Charlotte Evans

Question 1.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products

Research: For our documentary I did a lot of research into the facts and figures to appear on our documentary, this involved going onto the internet and watching documentaries, the facts that we found I think made our documentary more interesting to the audience and hopefully made them realise some things that they perhaps hadn’t in the past.

The main inspiration for our documentaries was supersize me, it wasn't the only thing that we looked at, but because our documentary was also on food we thought that it was a good idea to take some points from that documentary. From that documentary we were able to get ideas from the places that they went to, and the facts that they talk about, the difference between our documentaries however is we looked into the effects of malnutrition as well as obesity.

We used a voice over throughout the documentary which made it use a narrative structure as we were trying to persuade an audience into thinking differently about obesity and malnutrition. Just like many other documentaries we also interviewed ‘experts’ and used vox pops in order to gain more information. I think that we made a strong argument in our documentary as it was filled with facts and figures and had the experts to back us up.

Camera- the camera angles we used included, close up, medium close up and long shots, we varied the shots in order to make the documentary seem more interesting just as many other films do, just like supersize me, he uses many different shots for example the long shot when he’s walking to all the different food chains, and medium close ups when he’s eating. We also used a handheld camera in a tiny section of our documentary to give it a sense of realism, the hand held part that we

Charlotte Evans

chose to use was very fast pace and hopefully made the viewers more engrossed in watching it. However although we may have used the hand held camera for a little section of the documentary, throughout the rest we decided to use a tripod in order to keep our camera still. We did this with shots of cars moving and the interviews. The various shots that we used included pan, tilt and zoom, we did these mostly on establishing shots to make an interesting beginning to the footage we had. We used straight cuts throughout the documentary which follows codes and conventions normally as it’s snappy and gets straight to the point.

Sound- as sound is an important aspect to a documentary we put backing music into some of the sections, we only did parts of the documentary in order to not have the viewer too distracted by the music and not listen to the facts, we learnt this by watching many other documentaries and deciding as a group that it should be that way. We did however have a voice over speaking over the majority of the documentary and in hindsight that should have been less so the viewer got the chance to really listen to the information that we were giving out to them and giving them a second to digest the information.

Bill Nicholls

We did research into bill Nicholls which taught us the differences between many different conventions of documentaries, we then made a decision as a group which category our documentary was going to be in, poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflective or per formative, out of those choices we decided that we wanted to make ours expository so we could get a message out to people about the effects of malnutrition and obesity to people in the UK. None of us wanted to feature in the documentary and didn’t think that was the way that we wanted it to go so participatory wasn’t going to happen, in some aspects our documentary it is reflective as we are looking back over time and the increase, and aspects of realism were also portrayed.

Magazine article

The final outcome of our magazine may not have fully followed conventions of other magazines; we tried to create another issue of ‘the radio times.’ This is an actual article for the radio times, we wanted to make our double page spread look like this but not fully, however I think we went too far out and past the normal convention. Like this double page spread however we did have the picture on the left hand side, but unlike this article we had text covering the image, the reason we decided to do it this way is because we wanted the reader to still have that image in mind

Charlotte Evans

when reading the article, as for the right hand page however we had more facts that we pulled of the documentary which is not the normal convention for a magazine article. We used the normal conventions such as the masthead, main image, article and captions for images, by doing this I think it made our magazine article follow the normal codes and conventions of regular magazines.

Radio trail.

For our radio trail we decided that we were going to keep it short and simple in order to get to the point, we also listened to many other different radio trails so that we managed to follow conventions. Our radio trail was roughly around 40 seconds long which like many others were and they managed to get the point and all the information about the documentary out which we also did, we took clips from the documentary itself as a way of trying to make people want to watch the actual documentary.

We added a good piece of music to the radio trail which wasn’t to overpowering so that you couldn’t hear all the information but it would hopefully keep the listeners interested, we also did this so it wasn’t just full of information and seemed boring.

In conclusion I think that we have mostly used the codes and conventions like other documentaries/radio trails and magazine articles in ours, however I do know that we have not followed some which means that parts of our work is not what a audience would normally see.

Question 2.

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

All together I think that the combination of my main product and ancillary tasks are effective as they all focus around the one thing; malnutrition and obesity. Although I don’t think that our documentary was as strong as it could have been, added together with the radio trail and the magazine article, it stands as a fairly interesting documentary to watch. We used clips from the documentary to use in the radio trail because our intention was for the documentary to stick in people’s heads and make them tune in; we also used still pictures from the documentary in our magazine to make it more real. We had to keep the ancillary tasks in mind when we were making our documentary, so that we could pick specific bits out to make our magazine and rail trail seem more effective, we added bits in like this. I think that if we could go back and change some things within the

Charlotte Evans

tasks we were set we would, such as the magazine article; it wasn’t as good as we hoped as it didn’t stand out as much as didn’t look as professional in my opinion although the writing in it itself was good, I think the layout and the presentation of it let the writing down a little. As for the radio trail I think that some parts of it didn’t make as much sense as others, so if people who didn’t make the documentary was listening in; which was our intention, then it would potentially just confuse them. The documentary itself could have been a lot better, maybe have someone presenting it and use less voice over and still images, make the most of the relevance of our images to go to with the topic itself, I think as we started to panic as it got towards deadline we started to put anything we could find in it which in hindsight was the wrong thing to do.

Question 3.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From our audience feedback I have learned that we didn’t make our documentary as interesting as we all hoped, there are many things that we need to improve on such as voice over, images (still and moving) and sound. However although we may have had a few things to improve on, we learnt from our audience feedback that we typically followed the codes and conventions. We found that over 90% of the people that did our questionnaire said that

our documentary did typically follow conventions of a real documentary. This was good news to us because we aimed to make our documentary as like other documentaries as we could. However we did learnt that the sound levels in our documentary weren’t level throughout which means that it made it sound like

a less professional documentary and we would have had to change that if we were going to improve it. We found that in the majority of questionnaires we got back people ticked the no box, which tells us that it wasn’t a one off, to improve this we would move the sound levels up or down depending on the contrast in scenes and the intensity of microphones we used to do the interviews and vox pops with.

In our radio trail the audience feedback that we got back was that it was informative enough for the audience, when it came to our audience feedback we were never torn with a 50% difference in the way that people answered, the results were either really positive or

Charlotte Evans

really negative, this is a good thing for our group because it clearly shows us what we need to improve on most. However even though the radio trail made people want to watch the documentary because it was interesting and informative enough, it seems that when people watched the first 5 minutes of our documentary, they didn’t want to carry on watching because ‘the point seemed obvious from the beginning.’

Our magazine article was the most negative out of them all, and it had showed what we feared; that the magazine didn’t typically follow the codes and conventions of a normal magazine, however the good thing that was said about our double page spread is that the article was interesting enough to read and could make the audience want to watch our documentary which we wanted to do, the thing that let us down on the magazine article was the pictures and layout, we decided to go different to what is the norm and that was a risk that didn’t pay off.

We asked an audience of college students to fill out our questionnaire as that was the target audience of our entire documentary; we thought that if we aimed it at college students we might get through to some of them before it got too late to change anything. We also thought that college students would perhaps be more honest to what they thought of our documentary considering were college students ourselves. Overall I am not as pleased with the outcome of our publishments as I would have hoped to be, there were many things that we needed to improve on in order to make it better.

Question 4.

How did you use media technologies in the construction of research, planning and evaluation stages?

For the research and planning into our documentary we used many different stages, we decided as a group to split up and research and plan everything on ourselves and then mould what we had together in the hope that it would be good. We all designed our own storyboards on paper as we wanted our documentaries to pan out.

For the research we used many different websites to find the best facts and figures we possibly could. By using sites like this we were able to not only find out some hard truth

facts but also find out what real people think

about these situations themselves, we wanted to gain realism in our documentary as

well as truth, this was to hope that people could relate more to it. We put all of our research and planning onto blogger which allowed us to save and edit things that we later thought needed changes. It also allowed the full group to be able to access the stuff we had done

Charlotte Evans

together instead of just one person having it or it being all spread out amongst the three of us.

In the construction of our documentary, radio trail and magazine article. I used things like Microsoft word and PowerPoint, as well as this I used Photoshop to create the magazine, I started writing the article in Microsoft word which I was later going to transfer onto Photoshop when I decided what layout I was going to have the magazine, this was a lot easier as it meant that I could place the text anywhere I wanted to instead of moving it around all the time until I found out how I actually wanted it. I used PowerPoint as an easy way to store different styles of magazine that I had researched and could refer back to when constructing the magazine article and finally, Photoshop was used to mould it all together as one. Photoshop is relatively easy to use when you get the hang of it, I used things such as the colour button and the effects when it came to designing the masthead, I then used the columns button which was a simple way to get all the text into the places that I wanted them.

To construct the radio trail we used garage band, this allowed us to create many different sounds on a timeline and mix them together into the sound that we

wanted. At first the sound that was made was a little too serious for our documentary, and although we are trying to get a serious message across we

didn’t want it in any way to be boring. So the we could take bits out of the timeline and mix it into something less serious and with more of a beat.

In the construction of the documentary we used apple Macs in order to make our documentary, this involved cutting, increasing or decreasing sound levels, smoothing out the clips to make them smoother and adding voice over/music onto it. We imported all of our clips off the camera onto the Macs; we then logged and transferred them in order to get them onto our timeline. We changed the length of some of our clips to either slow them down or speed them up in order to make it look more effective.