1. In what ways does your media
product use, develop or change
forms and conventions of real media
products?
2. • Before we made our media product we all did research into other documentaries that had been made in the past. Some of
these documentaries were based on our documentary topic of illegal downloading, ‘Panorama: Are the internet police
coming for you. But we also watched documentaries such as Morgan Spurlocks ‘Supersize me’ and another Panorama
documentary of ‘The killing screens.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg5Oa6MQe_o
After viewing these documentaries we made sure that we used these codes and
conventions in our documentary. This would give our documentary a sense of realism.
We stuck to codes and conventions by using certain production modes. In our
documentary we had examples of the expository mode which was through of by Bill
Nichols (2001), which was relating to Morgan Spurlocks Super size me. We used this to
give people a first impression and try and persuade them to follow the argument of our
documentary. Other ways that we stuck to regular conventions was by adding a voice
over narrator, this was to help the documentary flow through the scenes and give people
some guidance as to where we filmed our documentary or to explain some vital
information. We also used interviews from vox pops ( the popular voice) this was to get
an idea of who was illegally downloading and to see if they knew the consequences of
such acts. We also had expert interviews, these were people who had knowledge of
illegal downloading or was in work that related to our topic. To give our documentary a
sense of actuality we used archive footage of music videos and other clips. Other ways
that we kept it realistic were by having a sense of cinema verity in interviews. Also it had
a sense of a public affairs documentary as we chose to place it on BBC 3. Other
elements involved: poetic to create mood or tone with use of a montage of pictures at
the start of our documentary, observational mode and also reflexive mode.
3. When creating our magazine article we made sure to follow codes and conventions
of similar magazines. We looked at magazines from The Radio Times
predominantly. This was because that we chose The Radio Times as the magazine
our article would be published.
Both use a title (masthead) in bold to draw the attention of the reader, but it
also is in the top left of the page. This is because the top left is the first place
a person will look due to how we read and follows the codes of a
professional magazine.
Both our magazine article and the one from Radio times Like a professional article our
use 3 columns to display their information. magazine uses images to help get the
message across, and support our
article.
4. When creating our radio trailer we made sure that we kept to common codes and
conventions. We started off by listening to examples of radio trailers and looked at
how certain pod casts and news bulletins were produced.
After we started to make our radio trailer. Our radio trailer stuck to common codes
and conventions by having a voice over, backing track, interviews with experts and
vox pops and also the vital information. When making our radio trailer we kept the
same music from our documentary and used it for our backing track for our trailer.
This was to make sure that we had continuity throughout the piece.
5. How effective is the combination of
your main product and ancillary
texts?
6. • After completing all of our three tasks we think that they relate to our target audience well.
This is because we think the documentary is fast paced and keeps our audience interested
in the matter raised. Also when creating the magazine article we made sure that there was
a fine balance between how much text and information there was to how many pictures
were on each page. This was to make sure that our audience would not get bored with our
article and loose interest in what it was promoting. In creating the radio trailer we had a
clear message about what the documentary was about and we had a clear day and time
stated. This was all done in a 30 second clip as it was on radio and did not want to drag on
too much.
• When looking at the magazine article and the radio trailer, I think the magazine article
promotes the documentary well, this is because there is relevant pictures, taken from our
documentary and the article gives you an insight into what the documentary is about and
also how we made it. The magazine may have been better if we had added more colour
and eye catching graphics, but on a whole I think that it did the documentary justice. The
radio trailer I think went well, I think that the backing music fitted (as it does in the
documentary) and that it is very informative. The only thing that may have been improved
would of been to keep the same voice who did the documentary voice over to do the radio
trailer, but we thought that it worked well with two different voices.
8. • After finishing our documentary we conducted a survey on how successful it was to a group of students all in our target
age range. And after looking through our questionnaires we had some mixed reviews. We asked on a rating of 1-10 how
successful the documentary was the average rating was an 8. This we thought was pretty good feedback, and we also
left comment boxes for our target audience to say how we could improve our documentary and get more people into the
9/10 brackets. After looking at our article response we found that people would rather have more images and less text,
but other than that we had a good feedback for our magazine article. The most critiqued of our three pieces of work was
the radio trailer. We had comments saying that the backing track on the radio trailer was too loud for the voice over and
they said that the voice over faded out in places and became unclear. On a whole our audience feedback was positive
and was how we expected, none of the comments were bad they were able to give us advice on how we can improve and
we took that on board.
Another question that we asked was if our media
products ( especially our documentary) had
discouraged people from downloading illegally
Most people said that it did not discourage them, and we think that it will
always be the case. If you have a free way of getting your music that
you like, people will see that as a bonus illegally or not. So we do not
think this is a negative reflection on our documentary.
9. How did you use media technologies
in the construction and research,
planning and evaluation stages?
10. When filming our documentary we used many
different terms of media technology. To film
footage for our documentary we used a Cannon
HG20 video camera to capture the footage, a
directional microphone to make sure we had
top quality sound and a pair of earphones to
help us judge the sound levels and make sure
they were correct.
We also used a digital voice
recorder and an external
microphone to help us record
the voice over for our
documentary and also our radio
trailer.
11. To create our three pieces of work
•In the planning stages of coursework we were collecting we used Apple Mac computers and
information and placing it onto our groups blog, which was we used Final cut express to create
on www.blogger.com. We used this system of presenting our documentary. We logged and
our work throughout the course- I did not like this form of transferred all of our footage that
presentation and would have preferred to hand in hard we shot and placed it into a
copies of our work. Other resources included channel sequence. We then started to cut
websites and places to get our information. Some of these and crop our footage to fit into our
were BBC, Radio Times, BBC3 and Wikipedia for our 5 minutes time limit. When we had
information. a rough idea of where clips and
interviews were going to be placed
we started to add in some shot
We then started making sure that the sound was all transitions and cut-a-way shots to
correct so we normalised some of the audio in some make sure we kept to the codes
clips and then used the pointer tool to lower the and conventions of real
decibels of some audio, this was to make sure that the documentaries. We also made a
sound did not become distorted or hard to understand. backing track in Garage
We also added in text at certain points of our band, which we later imported into
documentary using to tools to help shape the text and our documentary.
place the text where we thought it worked best.
12. To create our radio trailer and backing track for our For our backing track we took beats from the Garage
documentary we used the program ‘Garage band’ band archive and blended them together. We took one
that was a synth bass and two other plain synth track.
We then used Garage band to create our We placed the one over the other to give our backing
radio trailer. This involved taking sound bites track a quick flow to make sure that it kept the reader
from our documentary, consisting of vox pop interested.
and expert interviews, and placed them into
Garage band.
We then kept the same backing track and started to place the sound bites in the required places
cropping and cutting the files to make sure they sounded good. We also adjusted the sound levels on
the backing track to make sure that it would not drown out the voice over and sound bites.
13. To create our magazine double page spread we used Adobe programme
InDesign.
We used various aspects of in design to create our double page spread.
We used tools such as the text tool, the rectangle tool to create boxes
and add colour and we also placed JPEG images into our article.
To create our text we selected the text tool and drew a
text box the size of the page we wanted to fill. We then
selected how many columns we wanted our article to be
and we started to write our article.
We then created coloured boxes to add some appeal to our
magazine and then we added drop shadow to our boxes to
make them stand out and give some other dimensions to
our article.