Since the beginning we started the A2 course I made sure to watch lots of different documentaries in order to prepare for making my own. I was able to note down general conventions of documentaries which I watched which included ‘My big fat Gypsy Wedding’ and ‘Supersize Me’ after watching these documentaries I can now reflect and comment on how our Documentary follows the same conventions as these documentaries.

Different camera angles are used within documentaries to display and connote different things for example in Supersize me during one of the vox pops, Spurlock chooses to have quite a low angle shot of the male speaking this gives a sense of realism which is then reinforced through the use of hand held camera. (to view this please copy this URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-Z74og9HbTM#t=926s) This gives evidence of Spurlock challenging the traditional codes and conventions of a documentary as vox pops would usually use a still camera involving a tripod. Which is in fact what we did for our documentary. As you can see below I have taken a screenshot of a vox pop from our documentary which takes the traditional style of vox pop as we chose to use a tripod and one from ‘Super Size Me’.

Use Of Camera

Our documentary (use of tripod/steady cam) = traditional way.

‘Supersize Me’ (use of handheld cam) = challenges typical convention

The tripod allowed for us to steady our shots and use the skills we know such as pan, tracking and zooming in a professional way as a lot of camera pans (up,down,across) and zooms (in and out) will be used during documentaries to add to the realism and engage with the viewer. For example the camera may zoom in on an important piece of writing on a piece of paper within the documentary. We did this in our documentary when we cut a way to an ‘Equality and Diversity’ poster during Mikes interview, this is to put the message across to the viewer that everyone is equal and shouldn’t be treated differently due to the age, class, gender, ethnicity and other factors such as how they dress or where they live etc.

The use of tripod was also useful when it came to filming our formal interviews. We were able to steady the camera and get good medium close ups as I noticed when watching several documentaries that medium close ups tended to be what was used for the most for them. We also tried to interview every one of our experts in a formal setting (i.e their place of work) as I noticed (and as you can see form the screen grab below from ‘Supersize Me’)this tended to be the case. It also conveys to the audience immediately that they’re an expert of some sort.

Use of title/captions

Just like in ‘Supersize Me’ we followed the rule of thirds when filming our formal interviews. The interviewee should be looking into an empty space and positioned a third of the way in, with their eye level at a third of the way down.

Supersize Me Documentary

Our Documentary

Different types of camera shots such as Close ups,Medium Close ups, Establishing Shots/Long shots, Extreme Close ups and wide shots where present when I watched the documentaries so in order to conform to the norm of having a variety of different shot types we tried hard to include different shots within our documentary. Below are some examples of different shot types, on the left hand side is our documentary compared to other documentaries on the right hand side.

WS

MCU

Supersize me documentary

‘My Big Fat Gyspy Wedding’ documentary

When watching documentaries I noticed that all of them included a title screen therefore we decided to follow this convention however, before the title screen actually came on, the documentary would start beforehand to give the viewers a flavour of what the documentary was about. We decided to do this too. For example ‘Supersize Me’ doesn’t begin with the title screen but actually the documentary is introduced first. This is shown here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z74og9HbTM

Our title screen.

SoundSound is a very important part of documentaries, including background music, sound effects, voice over, diegetic and non diegetic sound.

A common convention I noticed when watching documentaries is that they usually have a narrator who appeals to the target audience, and generally within the same age of that target audience. The voice over to our documentary was a male, aged 17 (we did this so that it appealed to the target audience as it’s the same age range) and the tone of voice was a casual laid back one to emphasize that although our documentary was on a partially serious topic it wasn’t too serious and comical elements were able to be incorporated and enjoyed.

Kyle = Voice over.

Documentaries will usually have some sort of sound track to back it. It is always relevant and well fitting for example in ‘Supersize Me’ a song played in the background was Queen – ‘fat bottom girls’ which fits well with the topic of ‘Obesity’ (this can be heard here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-Z74og9HbTM#t=337s ) The music was also a good sound level, however at times it did overpower the documentary which was something we didn’t want to do with ours. Another problem we had was that we couldn’t use Copyrighted music so we chose to choose something from the student folder on the college network. As it was already an MP3 file all we had to do was insert it into Final Cut. We chose the track ‘Drum and Bass’ as this fitted nicely with our topic, and as ‘Drum and Bass’ is usually music associated with ‘Chavs’ it seemed like the right choice of music. We tried to keep the music to a low level so it didn’t interfere with those speaking on the documentary at the time, however during the titles or when no one was speaking we increased the sound levels slightly.

Documentaries require a lot of research before actually producing, and as a group we found this slightly hard to do since ‘Stereotypes’ is not exactly a topic in which you can go and get statistics for. So we decided to look more into definitions. However with our first episode being about ‘Chavs’ we thought looking at crimes rates would be useful. In most of the documentaries I watched, statistics would pop up on the screen to do with the topic, for example in ‘Super Size Me’ as you can see below the images show this being done. As a group we decided to go against the idea of having the statistic's show up on the screen like this as we felt the text may look shabby and not very professional so went for the other common convention which was to just announce the statistic in the voice over. Which ‘Super Size Me’ also does here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z74og9HbTM&feature=player_detailpage#t=684s and as you can see we did something similar in our documentary here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UPGRYs39gOA#t=153s

Taken from ‘Super Size Me'

RADIO TRAILERWhen it came to our radio trailer we tried our hardest to match our theme, of ‘Chavs’ (which was our first episode of a documentary series) but keep it professional and like other radio trailers too. We decided to include voice clips from our documentary into our trailer as most radio trailers do this. Therefore we converted our whole documentary into a ‘wave’ file and put it into GarageBand, and cut up the bits we needed.

Documentary exported to ‘Wave’ file in GarageBand

Cutting up the bits we needed. (using Command T)

We wanted the voice over to match our theme so to make it comical we had Kyle put on a stereotypical ‘Chav’ voice and narrate the whole thing, with myself also being included at the end giving the details as to when and where to watch it (again to add to the comical effect, I spoke in a chav voice.) Although Kyle and I sounded like a ‘Chav’ throughout, the typical conventions of a radio trailer were still present. For example I still gave the details as to when and where to watch it at the end, which is an essential thing to do, which all radio trailers do, do and Kyle was also able to describe the episode which would be showing first and used lots of rhetorical questions such as ‘have you ever thought that guys looks well dodge?’. The use of rhetorical questions helped the radio trailer remain professional and following the conventions properly, but to add to the comical effect slang words such as ‘dodge’ and the tone of voice created comedy which would attract our target audience being 16-24 year olds. But also ages outside of this range would be curious as to what on earth was playing on the radio and therefore grab their attention too. Meaning we had been successful in achieving the sole purpose of what a radio trailer is meant to do = grab attention and promote the documentary.

Most of the radio trailers I looked at were around 30-40 seconds long so in order to follow the conventions we had ours at 31 seconds long.

Finally to keep with the comical theme we used ‘Jam_1’ as our soundtrack. We took it from the same folder as the soundtrack for our documentary on the college video drive, this was because we knew the music wasn’t copyrighted then. It fitted nicely yet wasn’t too intrusive so that you couldn’t hear Kyle or myself or became very unprofessional.

Overall for all three pieces of work we produced, we managed to follow the main codes and conventions that of a real documentary, magazine and radio trailer.