Hannah Precelton 6154Evaluation

http://f02documentary09.blogspot.com/2010/03/evaluation-matt-de-sousa_02.html

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

Our documentary follows many codes and conventions of real media products for example, We used Vox pops from students within Solihull Sixth Form College, Solihull we saw an exam of this when watching Super Size Me.

Another convention we used which we noted from The Morgan Spurlock documentary was the fact that the voice over gives statistics

Two more vox pops needed

The

We made sure for our interviews that there was relevant mise-en-scene

because it shows authenticity and it makes the audience believe in what

they say because of their surroundings

Oona Stone is wearing a lab coat

Mrs Breeze is in NHS

Nurses uniform

Stop smoking website open behind.

To add to the interview set up.We had a Skeleton which adds to the connotation of a biology teacher

For both of our professional interviews we made sure we focused on shot composure

insuring the experts who were being interviewed looked across

the dead space and not directly at the camera.

Occupying just over half the frame

Small space above head

During our interviews, we included a selection of cutaways in the form mainly of over the shoulder shots. It made our interviews more visually stimulating than they would have been had we only shown the subject talking on the documentary topic.

Another cut away

needed

conventional

Establishing Shot

Before our interviews, we included an establishing shot. This is common practice as it strengthens the spoken narrative. It’s something Grierson defined under the expostional mode as “evidentiary editing” as it gives support in visual format to the voiceover.

Audience Feedback on whether our media product use

develop or challenge forms and conventions. The two people

who thought we had challenged the conventions commented

on the fact they believed the music overpowered the

interviews/ vox pops. Also a comment was passed that there

were no interview names however there is.

This is our final version of our double page spread.

Picture Credit

A Pull-Quote

A Caption with connotations from

words used

Footer with magazine name and issue date and page numbers

The title with emphasis on adjective

Text in columns

Article Credit

Smaller Images

depicting parts of the interview

Drop Caps to emphasis the start of the article

Important detail about Documentary

schedule

Stand first in larger print

Consistent House style

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

We tried to follow a house style when making the combination of tasks in order for the audience to be able to associate all three as being about one product. We were aiming for a clear brand identity.

Therefore as planned to air our documentary on BBC 3, we felt it appropriate to have our double page spread, TV listings in Radio Times because of the association between the two. Although it is questionable that our desired target audience would not themselves read this magazine, we said that they would read their parents copy.

We used this still from within the documentary on

our double page spread so that there was

continuity between the tasks and hopefully the

audience would recognise the expert when

watching the documentary.

However with reflection on our magazine article promoting our product the image which we used in the final double page spread does not actually feature within

the documentary however it is still relevant to the topic of the documentary. This was unfortunate for us, thus being that our first choice of image would not

place properly in portrait format

Pull Quote taken direct from interviewee in documentary

To further this and to keep a house style we made the decision to use the same music sound bed from within Garage band for both our documentary and our radio trailer with the aim that it would contribute to the brand identity

Within our radio trailer there were sound bites from the documentary itself to continue to establish a brand identity. This hopefully will also enable the audience to associate the two products.On reflection I feel this was a good decision because it appeared to work effectively

Music from documentary

Music from Radio Trailer

Another way in which we tried to ensure continuity with a combination of tasks was that in both the radio trailer and the documentary use the same voiceover.

Issues may occur with how well the tasks appeal to their intended audiences. The documentary is probably our best piece, as it has a range of editing techniques which have been applied and interviews that present hard hitting information. Therefore, the documentary virtually has something to cater for any type of viewer. The radio trailer is similar in many aspects. In the brief 30 seconds that it plays, it contains a montage of voiceover and documentary sound bites, this is example of fast editing which we have used in order for the radio trailer to be attention grabbing. With regards to the double page spread problems may arise when looking at the chosen magazine for our article to be published in although it follows suit with us airing our documentary on BBC3, the Radio Times is not a magazine frequently read by our target audience (teenagers). Therefore on reflection if we were to repeat it’d be suggested we look for a more suitable magazine to aim directly at our target audience

Overall, I think our ancillary tasks combine with our documentary quite successfully. They look and sound as if they have a brand identity, and are clear and effective when promoting the program this can also be seen by the audience feed back results

Target audience:- Any ethnicity/culture- Both Genders- Between 16 -26

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1002468

1012

Overall Documentary Score

Score out of ten

Am

ount

of

peop

le

We gave this information from 23 people;

15 females and 8 males

To gather our audience feedback, we produced a simple questionnaire, asking fellow students to rate our products overall, and also on how appropriate they were.

These are the results for our final product.

The sample who filled in our questionnaire we all between 16-22, which means we gained feedback from our target audience

From the bar chart we can tell that our documentary was believed to be average because 11 out of 23 people rated our documentary 7/10.

These results tell us that our documentary was not thought of as poor this is shown by us not receiving anything below 4. On the other hand students believed if given the chance there was still elements which we could improve upon as 10/10 was not

scored.

The following pie chart represents whether or not students thought the ancillary tasks which we produced effectively promoted the documentary. Overall unfortunately 39% of people we asked believe that the radio trailer and double page spread failed to effectively promote our documentary. However 61% believe that our ancillary tasks did work successfully in promoting our documentary.

No

When asked if they thought our 3 tasks had a clear defined brand identity. The pie chart on the left shows that 78% believe that our 3 products did but 22% of the 23 people we questioned disagreed.

From the verbal feedback we received it was noted that the documentary had good sound quality and that the choice of music was appropriate as it was insistent which create tension. Furthermore we were informed that our interviews were very informative and that the mise- en- scene and shot composure

were of high standard.A point raised in the verbal feed back about our documentary was that there seemed to be an

inconsistence, with questions appearing on screen and the voice over asking the questions. In addition with regards to the double page spread it was advised that if we had the chance to edit/ tweak our

tasks that the photograph of the cigarettes shouldn’t be the feature image. These are both points we would take on board as improvements if we were to repeat this project. Unfortunately our questionnaire

lets us down because it didn’t clearly enable us to gain enough qualitative data with the audience’s opinions. A question was asked about target audience however the exacts of target audience was not

specified.

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

During all stages of the production we used an assortment of technologies and software, ones which we were both familiar and unfamiliar with. However in our initial research into the project we also used a wide range of technology; this involved the

analysis of existing documentaries our primary internet research. Also throughout we uploaded materials and proof of our work onto Blogger.com

In our production phase, the video cameras which we used to create the documentary involved fairly new unfamiliar technology. This was convenient as the uploading process was incredibly simple. The convenience of the video cams was they were easy mountable on a tripod meaning we were able ensure that our shots were still and level. As the camera had ports for headphones and a microphone, we were able to monitor the audio, this feature wasparticularly important to us when conducting interviews as we could monitor and attempt to reduce the backgroundnoise.

Blogger.com allowed us to organise and share our research and planning with the rest of the group, I feel that this medium was effective way in storing our work as it didn’t involve needing a large quantity of paper evidence. Other than text and

images, there is little else Blogger offers in the way of features. However, one technology that was ample and convenient for our research was a scanner,

this enabled us to generate digital versions of our the few pieces of paper-based work which we had to produce in order to update our blog.

This internet site was incredibly useful as it enable us to access the work we had done from any computer and I found it easy to deal with but it was a shame it didn’t enable us to

upload videos without embedding links from site like YouTube.

The majority of our post-production took place on an Apple iMac Computer. In order to edit and produce our documentary, we used Final Cut Express.

The software was new to the whole group, this means it took a little time for us to familiarise ourselves with the program and how it functions.

Myself , I found it a little complicated at first because of the fact that the programme was quite complex with it’s smaller feature on the other hand

the initial main idea of Final Cut was rather simple.

Log and Transfer was first step for our clips, during which we wanted to use. Once footage had been selected and organised it appeared in the Browser on the left-hand side and we were able to place the footage anywhere on our time line.

We then added video transitions to the clips, by dragging them from the viewer to the rough position on the timeline. We watched the edit through a couple of times, and tweaked where needed. They then appeared on the time line as grey rectangles

In our final editing stage we went to modify and normalization and applied Normalization Gain to all our clips. This feature of Final Cut allowed us to ensure that we had a consistent sound level across our documentary.

For our over the shoulder shots it can be seen that we used a feature which enabled us to alter the speed. The reason we applied this feature to our documentary was to use the footage as a cutaway thus meaning it didn’t need to be on screen very long and we wanted to make sure our audience got the information we wanted to convey.

The smaller features within Final Cut were a tad complex to find however they enabled us to fine tune our documentary

Track contains chunks of audio from different sources( Sound bites from documentary and Voice over)

Colour picker was used from this software to insure a consistency of colour with box a pull-quote

When designing our magazine article we used Adobe InDesign

InDesign works on the of Placing images into frames in the document, so that they are still linked to the original file. Although we used this technology at AS I myself, found it challenging as the software isn’t self explanatory. Although the text is in columns like you would see in a normal double page spread it isn’t level and drastic tweaking is needed. However the software allows our double page spread to look relatively like a everyday newspaper spread

Dragging in sound clips and generally using Garage Band itself was an uncomplicated process in my opinion and a good piece of simple software which aided our radio trailer production