Hannah Precelton 6154 Evaluation

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 The Sixth Form College, Solihull. we had witnessed an example 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 which is supported by visual feedback. Therefore if can be said that Supersize me has influence some of our decisions in elements we used with the documentary Link to opening of documentary

The vox made up our fast pace

montage and from what Bill Nicholas 6 different modes our montages come from the soviet montage theory which we have borrowed from within poetic mode.

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 expositional mode as “evidentiary editing” as it gives support in visual format to the voiceover.

Establishing Shot

During our filming process you can see we improved upon shot composer, as the picture below demonstrates what our original vox pops looked like in comparison to the above where we learn that framing was important

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

The use of interview to back up the film makers opinion is an element we have taken from

cinema verite. Also the fact that the interviews support the main theme means they are

rationale too.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

Text Overlay

During our interviews, we included a selection of cutaways in the form mainly of over the shoulder shots. This classes as archival footage. We were only advised to use a small amount of this but it made our interviews more visually stimulating than they would have been had we only shown the subject talking on the documentary topic. They also strengthen the spoken narrative.

The use of this borrowed from within the expositional modes introduces important dramatic segments as it catches the viewers attention Another cut

away needed

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.

On a whole our documentary falls under the category of public affairs documentary as it’s made in a traditional format because we have chosen to show it using public service broadcasters , BBC. This type of documentary is known for investigating and exploring into current affairs.It could also be know that our documentary is polemical because it focuses on a perceived wrong within current society .

This is our final version of our double page spread.

Picture CreditA 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

Our article follows most of the conventions specified by other products of a similar nature. But one feature that challenges these standards is the larger picture of an inanimate object. This is possibly the only occasion in all three of our tasks where challenging a convention has adverse consequences, because many other magazine adhere to having a person as the larger image.This may be something for us to consider if we were to redo this, however we felt that a picture of cigarettes as the main image really emphasised the main theme of the documentary.

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. We believe that that score was adequate for our documentary although we

would have liked higher

87% of the people we said that they thought our documentary did typically follow codes and conventions. 9% (2 people) made comments that the music over powered vox pops and interviews.4% did not comment. In all this reflects our opinion of the documentary because the majority of those asked agreed with our beliefs in the production of the documentary that it did follow typical conventions

0 2 4 6 8

Mise-en-scene

Vox Pops

Proffessional Interviews

Establishing shots

Information

No. Of People

The following bar chart shows what codes and conventions from the people in our audience feedback questionnaire stated we had used.

When asked if we have effectively developed

any codes and conventions in the

documentary we found the following: 9 people

said we yes, 12 said no

Out of those 9 people, 5 specified what exactly we had developed effectively . 90% believed that our interviews were a point in which we had effectively developed. 10% said they thought that it was the cutaways which was a convention which they noted that we had effectively developed

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.

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.

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.

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 was particularly important to us when conducting interviews as we could monitor and attempt to reduce the background noise.

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. To me this technology was difficult. Mac’s have a tendency to crash and also simple commandments on a normal computer vary on Apple Macs thus making the tasks more confusing. However once we knew the basics of this revolutionary technology it aided our development in our tasks.

Click logo to go to our blog

This viral video aided us in our research as it allowed us to look at previous smoking documentaries in order for us to decide where to take inspiration from. We watch two in

particular Talking Butts and a BBC Horizon documentary by the name of We love cigarettes

Final CutIn 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 quitecomplex with it’s smaller feature on the other hand the initial main idea of Final Cut was

rather simple.

This is the layout of Final Cut, the time line above displays the last 3 minutes of our documentary. The blue tracks shown are the visual files whereas the green tracks are the audio files. The timeline also allows clips to

be layered. In the canvas in the top right you can see the documentary title which appears at the end of the five minute montage. The middle screen is the viewer it allows pre-screening and trimming of video and also for titles to be added therefore it’s purposes are to adjust and modify. On the left, the browser contain the raw

footage which we transferred in from where saved during our recording process.

The first thing we did was part of our post-production which involved having to Log and Transfer our clips, during which we looked through and selected the most

appropriate footage which we thought we could make the most of. To access this we went to file Log and Transfer then the image on the right appeared. Once our

footage had been selected, organised and considered suitable for use, it appeared in the Browser; and was available for us to use anywhere in our sequence.

In our final editing stage in order to professionalise our documentary, we

went to Modify, Audio 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. We decide to apply a constant -5 across the

board.

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

We then added video transitions to the clips, by dragging them from the viewer tothe 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

But in order to make sure our transitions worked when we replayed them we had to make sure when a red line appeared we made sure we rendered the footage so it would play smoothly.

Also in order to make sure during our editing process that the footage stayed in sync with the audio, there was a special function which we had to enable, seen on the left called linked selection.

In order to follow conventions, we insured our interviewees names

appear onscreen in for of text overlays. This making them

identifiable during the rest of the documentary.

We did this editing within the viewer. To change screens we had to select

the controls tab. It enabled us to write our desired text, change the font, its colour and adjust the size to coincide

with our documentary.

As it can be seen here between the experts it is much more effective when the name is shown. Also having the chance to insert two texts allowed us to be able to write the experts name on the top line and then underneath in a smaller font size, their job description

This tool bar appeared in the bottom right of the final cut screen. It enable us to do a variety of different commands

On the right is the sound level. Throughout the documentary we had to ensure that we monitored this as we didn’t want to have any extremities in our documentary sound level.The appropriate level of sound which we were searching for was green going into yellow.

This function serves to select it enables you to move footage around and select transitions and other extras to add to the footage

This is another function we used in our production stage this function enable us to cut up our footage so we could select the appropriate from what we had filmed to use within our documentaries

Garage BandWhen it came to the production of our radio trailer, we chose to use GarageBand, an apple Mac program as it is fairly simple to use however it fulfils our needs.

Directly records a new track

New tracks appear on different linethis is a simplified version with just two tracks

Background music from which we were able to select our backing track

Combining segments of audio

Adjusting the sound was easier than Final Cut and in my opinion aided the success of the production of our radio trailer . We were easily able to adjust the left and right panning of sound and also each individual track had a volume slider this therefore allowed us to lower the volume of the backing track so it didn’t overpower the information relayed in from the voiceover

The image above show 5 back to back clips. The tracks contains chunks of audio from different sources there is a variety of sound bites from the documentary and Voiceover. These were easy to insert as it involved dragging into a timeline much like Final Cut however Garage Band is much more accessible.

Furthermore we also picked a music track in which we repeated throughout the 30 second trailer. This track we also used within our documentary

Viewing the track in this format allowed us to get a close up of the variation in the audio in case we need to make adjustments to make the sound consistent.

In Design

Toolbar which contains different cursor options

Multi tab side bar which is customize able to users needs

This function was useful for us when we needed to tweak our spread

Although Adobe InDesign it is not the most straight forward Desktop Publishing package available, We used it because precision it allows you create when used properly.

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

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

When designing our magazine article we used Adobe InDesign