Genre Research:By researching through multiple past examples of youth orientated Channel 4 documentaries, it provided our group with the ability to use, develop or even challenge the conventions of modern Channel 4 documentaries.

Some examples we looked at were ‘Disarming Britain’ and ‘Britain’s Forgotten Children’, both of which primarily focus on modern youth within society. We narrowed our wider research to Channel 4 later in research as Channel 4 has its own unique way of presenting documentaries in its own style and structure in comparison to a wider variety of documentaries over multiple channels and broadcasters.

Used ConventionsRepresentation within modern society and culture is a popular topic and theme that takes place in a range of Channel 4 documentaries. This was one of the primary reasons that we chose Channel 4, it gave us the opportunity to present a youth perception investigation in both a stylistic and informativeway.

To achieve this we decided to use a balance of professions for interviewees to create a non-biased production and placed this between scenes of general views and statistic based animations. This is similar to that of the more recent Channel 4 documentaries such as the Connecticut Shootings documentary, with its expressive range of opinions from multiple members of the public and law enforcement as well as presenting evidence through graphs/percentage charts.

As for stock characters: students, teachers and experts are generally considered to take part in our genre of documentary. This was something we felt was necessary to include within our documentary on youth to steer away from developing a ‘moaning-session’ with the limitations of just young people. To further improve this we could have included more from an experts field of view, but we still wanted to focus on the publics views to gather a generalised perceptive finding.

We also decided to use one of the typical stock settings of a youth documentary, a school. This was something that we felt was a location which a broad range of young people could associate with seeing as education is a key aspect of youth culture that people in Britain can identify with.

For our print work we researched the channel 4 production package for advertisement layout. We followed these rules and conventions for our advertising banner and decided to present our documentary in a simplistic light: brick wall background and set of diverse teenagers in the style of a police line up.

By following these conventions we simply established the name of the documentary and time of airing. The channel 4 logo was also researched into where it would be placed in its advertising rules of conventions. The way in which we developed on this however was that we presented this teasingly highlighting the youth representation stereotype; only when our presenter and aim of the investigation is revealed do the audience understand that it is an attempt to defuse youth stereotypes.

Developed ConventionsAlthough the way we presented our interviewees was indeed a mainstream used convention, we felt the incorporation of a broad age range and diverse occupations to enhance the non-biased tone of the show. By doing this we managed to successfully broaden our target audience which was evident in audience feedback questionnaires.

Once this was investigated, we had our young presenter retrieve vox-pop interviews to gain even more data, this was deliberate to gain an understanding on how young people think others see them.

Challenged ConventionsA popular choice of in the navigation of Channel 4 documentaries is the ‘Voice of God’ voice over technique. We decided to challenge this and bring in a young presenter to lead the show and provide narration. This would allow us to have someone on the middle ground, empathising with young people while still considering a mature attitude to adult/expert opinions/views.

On our magazine article we presented our main presenter as himself yet divided by two opposing stereotypes (the geek/the hoodie). This would allow readers to understand the aim of the show and as an image it is quite interesting due to the triple persona factor of its appearance.