In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use

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

The brief given at the beginning of the A2 course was to: create the opening 5 minutes of a 1 hour documentary, alongside this we were asked to create two ancillary texts, a double page spread for a TV listings magazine and a radio trailer both to advertise the documentary. In order to do this we had to research and look into similar media products.

When carrying out research into documentaries and both ancillary texts we researched background information. As part of this we looked at narrative theories. We looked at Claude Levi-Strauss and his theory of binary oppositions. He looked at numerous myths and legends throughout the world, from that he concluded that humans make sense of the world, people and events by seeing and using binary oppositions, he showed that culture is a system with underlying structures that are common to all societies regardless of their differences. According to Levi-Strauss, all people think of the world around them in terms of binary opposites and therefore every culture can be understood in these terms. Carrying on from this he found that narratives are arranged around the conflict of binary oppositions and apply these to their productions.Claude Levi-Strauss along with Roland Barthes discovered that the way the human mind understands certain words does not depend so much on the meaning they directly contain, but more by our understanding of the difference between the word and its opposite, they then called this the binary opposite. Examples of binary opposites include: Good vs Evil, Black vs White, Peace vs War, Boy vs Girl, Protagonist vs antagonist, Ignorance vs Wisdom.

After researching Clause Levi-Stauss and many other Narrative Theorists such as Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov and Roland Barthes we chose to follow Claude Levi-Strauss theory of binary opposites. Our aim was to portray the good vs evils of social media in terms of the impact that it is having on our generation.

We then looked at narrative structures, which is the way in which a storyline or tread is put together.

Eachmediaproduct,whetheritisfictional ornon fictional is organized accordingtooneofthefollowingnarrativestructures: open, closed, multi-strand, single-strand, linear, non-linear and circular. The narrative structure that our documentary follows is an open narrative structure as we portrayed both the positive and negative effects that social media has on us and therefore our aim was for the audience to make up their own mind based on what they were shown in the documentary. In our documentary our attempt to portray both positive and negative effects and opinions of social media was done using voxpops (voice of the population) and expert interviews however the majority of the voxpops portrayed positive comments on social media which didnt provide a balanced argument however the expert interview with the college principle and the college councilor did provide some of the possible negative effects of social media. The use of experts provided an authoritative argument which provides a stronger opinion, this may lead to the audience being persuaded by their negative opinions therefore a more balanced argument is given.

Since the beginning of the A2 media course I have watched many different documentaries, such as Super Size me in order to see the different conventions used in the different styles of documentaries. Doing this research helped in the making of our documentary as we were able to base decisions on the conventions that we were aware of. Research into radio adverts and TV listings magazines was also carried out so that we were able to do the same when producing these two ancillary texts. The use of the camera and the shots used was a main convention I picked up on whilst analyzing the documentary. Including shots such as Close ups, Medium close ups, Long shots and Establishing shots. The use of the tripod or handheld camera were also conventions picked up on, using a hand held camera makes the audience feel as though they are a part of what is happening therefore we rarely used this in our documentary as it wasnt packed with action that we felt the viewers needed to feel a part of. Instead we mainly used a tripod, the use of a tripod is in order to keep a steady shot and makes the documentary look more professional, we used this for shots such as an establishing shot of the college, where we also used the skill of panning the camera right to show the college we also used the tripod for expert interviews and voxpops allowing us to keep the shot steady.

For each of the expert interviews we used a caption was displayed stating who the person was, this small detail immediately introduces them to the audience. We also consciously followed this convention in our double page spread for the documentary, captioning the images. Captions are used in documentaries to introduce the person being interviewed so this was a convention we followed in order to make our documentary as professional as possible.

Captions used in the interviews in Super Size Me.

Another convention followed in our documentary is the positioning of the interviewee during their interview. We used rule of thirds to set up the shot, the interviewee should be a third of the way in and looking at the interviewer not at the camera.

Sound is important in documentaries, including background music, a voiceover/presenter, non-diagetic and diagetic sound. In Super Size Me a presenter is used in order to make the documentary feel more personal as you feel you get to know him throughout and feel as though you are part of what is happening. However we felt that as our documentary was more informative we were just going to have a voice over as a presenter was not necessary so we just had a voiceover. Although this is challenging the conventions of Super Size Me it is a convention that is widely followed in other documentaries therefore we were still following conventions. Background music is convention followed in documentaries. For our documentary we had to choose a track that would be simple and not overpowering so it didnt take the audiences attention away from the voiceover or the other sound in the documentary. Therefore we tried to stay with a simple yet upbeat track for our documentary so that it didnt make it seem boring however due to the issues of copyright finding a suitable track wasnt easy. I think that the track we chose works well but a better one could have been used as we only chose it because it seemed the most fitting rather than because it was one that we really liked. To improve this we could have recorded a simple yet fitting background track for our documentary or done more research to find another one.

Facts and statistics are heavily displayed in the first 5 minutes of a documentary as this is where the topic is first introduced so the beginning of the documentary needs to be informative, this is a convention also used in Super Size Me, so it is a convention we have followed in our documentary, using the voiceover.

Facts and statistics displayed in the opening 5 minutes of Super Size Me

Facts and statistics displayed in the opening 5 minutes of our documentary.

Effects and transitions are used throughout the documentary Super Size Me; they work effectively in leading one scene into another. We did this in our documentary using transitions between clips in order for it to flow and look more professional. We also changed the speed in the clip of our title speeding it up so that the title is typed faster, the idea behind this was so that the title was typed out in time with the voice over however, due to the issues with timings throughout the documentary we were not able to add that into the voice over, despite this I think that this still worked effectively as the audience are able to read the title as it is typed out.

Magazine Article

This is the double page spread we produced as an ancillary text as part of our coursework.

Before producing the double page spread we looked at and analyzed various TV listing magazines, including Radio Times, in order to get an idea of the conventions used and how effectively they could be followed, challenged or developed. As our topic wasnt a very serious topic we were able to make our double page spread more colourful and include more images in order to attract our fairly young target audience.

Magazine articles for documentaries feature a fair few images, which tend to be stills from the documentary itself introducing people involved. For our double page spread we used stills of all three experts allowing readers to be aware of who is going to be involved in the documentary and what to expect from them. Following conventions further we used captions with the images explaining who the person is and why theyre part of the documentary.

The Masthead is the title of the page that is always used in magazine articles and it is a convention that we subconsciously followed as it is needed to introduce the article. Often the headline is the name of the documentary/ television program featured on the double page spread however we chose not to use our documentary title as our masthead as we felt as if it was being over used and we wanted something else to grab the attention of the readers which is why we chose to use the word epidemic, I think it was used effectively as it insinuates that social media is taking over and this is the effect we wanted our masthead to have.

A pull quote is used in a magazine article to draw the attention of the reader giving them a snippet of information from the text; we used a statistic on the usage of social media as our pull quote.

Articles are always laid out columns which is why we used the format of 4 columns in our double page spread.

The date, time channel and the name of the program is often located here in an article. As we liked the way it was laid out and easily spotted we used this in our documentaries double page spread.A drop cap is always used in a magazine article to open the text therefore we followed conventions by including this in our double page spread.

Radio Trailer

Before making our radio trailer we listened to real ones in order to get an idea of the conventions involved.

We used clips of voxpops to begin the radio trailer, manipulating one so the word everyday repeats itself a few times in order to grab the attention of the listener before the voiceover begins explaining what the radio trailer is about. The background music that we used was the same music used for the documentary, following conventions to keep a constant flow throughout. The time, date, channel and name of the program is a simple convention that has to be used as it is necessary for the listener to be able to watch the program therefore it was naturally followed.

Most radio trailers are between 20 and 40 seconds long; anything less than this doesnt provide enough time for enough information to be given and anything more than this may go on too long and begin to get boring so listeners may stop listening or switch off therefore we kept ours in the middle at about 30 seconds.

I think that overall we stuck to the main conventions throughout all of our projects following them accordingly. We didnt challenge conventions as we never felt a need too as we were happy following basic conventions as a basis while creating our documentary and I believe our documentary, double page spread and radio trailer look professional throughout.