Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or

challenge codes and conventions of real media products?

Documentaries

Hayden Atkins

Documentary

• Before starting the making of the documentary, we decided that we wanted to follow codes and conventions of existing documentaries, whilst also adding in our own features, that we believed we relevant to our genre and audience- Health and fitness and teenagers between the ages of 16-24.

• By using existing codes and conventions, it would allow us to emulate some of the features used on a real life documentary. We decided we would add things like interviews , for example, so that our product looked genuine and professional.

• During our planning and research, we decided that it would be very beneficial to examine existing documentaries, and look at the features they contain, so that we could include these in our work.

• Prominent examples of existing documentaries that featured on our broadcast channel (BBC 3) was “World’s strictest parents”. Whilst we also looked in depth at a documentary that looked at the same genre as us, “Supersize Me”.

• I have looked at various aspects of both of these documentaries, and we have tried to emulate some of the conventions and codes that they have portrayed, to try and make our product seem as realistic as possible.

Use of graphics/images

• It is a key convention of nearly all health and fitness documentaries to use disturbing, graphical images to portray the problem of obesity. One of the ways in which documentary producers do this is to use images of obese people, often combined with facts, showing the risk of obesity. This graphic is used ins supersize me, to demonstrate the size of the problem. For example, in this photograph, we have a long shot of an obese man. The long shot allows productors to include all of the mans body, highlighting the obesity in more detail, providing us with more graphical content.