In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and

conventions of real media products?

Our brief

The brief we were given at the beginning of our A2 course was to create an opening 5 minutes for a television documentary. Alongside this, were two ancillary tasks; a radio trailer and a double page spread for a listings magazine, to back up our documentary. With an hour’s documentary in mind, I had to research into and find our more about what would go into the first five minutes of a documentary. I watched many documentaries and studied double page spreads as well as radio trailers to learn the codes and conventions. Here are the initial ideas we had for the documentary:

What background knowledge did I have of documentaries to

help me?

Documentaries tend to fall under certain categories, such as light-hearted, optimistic, pessimistic, serious, resigned, uncritical, ironic, condemnatory etc. The documentary that we created had aspects of light-heartedness, but also seriousness throughout the opening five minutes. This is important for a documentary, as it sets the tone for the viewer and the type of documentary they are about to watch.

Bill Nicholls’ theory of Documentary Modes (2001) is something that we began by looking into. We studied the different styles of documentaries that there are; poetic, participatory, reflexive, performative, observational and expositional. One of these modes is poetic mode, which is a very subjective style of documentary. The participatory and performative modes are very similar styles, in which they include the film maker as part of their documentary. For example, ‘Supersize Me’ is an excellent example of this, as Morgan Spurlock appears in his documentary, it is very personal and more about the film maker and their intentions. This is a very effective mode, however would not be suitable for our chosen topic of binge drinking. The performative mode is very much autobiographical, and almost follows the film maker’s life around. The observational mode follows the subject around, and has a very ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style to it. However ours was very different to this, as observational documentaries tend to not use any voiceover or music throughout. The expositional mode was definitely the most similar style to our documentary in many aspects. This has a narrative and a voiceover throughout, which is what our opening five minutes had to guide the viewers through. It is very factual which we certainly followed in ours, due to the amount of stats we used. This style is also very rhetorical in the way that it narrates to the viewer, and this we found very effective in our piece.

The Documentary: What conventions

did we use?

The other type of use of the camera is by using a tripod. We used this on various occasions such as establishing shots of the college, for showing students walking in and out of college. The tripod meant that we could have various steady shots, and use skills that I know such as pan, tracking and zooming in a professional way. The main use of the tripod was for expert interviews, which enabled us to set up the camera in a professional manner.

Since the beginning of the A2 course I watched many documentaries in preparation for creating our own. They can all be very different; however will use many of the same conventions of each other. I spent a lot of time analysing documentaries such as ‘Supersize Me’. Many of the conventions that I picked up from these were the uses of Camera. This included the shot types such as close ups, medium close ups, establishing shots/long shots and extreme close ups. We used handheld camera a lot in our documentary to make the viewer feel as though they are there, and get a feel for what is going on. This was used a lot in ‘Supersize Me’ and we found that it was very effective for our documentary.

Camera shots

Establishing shotsEstablishing shots are used in many documentaries to introduce the setting and make the viewer familiar with the surrounding. When introducing the Sixth Form College, we used a panning establishing shot to show where we was.

Taken from our documentary Taken from ‘Supersize me’

‘Supersize me’ was a documentary I found very helpful in understanding the different codes and conventions of a documentary. Whilst studying this, I realised every time the creator of the documentary went to a place or spoke about a place he proved it by showing the audience. This is something that I learnt is extremely important in a documentary as it is visually useful for the audience. Therefore every time we went and filmed somewhere we showed the viewers exactly what we meant.

Here are more of the establishing shots in my documentary…

SoundSound is another important part of television documentaries including background music, voiceover, presenter, diegetic and non diegetic sound. ‘Super-size me’ used a presenter in their documentary, as well as a voiceover. This worked very effectively and makes the documentary feel much more personal with the audience, however we found that for our documentary being more informative and based at college , we did not need to use a presenter, so had just a voiceover.

The use of background music in our documentary was non diegetic and added to the professional look of the documentary. It also added an element of entertainment as the documentary appeared more up-beat and fast paced. Also, the use of diegetic sound such as voxpops, interviews and voice overs had very good sound levels. When filming voxpops, we purposely kept the background noise in the clip so it looked authentic. This is another thing that ‘Supersize me’ does as they are filming on busy American streets.

We took inspiration from ‘Gogglebox’ which uses a voice over instead of an on screen presenter. Gogglebox is a popular programme amongst our target audience also, according to our questionnaires.

Our interviews were crucial to conveying the general opinions of the public on alcohol drinking in young people. Having professional interviews in documentaries, and we followed this in order to keep our documentary looking very realistic and professional. Throughout the interviews we were aware of mise en scene and so we paid close attention to the background as we knew this knew this was a huge factor of the way people are represented. For the interview with student

counsellor Julie Maitland, we put up a poster in the background about alcohol and how to get help which links in with the fact there is help for people and also links to the subject of the social and health consequences which we discuss in the documentary.

For all the bar interviews we made sure the bartender was placed in front of the bar so their job was emphasised and the topic was highlighted.

We ensured that the West Midlands Police website was up in the background of this expert interview so it added credibility to PC Luke Prescott and showed he knew what he was talking about, as well as looking professional.

Mise En Scene

Expert interviewsWe made sure the questions we asked our experts were appropriate and relevant for each

different interviewee and therefore made alterations between the questions for each interview. The majority of our interviews were medium shots and not medium close ups as we initially planned so this could have been improved by shooting in medium close up to emphasise the interviewees emotions more and therefore get their message across better. The style of our

expert interviews was probably the most serious of that of the whole documentary. In contrast to the voxpops where we had asked the younger people to share funny experiences of alcohol, we asked the experts more serious questions about the consequences, fake ID and what problems they have to deal with. This is similar to ‘Supersize Me’ where the expert interviews are quite

serious in order to get the message across.

I feel like the interviewee could have been positioned a little better in this shot for example as it doesn’t appear that he is looking at the camera and so the effect isn’t as serious. For example, when comparing this formal expert interview with a formal interview from supersize me you can see the expert in the documentary is up much closer to the camera than ours which allows much more emotion to be shown.

Our documentary Taken from ‘Supersize me’

One mistake I have noticed in the process of making this evaluation is the fact we put the titles on this shot on the wrong side which in the future, for consistency reasons I would make sure they are on the same side.

Taken from ‘Supersize me’

Expert interviews continued…During the editing of the documentary we made sure we kept the titles the same as the titles in ‘Supersize Me’ and in most media expert interviews also. The convention is to keep the titles to the left hand corner as that is where the human eye is drawn to first. We decided to use this as we felt it was important. As well as this we noted the font was white and very clear, therefore we decided to use this to make our documentary as similar as we could as our style models were very successful. We also wanted to make the final product as professional and authentic as we could.

The Documentary: What conventions did we develop?

Facts and statisticsAnother convention of the expository genre we used in our documentary was the presentation of facts and figures which is important in documentaries as it supports the piece with educational, solid information.

Taken from our documentary Taken from ‘Supersize Me’We took inspiration from ‘Supersize Me’ and developed it. As you can see on the right screenshot, supersize me showed the viewers what health problems people can develop from binge eating. The way these statistics are shown on screen shocks the audience as there are a variety of consequences, and more importantly so many. This was something I wanted to include in my documentary as one of the main points of ‘Tipsy Teens’ was to highlight the problems caused by binge drinking and the short/long term problems.

I think this shot in our documentary looks good and works well. We blurred the background and also sped up the original clip so it appears the students are walking really quickly. I think the stats themselves are effective as they are shocking which is what we were aiming for.

Footage from other existing productsIn ‘Supersize Me’ clips from advertisements about fast food and television programmes were used in the documentary to emphasise the point that it was in the media regularly. We decided to develop this and use clips from popular programmes that the target audience watch regularly such as ‘Geordie Shore’. We chose to do this as it worked successfully in our style models and looked very effective. Geordie Shore was the choice of programme we decided to gather clips from as it is based around alcohol and we thought our target audience would get very influenced from the stars of the show.

Taken from ‘Supersize Me’Taken from our documentary

I think it was a good idea to use footage from other programmes, specifically the one we chose because teenagers will relate to this programme and it also gives the documentary more depth instead of just being interviews and statistics.

Montage

Taken from our documentary Taken from ‘Supersize me’

One idea that we did have was to open the documentary a slightly different way. We decided not to open the documentary a traditional way of the voiceover coming in straight away introducing the topic to the audience and going straight into the documentary. Instead we took inspiration from one of our main style models ‘Supersize me’ and made a montage to open our documentary. Supersize Me opens with a very strong message about child obesity, represented by children singing famous fast food songs.

We decided to develop this idea as we felt it represented them well without words which was very powerful. We collected clips from our target audience of holidays in popular teenage drinking destinations such as Magaluf and also from parties. We were very interested by this and hope for the same impression on our target audience.

The Documentary:What conventions did we challenge?

ReconstructionsOne typical convention of documentaries is reconstructions. We did not use this convention as we didn’t feel it was necessary for the topic or the target audience of our documentary. Instead of attempting conventions we felt were not appropriate we decided to focus on the conventions that fitted our documentary in order to create the best product we could.

Another convention we did not use in our documentary is having the film maker present in the documentary. This is a typical feature of the performative mode, however we chose not to use it as we wanted to present the views and experiences of the general public, not just one person. An example of this type of participatory mode can be seen in ‘Supersize Me’ where Morgan Spurlock portrays his personal experience. This autobiographical style personalises the film and so is less effective when representing a general audience.

In conclusion:Our documentary can fall into a light-hearted category in some aspects but also a more serious tone is taken when discussing the consequences. We wanted the voice-over to come across this way as the opening five minutes in our documentary is a balance of humorous (due to the comedic voxpops and anecdotes) however at times very formal (in the expert interviews emphasising the long and short term effects of drinking in young people).

Overall, I feel our documentary used documentary conventions successfully and the ones we didn’t use were relevant and did not affect our documentary significantly. We used a variety of shots and settings to make our documentary interesting and varied, similarly to the documentaries we had studied.

The Magazines Listings Article:

What conventions did we use?

What codes and conventions did we use in our DPS?

We also produced a double page spread article for Radio Times. We chose radio times as we felt it covered the same type of topics as our documentary. When analysing Radio Times articles we noted the key conventions, for example a main title, page numbers, small and large images, a main image, dates, columns and quotes which summarised what the text is talking about.

We used the conventions of radio times articles by using small images, however we decided to place ours in the middle of the text. We put the photos next to the text they were relevant to so readers can visualise what they’re reading about.

The radio times DPS typically start their article in the bottom left hand corner so this is something we followed as we thought it looked professional and authentic.

Similar to radio times we placed our page numbers in the corner of both pages, and made sure that the number on the left hand page was even as the very front cover of a Radio Times counts as 1, so the number on the left would be even.

Our double page spread

A Radio Times spread

We made sure we made authentic logos on our DPS as in the corners of radio times articles they use their own logos.

The Magazine Listings Article:

What conventions did we challenge?

On this radio times article they chose to challenge conventions by not using a big eye catching masthead, however we wanted to make sure it was bold and people would notice it as people often quickly glance at an article before reading, therefore we wanted to make sure people were intrigued.

We chose to challenge another convention of typical radio times articles. They tend to show behind the scenes of the programme they are advertising, however we decided we’d rather show actual content the target audience will see in the documentary.

We decided not to use the main image taking up the whole background like this RT DPS as we wanted our main image to stand out and be clear.

The Radio Trailer: What conventions

did we use or develop?

We were asked to produce a radio trailer lasting between 30-45 seconds. Prior to production of our media trailer, we did our research to understand the codes and conventions of a radio trailer. After listening to radio trailers on stations such as capital and free radio we decided to broadcast our radio trailer on capital. This is because they advertise frequently and we felt the target audience of our documentary would listen to capital. Also, we intended to broadcast the radio trailer on BBC radio 1 originally, however due to BBC regulations we would not have been able to air our documentary on channel 4 so we changed to Capital FM.

The typical conventions of a radio trailer include documentary extracts, facts, music, length, voiceover, time, date and channel and we decided to stick to these conventions mainly.

We followed all of the conventions of a typical radio trailer. Our voice over for the trailer was the same of the documentary for some consistency. The music we used was also upbeat similar to the positive music in our documentary. We also used extracts from our documentary such as voxpops which would intrigue the target audience as they would have to listen to the rest of the trailer to find out what we are talking about, and then when and where its broadcasted. This also gives the audience an insight as to what will be discussed in the documentary and what other teenagers opinions are in general – if the audience agree with what is being said in the radio trailer they may be interested in watching the whole thing. The length of our trailer was around 30 seconds which is typical of radio adverts as they are meant to be short, sharp and straight to the point. This means the audience will not get uninterested. We also decided to use a voice over which is what all radio trailers use.

Overall I believe our radio trailer was very successful and professional which I think is due to the fact that we followed many of the typical codes and conventions of a radio trailer. I think the fact the sound levels were very well balanced also contributes towards the success of this product. We followed the typical length of a radio trailer which meant it all flowed together well and enabled us to advertise what we wanted to and get our point across well without boring the audience.

In conclusion:

Final thoughts: I feel we used the majority of conventions within the documentary genre, TV listings magazine and radio trailer in order to create our products. In this evaluation I have explained why I conformed to certain conventions or why I challenged them. I believe our research helped to a great extent as we used media articles to our advantage to see how they used and adapted conventions and I think this helped us to create 3 very successful products.