MY EVALUATION ON NED PRODUCTION'S DOCUMENTARY – THE GIG EXPERIENCE.

Evaluation – A2 Media Studies

The title of our documentary was ‘the gig experience’ as it focused on live music from the artists/band’s point-of-view to the process the public go through before and during a live concert eg. Buying tickets online and queuing to enter the venue. When creating our documentary, we researched bands/artists that will be appearing locally in Manchester and Liverpool and contacted their managers to see if they would allow us to film their concert. Luckily, Tyler Hilton, imagine dragons and Alex Clare's manager got back to us saying that we could film them. Unfortunately, we wasn’t able to film imagine dragons in the end as they were playing in an over 18’s space only. However, we still got some great footage from the other two concerts. Altogether, we put over 100 hours into creating our finished media products.

For our documentary we decided to start it of by having a 30 second montage of all the footage we had using both our own footage and some archive footage of YouTube. We used conventions of real media products by having a narration throughout our documentary and used a sound-bed throughout it. Our product is also similar to professional ones as it follows the rule-of-thirds for the interviews and features B-Roll footage.

However, we challenged the conventions of real media productions by using hand-held cameras instead of a tripod as for health and safety reasons the venues would not allow tripods. We also challenged the rule-of-thirds notion for Dion Roy's interview as we filmed him centralised instead to signify how the performer is the centre of the audience’s attention. We also wanted to draw attention to the aspect of live music by having the stage lights on and by having the staging equipment shown.

We also challenged the guidelines for a typical interview by filming a Vox-pop in front of a crowd.

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

forms and conventions of real media products?

Our combination of our main product was effective as we used snippets from our documentary in the radio advert so there was a sense of continuity. This is also displayed in our newspaper advertisement as we used the same font ‘Dirty Ego’ for our texts. In addition to this we extracted photographs from our documentary to create the advert. We did this by layering two images together and altering the overlay so the background image could be seen in the foreground. We featured Alex Clare as our main image because he is the most well know artist featured in our documentary.

In our radio trailer we use the same tagline (Turn it up loud) and use the same channel (MTV Live) as displayed in the advertisement to show how they connect together. The fact that we will have the documentary on MTV Live relates to the content of the documentary as it will feature ‘live music.’

How Effective is the Combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

From our audience feedback we learnt that people thought our documentary and advertisement was eye-catching. Indicated by our results the majority of people believed that our documentary was informative and featured appropriate visuals. When we did visual reviews of the documentary with people they elaborated on the fact that they thought the technical process of the documentary ie/ the editing, sound quality ect was very good and they would have though it was professionally created.

If I was being critical about my own work I’d say that It felt rushed towards the end of the documentary as the footage was almost random in parts. While editing the documentary at the start I felt that the music was too grainy and wanted to change it. However, after changing the sound levels of the sound it became more adequate.

I think overall as a group we worked well together to get this project finished and shared a common interest in music which helped us come to an agreement on which style of music we will feature.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

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

To film our documentary, we used Sony HXR-MC200E cameras. These cameras are broadcast standard. Other equipment we used to film was a; tripod, boom microphone, chip microphone and headphones.

The computer system we used to create our documentary was a XPS Dell PC with a solid-state hard drive. In addition to this we used USB cables to upload footage onto the D Drive.

The computer software we used to create the documentary and the radio advert was Adobe Premiere Pro C55. The settings we used to create our documentary was in 1080p, HD. To create the newspaper advertisement and to edit the graphic we used Adobe Photoshop CS5 and exported them into Bitmap (advert) and PNG (Graphic) files. Additionally, we used Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word to record audience feedback, research and to structure our emails to Artists/Band managers.

Mozilla Firefox featured useful plug-ins that allowed us to download YouTube videos for sound-beds and for archive footage efficiently without much hassle. For our documentary and newspaper advertisement we downloaded a font called ‘Dirty Ego’ off Defont. We chose this as when comparing it to the other fonts we felt that it fit well with our documentary. We also recorded all our data onto Blogger, a online blog-publishing service which is hosted by Google.