Alex Lyndon

Evaluation

1. In what ways does our media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media documentary was produced through the ideas of us all and the knowledge that we all individually had about media conventions and the use of software. With all of the media knowledge we had, we managed to produce a 5 minute documentary on the ‘stereotypes of youths’ named “Running Riot”. To show the professional documentary that we all wanted to produce, we focused on getting all the correct elements into the short documentary with use of different shots and effects.

Before starting our documentary we had to decide what codes and conventions will be used. For our documentary we wanted a cinema verite style, more than a direct cinema style. Cinema verite suited the documentary better as we wanted to add in interviews and other documentary conventions, and the direct cinema style meant that they couldn’t be included, therefore cinema verite was much more of a suitable style. Another reason that we wanted a cinema verite style documentary is because it is about combining natural techniques with editing and camerawork, which is what we wanted and needed to do for our documentary to be professional. We also had to decide what mode our documentary was going to have. The American documentary theorist Bill Nichols identified six different documentary modes. From the 6 of the styles we knew that an expositional mode was present as it includes using actual information and opinions by the interviewees. We definitely wanted the opinions of interviewees about the topic of our documentary which was stereotyping of teenagers. Narration is part of the expositional mode, which we was going to add into or documentary. After completing the documentary I thought that a bit of the performative mode was present. This is because we offered the interviewees the chance to air their opinions and experiences, which is what the performative mode of a documentary would allow you to do. Our documentary was not observational as it has bylaws such as no music, narration, no interviews. This is exactly the opposite of what we wanted therefore it wouldn’t have worked. It was not linked to the participatory mode either as we stayed behind the camera and not in the film. It also converts a certain message when the presenter is filmed and that’s was not what our documentary was about. Our documentary was definitely not linked to the reflexive or poetic mode either. The genre was a slightly realist documentary, out of being subjective, realistic and a formalist documentary. It was more so realistic as we had interviews and opinions from a range of people, therefore making the documentary more subjective than objective as we had more opinions than facts. The category tone, I think was serious and uncritical. It was serious as stereotyping is an issue. We bought in the Birmingham riots into the documentary to show the seriousness of teenage youth violence. I do not think that the tone of the documentary was critical either as it was unbiased and included people’s opinions. The narrative structure for our documentary is story telling. This is because it includes talking about events such as the Birmingham riots, including the type of people that were involved in that event as well. The documentary has a rhetorical narrative as it includes the features of one such repeated motifs e.g. recurring images and it also addresses the

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audience directly. This is similar to ‘Supersize me’ as during that documentary it has recurring images of the McDonalds clown Ronald McDonald appear throughout. We do have an argumentation scheme. The examples of an argumentation scheme that appear in our documentary are history and authority. This is shown through an interview with Gill Tracey who talks about the history of youth violence and what the authorities did about it, referring back to the riots in London years ago. Through narration we have added in a enigmatic code. We have told the viewer what questions we asked the interviewees and made sure that those questions got answered within the opening sequence that they saw.

For the first part of production, we had to decide what shots and footage we were going to use and make sure that we had enough to last us the length of 5 minutes long. This process was called log and transfer. This was easy as we all knew what high quality shots and footage was and if it displayed any technical skills, such as the value of the mise en scene and framing of the shot. We only chose footage that was relevant to our documentary’s purpose and theme.

The first obstacle that we first came across was what our opening shot was going to be. We all had different ideas in mind of what the opening sequence should be and look like. This is the first part of the documentary the audience would see and give them their first impression. I wanted to have something hard hitting and fast paced that made the audience alert and interested.Through saying what our each of our ideas were and choosing out of the shots we had taken we all compromised and played around with all of our ideas and came up with a strong opening extract that we all agreed upon and that gave a clear message of what our documentary was going to be about. We opened with a sequence, along the lines of what I had in mind as we had footage of youths smashing in windows and police all along the streets. The idea of having a hard hitting introduction was acted upon by all of us in our decisions. This is effective and straight away shows that our documentary is about youth’s, using the stereotype of ‘youths are violent’, showing clips of the Birmingham riots. I suggested the title “Running Riot” to reflect on what the documentary is about, and, from the title alone, you get the idea that the documentary is going to have something to do with the recent riots. To enhance the severity of the opening clip, we used audio conventions and embedded a loud ‘rock music’ sound to give the clip a

more serious and dangerous effect, which I think reflected the nature of what the majority of people think about teenagers.

After the opening sequence we went into the technical media codes and conventions with the appropriate camera techniques to

These are the sheets of decision editing paper that we used to show what clips we were and weren’t going to use and why.

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start the opening sequence of introducing our documentary and the college. We also changed the sound to a more harmonious musical tone sound-bed. I think this reflects the nature of the college and the students apart of it, connoting the lack of violence within its students. Throughout the documentary the sound levels were changed, such as making the music louder when the voiceover was no longer heard. We lowered the volume levels when the voiceover was speaking so that it could be heard clearly, but could still faintly hear the music in the background. The sound-bed is played all throughout the documentary. The voiceover was recorded in a quiet environment so it could be easily heard when on the documentary. We made sure that the voiceover was clear; that the script was relevant to the topic of the documentary and that the voiceover wasn’t too fast or too slow. The tone of voice and the pace that the narrator is talking fits in perfectly with the documentary. We had recorded a female and male reading the script and decided that the female’s voice fitted the documentary better and flowed more easily.

When we put the voiceover into Final Cut express we had to adjust the sound levels. We made sure that the volume of the voice wasn’t too overpowering of the sound-bed and that it wasn’t too quiet to be heard either. This is crucial for the documentary as it gives a sense of professionalism. We had to make sure that the contrast between the music; voiceover and the interviews in the documentary are all equal according to volume.

Going back to the interviews, we had numerous choices of interviews in our documentary as we interviewed a lot of different people. Throughout all of our professional interviews with the psychology and sociology teacher we kept them to the left of the screen and had the mise en scene showing on the other side. When doing these interviews we made sure that the interviewee was not looking into the camera and in an appropriate direction of slightly to the right of the camera. We also added in the name of the interviewee and their profession with the professional interviews.

The computer screen has appropriate mise en scene as it shows a man promoting anger, with the word aggression, written in bold red letters.

This is the bar that appears with the name and profession.

This is how the name appears over the clip and how long it lasts for.

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We then did interviews with students. We had them central of the frame to show a difference in camera style, as well as having hand held cameras for most of those interviews, whereas we used a tripod for all the professional interviews. We expanded outside of those in the college to talk to and went to Solihull high street so we can get opinions about youths from the general public. This has been seen in many documentaries and I feel that it gives our documentary a more realistic effect and that it is not all based on the opinions of those who worth with youths, and those who are. This may have been seen as biased to some, so therefore we made sure that it wasn’t and got different opinions from random adults who we interviewed in Solihull. This type of technique is referred to as a vox pop. The shots that were used for the interviews were mainly medium close ups. We all changed and had opinions of where the shots should go and what worked better in a certain order and eventually produced something that we all thought worked well and agreed on. We also had a jump cut present in our documentary. This came about because we had to cut one of our clips to make the interview necessary to the point documentary.To go from interview to the next shot we used cuts. This is a common transition technique used in TV. I thought that ‘fade to black’ transitions were mainly used for dramatic effect and our documentary did not connote that dramatic effect. However, we did use a visual transition ‘fade to black’ in the documentary called a dip to colour. It was used to go from one clip to another; we used it because the straight cut didn’t look right. We felt that this technique worked better than a cut technique, which we had used throughout the documentary, and therefore showed two different types of transitions that we used. We also used a ‘cross fade’ transition for the audio. This made the audio flow better and more smoothly from one interview to another due to the change of voice and possible background noise.

These are examples of two of the student interviews we did. They are centrally famed and both a medium close up.

This is the ‘fade to black’ transition we used which is called a dip to colour transition that we added in.

This is the audio transition called “cross fade”.

We made the image appear over one of the interviews by dragging it above the clip.

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We had rostrum footage present in our documentary as well. The rostrum footage was a picture of hooded people robbing a local shop. The rostrum footage had the camera direction moving diagonally from the bottom left hand corner to the top right. This was used over one of the interviews that we had. We purposely used the footage there as it helped illustrate what the interviewee was talking about. It also added a professional and factual effect as we had the still clip going diagonally across the screen instead of having it just still.

Other media conventions that were present in our documentary were tilts and panning. We made sure that we had different camera techniques in our documentary to show are camera ability such as tilts and panning.

I feel that the documentary overall was very good in terms of quality of camera techniques such as tilting and interviews. I am very pleased with the information we gathered from the interviews that we did as all the interviews were useful and used in the documentary at some point due to the good quality of responses we received. I think that the documentary was successful in conveying an unbiased view on stereotypes of youths and how we used the recent riots that happened to help get people’s points on youths and what they’re typical view of a teenager is. I think we achieved this unbiased opinion through interviewing college students asking them what they feel about this negative stereotype of them since the riots and also that we managed to get adults views on this subject as well.

The documentary “supersize me” has the similar conventions in terms of interviews, compared to our documentary. Throughout the “supersize me” documentary we see and hear from professionals such as dietitians. We incorporated professional interviews into our

This is one of the tilts we used in the documentary. It starts out of focus but becomes in focus as we tilt the camera down.

This is one of the “on the street” random interviews featured in Supersize me.

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documentary also such as asking those with psychology and sociology qualifications. Another similarity is that they also had interviews with people they had met in the shopping centre to ask their opinions. We had done the same as we went to Solihull high street and asked their opinions on the stereotypes of youths and the Birmingham riots. I feel as if we have developed codes and conventions and have added them into our documentary to make it look more professional and are able to compare it to a real documentary.

This is the link to the supersize me documentary on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHKCb0_2oD0

The common conventions of a magazine were shown in our double page spread. We followed the rule of thirds when putting the article in the magazine. We also followed conventions of all magazines which is including the page numbers at the bottom corner of the page and also having the name of the magazine that it is being published in mentioned with the date present also. The date and time of the documentary, as well as the name of the channel that it will be shown on was made noticeable.

A convention that we didn’t follow is putting captions on the photos. We added in numerous photos to help illustrate the article, telling the reader visually what it was about but, some magazine do add captions such as who the pictures we taken by or what’s happening in that photo. I feel that if we added in the captions it would make it look too busy seeing as the pictures were already slightly overlapping one another. Having a number of pictures within the article challenged the normal conventions of a magazine as it is only usual one or two main images that are shown, whereas we have chosen five.Something that we incorporated into our double page spread was having important quotations from interviews enlarged. This is a typical of all magazines. We developed the convention by also making it a different colour to stand out more and break up the text so it doesn’t look too cramped together. I also think that we followed typical conventions of all magazines by making sure that the masthead was large and noticeable. We wanted to make sure that it was bold and

Alex Lyndon

eye catching. I feel that this was achieved and a successful convention in our double page spread. The use of the different colours show that we have stuck to the magazine conventions as some, but not all magazines, use different colour font for indicating who’s talking, as well as putting their name. To start off the article a stand first has been used to introduce what the article is about, mentioning the Birmingham riots. The article itself is written has been laid out in columns as this is a typical convention that all magazines abide by, as well as using the rule of thirds.

The radio trailer follows the typical codes and conventions. To get an idea of how real radio trailers sound we filled out 5 radio trailer analysis sheets after listening to different types of trailers. We commented whether the sound was ambient or not, what the presenter’s tone of voice was like and who the target audiences were and so on. We thought that it would be appropriate to have the presenter’s voice in the radio trailer as the same one in the documentary. The typical conventions we stuck to was choosing the correct sound to symbolize what the advertisement was about. We thought that having police sirens at the beginning, followed by a mob of shouting would be appropriate the voice this point. We then had an upbeat backing track (also referred to as a sound bed) flowing through the radio trailer. Over the backing track we had the narrator

Large eye catching mastheads

A Stand first, telling the readers what the article is about. Page

numbers

Article in columns

Developing codes and conventions as it is normal to have one huge main image.

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asking rhetorical questions, telling listeners what the show is about. It is a typical convention to have a backing track in all radio trailers, even if it isn’t played all the way through. The channel, date and time of the documentary is present within the radio trailer including clips from the documentary. We have developed normal and typical codes and conventions into our radio trailer as we have trailer last for 42 seconds long, the average length of a normal, professional radio advertisement.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

I feel that we have a good combination of the documentary and our ancillary products, the double page spread and the radio trailer. The double page spread is quite dark which reflects the issue of youth violence. I think this fits in very well with the beginning of the documentary where we see teenagers destroying and smashing shop windows with police vehicles everywhere. I feel that the double page spread connotes the beginning of the documentary well and more in depth. It is very symbolic of danger with the use of the red writing on the black background. The masthead also looks rough and destroyed. This gives a strong meaning of what the article is about just from the font used. It is very large font and eye catching with a catchy title. The images that are used in the double page spread have been taken from some footage that we have used in the documentary. Other images were used from footage that we had taken and not used, therefore making use of them in the double page spread. We have an equal contrast of “violent looking” teenagers, they’ve got the stereotypical view of some people’s point of view. The mise en scene of their clothing with caps and hoods up connotes that they are violet and should be feared. There is also pictures of “non-violent looking” teenagers. The other image has police armed with riot shields holding down a hooded man. This connotes the severity of youth violence. We have made use of other images such as a still of students working hard inside the college and the other picture indicating happiness of teenagers as they are laughing, and have their college work out on the table.The use of both of the different type of images juxtaposes each other. It helps show that the article and documentary is all about the different opinions of the majority

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of the public. Within the article we have used quotes from interviews that were in the documentary. The documentary overall has all the conventions a professional magazine double page spread would have. I think that it appeals to the target audience of males and females aged 16 – 35 years old of any race/religion or ethnicity. There is no discrepancy against gender or age with the use of images of font colour. The article appeals to the target audience because the format in which it was written was made to be understandable and completely relevant to the topic of the documentary. We have written it in the sense that one of the documentary’s producers has been interviewed. This makes the article seem more interesting and worthwhile to read.

The radio trailer also combines relevance to our documentary as well. We have used the same narrator for the radio trailer as we did for the voiceover in the documentary. This shows consistency as you can relate the voice back to the documentary. The radio trailer consists of the audio of interviews that we have in our documentary. In the 42 second long radio trailer we are able to capture the relevant and important points from our documentary and convert it into an effective radio trailer. Like the documentary, we have different people’s opinions of youth riots and that’s what is heard throughout the radio trailer. The only thing that is different is the sound bed music that we have used in the trailer. It is different in the way that it’s more upbeat than the harmonious sound-bed used in the documentary. The main thing that I think shows a strong link between the documentary and the radio trailer is that they both have a captivating start. At the beginning of the documentary we hear and see youths destroying property. To start our radio trailer we used the sound of a police siren gradually getting louder, followed by the ranting and shouting of crowds of youths. This gives the main and ancillary product a strong connection. With the use of the effective introduction from the main product and the radio trailer and the colour and image choice of the double page spread, it produces an image for all of our products and makes them connote a certain image, making it easy for them to be interlinked with one another. Overall, I think that the ancillary tasks and the main task all fit together. I think that they all have strong links into each other and all keep to connoting the purpose of the topic very well. In my opinion I feel that the radio trailer and the double page spread promote the documentary well and all three media products target the same audience. The only way I could suggest to improve the effectiveness of the combination of each of the products would be is making the radio trailer sound a more interesting and exciting with a different use of an interview. The idea of having a teenager using ‘slang’ language talking about his education and or charity work. I would have done this to juxtapose the idea of the roughness with their actual intellectual ability and good behavior. I think that this would make the listeners think about how they foresee teenagers, linking back to the point of our documentary. To further improve the double page spread I would have added in a byline, mentioning who wrote the article etc.., making it stick more to the codes and conventions of a double page spread.

Alex Lyndon

3. What have you leant from the audience feedback?

From the audience feedback questionnaires we handed out to those who viewed all of our media products we had sufficient feedback.We started by asking how they would rate the documentary, double page spread and the radio trailer. The choices were out of excellent, good, bad and awful.

We had very good and pleasing responses as the table shows. We didn’t have any negative feedback with the respondents saying it was either good or excellent. The documentary looks to be most promising at a professional level as it got the highest rating of being ‘excellent’. The radio trailer, however, had the least amount of ‘excellent’ ratings, therefore showing that it was good but could have been made better.

Documentary Radio trailer Double Page Spread

Excellent 5 1 3Good 10 14 12Bad 0 0 0Awful 0 0 0

The second question asked how we could improve all of our media products. For the documentary question, the most amount of people said that we could improve the lighting during the interviews. Another was that the music didn’t quite fit in with the theme of the documentary. Too many establishing shots were used was the response from others and another improvement was that the sound levels could be adjusted. I am not surprised with the main response of improvements which was that the lighting needed to b e better. I agree with this point and think that it would have made our documentary better. I see the view that respondents are taking about the music but we personally thought that it fitted in and wasn’t too bad, although I do agree that another piece of sound-bed music could have been used as well and may have sounded better and more in theme with the documentary.

For the radio trailer we only had two suggestions for improvements. The most common improvement was that the voiceover could have been louder. The other suggestion was to adjust the sound levels.I agree that the voice over was fairly quiet when the background music was playing and could have been louder. This ties in with the other suggestion of the sound levels. We may have needed to lower the sound track more when the voiceover was to be heard. This is a valid suggestion and I think that the sound levels could have been corrected for improvement of the trailer.

The double page spread also had a number of improvements suggested. A suggestion that was made was that there were too many images, therefore making it look slightly cramped. Another suggestion made about the images was that they needed credits. This is a valid suggestion and think that could have made the double page spread seem more professional as it is a typical convention of a magazine for most to have image credits. A final suggestion

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made was that it needed more colour. I personally thought that the images and the colour were fine as the images were chosen in particular to use. The colours of red, black and white were all to connote the dark stereotype that youths get. I think that maybe one other colour could have been used but I was happy with the final outcome of the double page spread.

I expected the feedback that came off of most of the media products. I wasn’t surprised, as I know that all of our media products could be improved in some way.

We asked closed questions next to get a different range of responses. We wanted to know if people would want to keep watching the documentary after seeing the first five-minute opening. All of the responses came back as positive saying that they would all carry on watching it.

For the second question we asked we wanted to know if our documentary seemed in any way similar to a real documentary that would have been shown on TV. The response we got was mainly positive with 13/15 people asked saying that it did seem similar to a real documentary. The results show that there are still issues with the documentary, which means that it is quite not BBC documentary standard.

The final question we asked was whether the viewers of all of our media products, the documentary, radio trailer and the double page spread, if they thought that they all related

yes no02468

101214

Was the documentary interesting enough to keep watching?

87%

13%

Does this documentary seem similar to a real BBC documentary?

yes no

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to each other. All of the people who saw our media products thought that they all related to each other.

The main findings from all of the feedback we received show’s that all of our media products link in well together and that they are effective, watchable, readable and listenable. However, I also know that improvements could be made with all of the media products and that the feedback was very good and informative about how we could have improved them all.

Before we created our media products we did audience research. We did this to see what people thought about the point of our documentary, double page spread and radio trailer, to make sure that it was a topic worth developing media products about. We asked questions such as ‘’define the word stereotype” and “would you say that teenagers have a negative stereotype?”. All of the people we asked said that teenagers do have a negative stereotype.We asked what type of person that you would expect to see on the street at night. 90% said “chav”. To follow this question we wanted to know how people would describe the look of a teenager and so asked them to name 5 attributes of a stereotypical teenager. These are the results we gathered:

What people said: How many people said it:

· Hoodies · 3

· Tracksuits · 4

· Gold jewellery (lots of) · 3

· Swearing · 3

· Loud Music (speed garage) · 3

· YOB · 2

· Shifty (scary) · 2

yes

no

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

Do all of our media products relate to eachother?

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· Rude · 3

· Lazy · 4

· Easy life · 1

· Always texting/ unorganised · 1

· Loud · 4

· Violent (Carries knives) · 3

· Moody, troublemaking and argumentative

· 6

· Intimidating · 1

· Unpleasant/ poor behaviour · 3

· Poor · 2

· Technological · 1

From the table we can clearly tell that people didn’t have anything positive to describe a teenager as. These results clearly sowed us that a stereotype of teenagers is well known and is not a positive one. This showed us that it would be a good idea to do a documentary to get people’s opinion instead of on paper and get their views about the stereotype of youths. We linked this behaviour to the Birmingham riots and asked “What is your opinion on the recent riots that took place around Birmingham?”. We found that the responses were all negative using the words ‘awful’, ‘disgusting’, and ‘selfish’. The questionnaire we produced was handed out to teenagers. After getting this response from them we realized that youths might have only been a small minority that we rioting, yet the media revolved the riots around them, and other teens felt that this portrayal of them was wrong. Following the question about a negative representation given to youths, “How do you feel about the negative representations always shown in the media?” All the responses we had said that they did not agree with the negative representation, and that it was only a small minority of teenagers that cause the stereotype. To follow the previous question we asked “do you feel as I a positive portrayal of teenagers should be shown more often in the media?”. 10 out of 10 of the people asked said ‘yes’. This showed us that people do think that teenagers are only shown in a bad light and would like to see more positive reinforcement about them, instead of always negative.

Alex Lyndon

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

To produce all of our products we had to use a range of technology to achieve them. Some of the technology I ad used before when producing similar tasks before, but others were completely new technology for me to use.Computers that were located all around the college that I had access to and also my own computer at home was the most familiar piece of hardware and software that I used. I used the computer software such as Microsoft word to produce the target audience questionnaire and other documents necessary. We also made good use of the Internet, as our blog was located on Blogger.com. The Internet was mainly used for research for our media products. We used websites such as YouTube, scribd and slideshare. It was also used to access online newspapers and images that were relevant to post on our blogs and help illustrate what all out media products are about.

Any research that we did was uploaded via the internet onto our blog. The website Blogger.com was good in terms of layout of how to see the blog, save work documents as a draft and easily upload images to the documents. To make our blog look different and stand

out a bit more than all the others we decided to add a background to our blog and make it look more effective. We also started adding colour to the text to make the blog look more interesting to read and look at. As well as uploading documents to the blog that we had produced on Microsoft word and so on, we also had sheets of work that were paper based that needed to be uploaded to the blog as well. We managed to do this with the scanners, and were essential for getting all the work we had done onto the blog. The scanners were really easy to use and very

quick to scan documents and locate them after. (http://f03runningriot.blogspot.com)

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After we had done all of our planning research, we went ahead with filming. We used cannon cameras provided by the college that were used for filming and for taking pictures. With the camera we were provided with a microphone, headphones and a tripod. The camera was slightly different as it was much more technical than I was used to. The camera didn’t have an SD card that it stored data on, it just simply connected to the Mac, which was useful and made uploading footage easier. With use of the camera we were able to white balance the footage to make it more naturalistic and get rid of any darkness or discolour that the camera tended to pick up. We also learnt how to do a range of techniques such as manual focus, instead of just using auto focus. By learning this camera technique we planned how we would use it and decided that it would definitely be used in our documentary.

The camera came equipped with a tripod, which meant we could make sure that the camera position was at the correct angle and level and that we had still footage, eliminating any shaking of the camera. To ensure that the camera was level, there was a spirit level within the tripod. If the bubble wasn’t in the middle of the spirit level then we knew that the camera wasn’t straight. This was one of the most useful necessities that we needed as it made sure that all of our shots were level and not on a slant. The microphone used was a directional microphone. This was very handy as we could hear the person speaking more clearly though the directional microphone when there was also a lot of background noise, which is what it helped reduce. The headphones that were used were compatible with the camera and so was the microphone. This was easy to set up and gave us a bit extra filming time.

When we had all of our footage, we started to produce our media products, which were all done on the apple Macs. I had not previously worked on the apple Macs much before so learning how to use it was a gradual throughout the production process. I did learn how to use the software and was able to contribute to the work through learning how to use them correctly. The Macs were much better to use for constructing all of our media products due to the software that it offered us, which a windows computer wouldn’t have been able to.

The construction of the documentary was done in Final Cut Express. I had never worked on this software before so it was completely new to me. By the end of finishing off the documentary I knew how to work the software efficiently. I learnt how to put the footage

It starts off blurred. This is the shot we got of students walking in.

This is what the shot looks like after we focused the camera.

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into the timeline and how to crop them to the length that we wanted. Through watching other real documentaries such as “supersize me” and others, we decided that we wanted to have the names of the interviewees appear on professional interviews. We learnt how to do this on the final cut express software and also how to change the transparency, font and colour of the name. Layering clips on top of each other was easy to do and so was adding in the voiceover and the sound-bed. Through this, I found out how to unlink the video from the audio of the clip and could then choose if we wanted both the audio and the video or one of each. We used this in our documentary and made great use of the video clips for voiceover over some as we had unlinked from their real audio. The final cut express software was good quality software that I thought was very useful for making the first 5 minute opening for our documentary.

This image is a snapshot of some of the tools that we were able to use on editing our documentary. The arrow tool allowed us to drag and move the clips to where we wanted.

The pen tool allowed us to increase and decrease the sound levels within the clips. This helped a lot if one interview sounded quieter than another.

The ‘razor blade tool’ allowed us to cut any audio and visual clip we had in half, or wherever we wanted. This was very useful as we used it on one of our interview clips and cut out the unnecessary part of the interview.

To make the double page spread up to a professional standard we used the software InDesign. I have used this software before when making a magazine for my coursework last year at AS. I thought that the software was very useful back then and quite easy to use however, some tools I found hard such as when selecting the colour you want to use consistently I found that you sometimes couldn’t save that exact colour that you wanted to the swatches area of the tools the software provided. This then resulted in having the colour you want in all different shades.InDesign was very good for the range of tools that it offered such as effects. The image on the right indicates that for the colour alone you could add an effect and a gradient to the text. It also offers different text and paragraph styles for the text as well. Due to the range of choice, this software was very good and effective to use when doing the article as we had a lot of options and styles to choose from.

The image below is the tool bars that are present in InDesign. The tool bar shows all of the tools that are available to use on the article.

These icons allow you to change the size and font of the text.

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However, for the masthead of our double page spread we used the software Photoshop. The title was put into a website called “Dafont” (http://www.dafont.com). The website allows you to pick from a number of different text designs. Once we had chosen one that we liked and thought was appropriate, it was the put into Photoshop. The text was then made larger and rotated

on the side to the left. The separate words ‘running’ and ‘riot’ was both not rotated parallel to each other. Photoshop allows you to manipulate all of the texts separately and not all at once if you wish. Photoshop was the more ideal and appropriate software to use for the making of the masthead and InDesign was much more appropriately designed for the article. Photoshop was the software that I used the least, opposed to Garageband and finalcut express. However, I used it last year for the same thing I knew how it worked. I enjoyed using software that I am not familiar with as I can learn and extend my technical knowledge ability. If I were to use this software again I would be confident in knowing how to use it.

For our radio trailer we used the software Garageband, which was available to us on the apple Macs. I had only ever used Garageband once before and not had much practice on it, so I didn’t know what I was doing when it came down to producing our radio trailer. We had some trouble with exporting the audio clips from the documentary into Garageband.We then were shown that we had to make a new sequence in FinalCut Express (where are documentary was located). We then had to drag the file that we wanted into the second sequence we had made. We then had to unlink the audio from the video of the documentary. After we had unlinked it we deleted the video but kept the audio on. We then had to export the audio, to do this we had to save the audio into a separate file in or ‘media student file’ on the Mac, we also had to change the format of the clip we wanted to just audio, instead of video and audio. If we had still kept it as video and audio then it would have been accepted in Garageband. All we had to do then once the audio file was saved separately was simply drag it from the ‘media student file’, where it was saved, into Garageband. We then just had to crop the clip to how we wanted it and it was ready to be heard. The problem that we came across when we imported other files into Garageband, we found that the new clip we imported in also had the previous clip attached to it as well so it was a long clip with all of our audio in it. It was a problem that we could easily overcome though as we just had to crop the audio that we didn’t want out of the clip.We chose our music through the choice that was present to us on Garageband already.

Alex Lyndon

We all easily agreed on the constant background music and was easily to put into the file as we just had to drag it onto the different line below, so it would play while the audio was playing as well.

Once we had all the audio and sound that we wanted in the radio trailer we had to adjust the sound levels so that the interview audio wasn’t too quiet or loud compared to the other audio and the background music. There was a pen tool that allowed us to select parts of the music and drag it up or down. In the picture on the right you can see those blue dots that the pen tool made and how it allowed us to adjust the backing track to go louder on some of the clips. The image below shows an overview of our radio trailer in Garageband and how all the sound levels were adjusted throughout.

All of the software and hardware that we used was very helpful and necessary in completing our media products. The software was

easy to use after I knew what I was doing and a few attempts at using all of the software. There was other software that was available for us to use such as ComicLite, which was located on the apple Macs. We didn’t make use of that particular piece of software as we already liked the masthead that we had chosen to use that was done on a website that was familiar to us. We also used other resources such as the internet, handouts that were given in class and also made use of the resources that were put up on the college’s intranet ‘moodle’.

We were given a choice of music and this is the range that we got to choose from. It would be copyright if we used an actual song.