

continuous to fade out the sound. When interviewees spoke very fast, thisavoided hearing the first word of the next sentence which we may of deleted in

editing or alternatively avoided

cutting off the end of the last word.We had to use Final Cut Express to perfect our transitions ,editing and sound . The soundlevels were quite difficult to keepthe same but we managed to and bythe end they sound levels were oneof the best parts of thedocumentary. For example in

certain parts, the soundwas a lot

clearertherefore the sound levels had to be decreased.Factors such as traffic when filming outsidecontributed to this therefore we had to rectify it tomake it sound professional. The music alsocontributed to hiding the ambient sound . Often,for some reason the audio was mono . This wouldnot have sounded particularly professional or balanced sowe had to change this to stereo usin

Editing speed of shot

Editing mistakes out of the shot

Typewriter text

g Final Cut Express .We also used the type writer tool for ourgraphics (i.e. statistics) as it looked

contemporary and modern. This, we believed,would attract the right target audience. Thismeant we had to use the text tool and the layer the text, image and sound in order for them all tocome up on the screen at the same time. Anothertechnique we had to get the hang of was creatingcutaways during interviews as this is a keyconvention . In order to do this, we had to splitup the audio and the video and then split thevideo before placing the cutaway footage in.This was tricky as if we werent careful and

moved the video then the audio would be out ofsync . We did this successfulfor Jodies interview and later during Regans interview. To make this

Cutaway


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cutawaymore visually attractive we zoomed in to the Topshop logo on theimage. We also used this tool in our montage. We had to edit the centrepoint and scale in order for it to zoom into our preferred part of the picturesmoothly.

Once finished, we had to transfer the documentary ontoa disk. We did this using iDVD byexporting the video

and audio as a QuickTime movie, then burning it to ablank DVD disk.

Radio Trailer:

To create our radio trailer we used Garageband .

Radio Trailer in Garageband


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We recorded the voice over and put this on onetrack then created a new sequence in FinalCut,exported the audio only and imported thisonto another track. This was as simple as draggingthem from one folder into the project. Once we had

put the music on we were almost there. This, wefound, was the easiest of all three programs to use.It was simple to fade out sound and add effects as well as adjusting sound levels in order to make them as good as thedocumentary.

or our article we used Adobe InDesign .

In order to manipulate the tracks, we

rticle:

had to use the effects tool. We chose toadd the echo effect onto thesignificant voxpop clip Everyonewants to be skinny to draw emphasisaround it. Garageband allowed us tochange the echo time, volume andrepeat so we could have it soundexactly as we wanted. This soundedeffective in the end and we were pleased

with the result.AF

Audio Clip from Final Cut Fade out at end of trailer Drag loops (voice over) Edit sound (click an drag)d

Exporting audio from final cut

Text manipulation (size/font/colour)

Swatches available colours

Document preview

Toolbar i.e. text tool, cursor tool,gradient tool


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InDesign allowed us to be very precise about our work.For example Swatches gave a large variety ofcolours ,also giving the option of adding effects . It also allowed

us to place images in frames (file and place)which let us draft the article before creating it.

It also gave us the option of editing imageshowever we chose to do this in a photo editing

website. We blurred the edge of the picture and made

rop shadow so it stood out from the page. This created a dull effect showingh ss of the topic. The program was familiar to us fromur S le work therefore was simple to use.

the outside greyscale . To make the text more interesting we used a slightdt e underlying seriousne

vel courseo A

Documents

Lauren Coles - Media Evaluation