Media Evaluation 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real

media products? For our A2 media coursework, we had to produce a 5 minute opening for a documentary, Life Choices, along with a double page spread magazine article and a radio trailer to advertise our documentary. We decided to follow the forms and conventions of real media products for all 3 products to look professional and in order for our documentary to seem presentable as if it were to be broadcast on TV, BBC 1, in addition for our article to look like a page from a TV listings magazine and to make the radio trailer sound like as good as another radio advert on the radio. Within documentaries there are different types and styles. The different types of documentaries are investigative, social, educational, cultural or commemorative, these different types of documentaries distinguishes the target audience that the documentary is focused at. The style of the documentary is how the way it is presented to the audience it could be narrative, profile, portrait, fly on the wall, docudrama or undercover. In our documentary, we wanted our type of documentary to be investigative, educational and social because we wanted to inform the audience by seeing how the public reacted to the rise of tuition fees. The style of our documentary was narrative and profile as there was narration throughout the documentary and it involved a profile because we included vox pops, experts thoughts and opinions. Before going out to film our documentaries, we all researched other documentaries such as Supersize Me where Morgan Spurlock investigated how junk food affected the USA citizens. In addition, we also watched A Good Smack which demonstrates how parents deal with the behaviour of their kids when they are naughty. I also researched Education For A Sustainable Future since we were planning at that time to make a documentary about education. This documentary highlights how the education system provides critical skills for future life. In this particular programme, I found out that the type of documentary was quite similar to what we wanted to create. All 3 of these documentaries that I gathered information from, inspired me, they also relate to the American theorist Bill Nicholss concept of Documentary Mode (2001). This theory demonstrates that any documentary that is being produced has to fit in with one of these modes. There are 5 modes, poetic, expository, observational, reflexive and participatory which indicate the documentarys type/style in depth. Poetic and participatory modes are both illustrated in Supersize me, where Morgan Spurlock wants to investigate how eating Mcdonalds can affect the nation. It is poetic because he doesnt get a response from Mcdonalds and therefore is quite subjective and bias as it was just his side of the argument and what he found out. It is also participatory as Morgan Spurlock is the director of the film but is also in the documentary. The observatory mode is what A Good Smack represents, essentially a fly on the wall. The reflexive mode when parts of the documentary tell the audience the truth through a reconstruction so that it seems to

be the truth when it isnt. Furthermore, with the expository mode, it is reflected in many documentaries and it is the mode that we focused our documentary on. Within this mode it demonstrates the narrative voice over, asking the audience rhetorical questions to make them see both sides of the argument. The narrative structure is also known as the voice of god where the voiceover uses facts and statistics to persuade the audience the argument of the topic. In our documentary, we have used the narrative voiceover along with vox pops and formal interviews with experts giving their view on the subject of education and what students and unemployed people should do. Camera Angles In our documentary we planned what camera angles we were going to use. This included establishing shot, low/high angles, zoom ins and outs, blur shots and with the interviews we used medium close ups and told the interviewers to look into the empty space. To obtain these shots we used a Canon HG20 Camera and a Tripod to maintain a steady focus similarly to any other professional documentary. During our research of all 3 documentaries, I found out that Supersize Me used a range of camera angles whilst A Good Smack and Education For A Sustainable Future used more medium close ups as they illustrated more interviews throughout their documentary. The camera allowed us to film and capture scenes and a variety of shots for our 5 minutes opening sequence. This camera also allowed us to blur the focus of what we were hooting, also to zoom in and out of a shot. The tripod also allowed us to tilt the camera so we could use a high or low angle shot and pan. We used a range of shots in order to make the documentary engaging for the audience. At the beginning we struggled to use the tripod as we werent taught how to use them before we set out filming however after the first day of filming we became more established and developed new techniques in using the equipment.

Supersize Me

Life Choices

Above you can the two similar forms and conventions that we tried to establish in our documentary, positioning the subject, in this case the interviewer in the last third of the shot, we also tried to get the subject to fill the scene with the head near the top of the shot and the eye line looking into the empty space. Also we chose carefully the mise-en-scene to replicate the topic of our documentary as education is associated with tables, chairs, offices and paper.

Lighting Another form and convention that we wanted to highlight in our documentary is the lighting. The lighting of the documentary has to be bright in order for the audience to focus on the subject however we didnt want the lighting to be too dark or too bright as this wouldnt allow the audience to concentrate on what the shot illustrated. Most shots in a documentary are shot in a well lit room so that the audience can see what is on screen. I noticed that in Supersize Me some of the scenes were shot at night therefore the directors and producers had to use artificial light in order to make Morgan Spurlock clear as he was expressing his daily views of what he had eaten, almost like a diary. As our topic was education, we felt that there was no need to shoot scenes in dark areas however we did use artificial lighting for the formal interviews as they were shot indoors and because the formal interviews took up most of the majority of our documentary we felt that the interviewers must be seen, as they had provided vital information that was necessary for our documentary.

In addition, another form that we have included in our documentary is the captions to highlight when the shot is taking place or who the person on screen is. For most documentaries there is background music, this is to keep the audience engaged with the topic however we didnt want the music to be over powering i.e. make the music too loud as this would distract the audiences attention away from the narration/voice over, the most essential part of the documentary. Firstly we used Garageband to create our music as we werent allowed any copyright music. To make our documentary appear at a high quality standard and efficient, we made sure that our sound levels had to be consistent; in order to do this we used edited the sound levels on Final Cut Express. The pink line indicates the sound level for the track; the pink dots above highlight the increase and decrease of the sound that I edited.

Special Effects In addition, another convention that is quite often used in documentaries is special effects, special effects in documentaries are there to capture the audience and keep them drawn to the screen. In Supersize Me there was lots of graphics especially with the cartoons to make it intriguing for their target audience. On the left this is in the Supersize Me documentary whereby they highlighted the words on the screen whilst the narrator was talking. This is a common way of emphasising what is being said. Another way that Supersize Me uses Special Effect is when stating facts and statistics, they use graphics to convey the information to the audience, since it is shown on TV, it has to be quite visual. We decided to use special effects in our documentary however it is not quite as advanced as Supersize Me because of the graphics. On the other hand, in our documentary Life Choices we tried to make it quite appealing as possible. This included the time lapsing by changing the speed of the shot; as our documentary is focused on education, university and career paths, this emphasises that the amount of young people affected by government decisions of the rise in tuition fees, whether people can get a job straight away with a degree and not creating enough work for the unemployed. Furthermore another special effect that we included in our documentary was when a shot was blurred so that we could put writing over it. We did this to emphasis the title of Life Choices. In addition, we slowed the shot down in order for the audience to focus on the title Life choices. We could have improved with the title size and font as I felt that because the shot is already quite busy in the background, we needed the title to be much more powerful. In addition, with our special effects, we filmed a shot where we were typing into Google about the topic that the voice-over was demonstrating, this is similar to the Supersize Me documentary where they highlighted what was being said. After that we created a quick successful montage of some of the university website pages.

Magazine Article A double page spread magazine article for TV listings tends to inform the reader about what the documentary is about. We decided to include our magazine article in TV Satellite and Week as they are focused more on documentaries and therefore we thought that it would be more fascinating for the target audience of that particular magazine. Before we started on our magazine we researched 3 or 4 other magazines just to find out the layout. In our magazine article we followed the forms and conventions of a professional magazine. This represents This is the masthead, the title of the article Life Choices which what channel our has been underlined. The colours red and white has been used documentary highlighting the similar resemblance to the title on the would be shown documentary. on.

This is the subtitle which illustrates to the reader, the date, time and channel that it is featured on. This convention is shown in every magazine.

This is the drop capital indicating the start of the article. This is another feature that makes it seem professional

Pictures covers up the majority of the magazine article creating a very visual eye opener capturing he readers attention.

Columns are frequently used in magazine articles making it easier and clear for the reader to understand.

With the magazine article overall, I felt that it could be improved especially the left hand side with the 2 angled pictures. I felt that seemed a bit plain, it could have included more colour at the bottom half of the magazine and needed captions to illustrate what the pictures were portraying. Otherwise the top half and the article looks good along with the page numbers.

Radio Trailer For our radio trailer before we used both Final Cut Express and Garageband to produce it, we had to plan and design how we wanted our radio trailer to sound like. So in a group we found 2 trailers, shown on the picture in the left. This highlights what was featured in each individual clip, eg. the use of music, length of clip etc. On the right hand side, it is another 2 radio trailers that I researched extra to give me more ideas on the different genres of radio trailers and which one would be similar to our radio trailer that we would be producing. Before recording the voice over we had to make sure that we included all the key information that all radio trailer advertisements included. This included a very brief summary of the programme, the date, time and programme that it is featured on. In addition, we noticed there was more extracts from the programme itself than there was of the voiceover. This is a key convention to a radio trailer to engage the audience and draw their attention in order for them to watch the programme. In addition, the length of the radio trailer ranged from around 30 45 seconds, we made sure that our radio trailer didnt last more than 45 seconds otherwise the listeners would start to lose interest.

We decided to go against the rhetorical questions that some radio trailers would use as we thought that this would be to clich for a documentary radio trailer, it needed to be serious and focused especially for our topic of education, university and careers. We decided that our radio trailer target audience would be the same as our documentary so based on that we decided to broadcast our radio trailer on BBC Radio 4. We recorded the voiceover for our radio trailer separately, then we used Final Cut Express to put a cross dissolve on all the separate extracts before putting into Garageband along with the music that we created on the radio trailer. Overall I was quite impressed with the radio trailer that we managed to produce in the limited time that we had. We followed the forms and conventions for all 3 media products that we have construct for our A2 coursework.