Evaluation Question 1

Codes and Conventions of a Documentary

To identify the codes and conventions of ourdocumentary we analysed three differentprofessional documentaries and identified thecodes and conventions of a documentary fromthem, in the creation of our documentary wedidn’t try to challenge the codes andconventions at any time.

Framing Interviews

One of the codes and conventions of a documentary is that the interviewee is either on the right or left side on the screen instead of the middle of the screen, another way that we followed the codes and conventions was by that we didn’t have our interviewee lookingDirectly into the camera we had the camera positioned on the opposite side to were the Interviewee was sitting and the interviewer would sit on the opposite side of the camera

As you can see theeye lines on both our documentary on the left and theprofessional one on the right are similar

Another way that we followed the codes and conventions was by positioning our interview on the right hand side or the left hand side basing on what side they were on for example in the images below the top image supported books and the bottom supported kindles

No questions were aired in the broadcasting of our documentarywhich is conventionally correct just like the real media texts.

We changed the shot type of our interviews so that the consuming doesn’t get bored this is part of thecodes and convention of a documentary.

When question are not aired on documentaries there are jump cuts between each answer, to cover the jump cuts cutaways are used to cover the jump cuts. Cutaways can be different things for example it could be achieve footage or footage filmed by the documentary creators which is relevant to the subject being spoken about below on the left are cutaways of real media texts and on the right is our cutaways this shows that we have followed the codes and conventions when it comes to cutaways.

The mise-en-scene of our interviews always had relevance to the person on screen and the subject what the they were talking about as the images show there is a relevance in the background of what subject the interviewee specialises in. The top two images are from our documentary and the bottom 3 are from real media texts. These images show that we followed the codes and convention when choosing the mise-en-scene for our interviews.

We also followed the codes and conventions of a documentary as well by adding graphics on our interviews, this is done so that the consumer is able to know the name of the person being interviewed and there relevance to the subject. The text anchors the person on the screen.

The image on the left handside is the real media text and the one on the right is from our documentary this is an example of how we followed the codes and convention of a documentary.

SoundI followed the codes and conventions of a documentary through sound by having a voiceover in our documentary, this is conventionally correct for when you are playing cutaways or achieve footage and there is somebody to explain it rather than silence

We also had music on our opening sequence of our documentary this was conventionally correct, we used music at the beginning of the documentary to keep consumers interested and to open the documentary well