Media

By Verity-May Walker

A2 Media Studies: Coursework Evaluation…

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?Our documentary; Music, Mind, Mayhem, holds many aspects and conventions of real media products in many ways. This is because in the run up to the making of our documentaries, we carried out a substantial amount of research into what features a typical professional media product contains. We watched Morgan Spurlock’s ‘Supersize Me’ and also Airline documentaries. From watching these, we got a practical idea of what our own documentaries should consist of and what is necessary to be included in order for it to portray typical conventions of a professional documentary.

Rule of Thirds…Music, Mind, Mayhem. Supersize Me.

During our interviews for our documentary; Music, Mind, Mayhem, we kept in mind typical features of a genuine documentary, such as ‘rule of thirds’. As demonstrated above, the rule of thirds helps to bring structure to the screen shot layout. We chose to use a medium close up shot, in order to add a casual and laid back approach to the image. Usually, during an interview, the interviewee will either look into the camera lens or at the interviewer being the camera itself.

Observation…Music, Mind, Mayhem. Supersize Me.

We chose to use observation to be used in our documentary as it is a convention of a real media documentary product. As shown on the left hand image, screen printed from our actual documentary; Music, Mind, Mayhem, you can see a silhouette of a girl watching a Marilyn Manson music video, this symbolises the process of someone being influenced by the explicit rock music of today. Similar in the right hand picture, screen printed from Morgan Spurlock’s ‘Supersize Me’, you can see him ordering a McDonalds, this fits in with the theme of their documentary, as the observation that we used fits in with our theme of documentary; the influence of rock music.

Background Music…Background music was another convention that we used in our documentary in order for it to represent a real media product, as it was something that we found was a pattern that repeated in most documentaries, such as ‘Supersize Me’ and ‘Airline’. The few background music tracks that we chose had to be simple yet somewhat related to the two music genres that we were focusing on; rock and urban, but still not too intense in order for it not to overpower the sound of the voiceovers, ‘vox-pops’ and general sounds of the documentary. We used Garage Band to create our background music in order to maintain simple beats, in order to uphold the conventions of real media documentary products.

Double Page SpreadRadio Times Music Mind Mayhem

As clearly shown above, the double page spread that we created for our documentary holds many aspects similar to those published daily in magazines such as the Radio Times. After analysing the Radio Times’ double page spread, we took into consideration what a conventional double page spread usually looks like and so almost duplicated a real double page spread’s layout of page, making it relevant to our theme of article. We included a main large image of Marilyn Manson in order to signify the main theme of our article and his importance to our chosen subject. We also included a small image relating to the text in order to give a ‘sneak-peak’ into what our documentary would look and be like. We also used text wrap around our smaller image in order to make our article hold more aspects of a typical double page spread.

Radio TrailerBefore putting together our radio trailer, we listened to a few genuine ones in order to get a true understanding of the aspects that ours must include in order for it to sound genuine and effective for our audience to be interested enough to watch our documentary.

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

OUR TARGET AUDIENCE: Our target audience is anyone who is interested in the subject, of any age, due to it not pin-pointing any particular target audience to attract. Our documentary obviously focuses on teenagers and how music effects them, although this does not necessarily meant that our documentary is aimed at them. Music, Mind, Mayhem is a informative documentary, warning anyone and/ or everyone the potential dangers of music’s influence on.

OUR RADIO TRAILER: We used clips of quotes from vox pops taken from our documentary, and incorporated them into our radio trailer. We felt that this would help the listeners to get an idea of what the documentary will consist of and how it talks about the chosen subject of music’s influence on teenagers.

OUR DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD: We created our double page spread, with the theme of rock music in mind, as it uses mainly blacks and reds and dark colours in order to connote the dark side of rock music and what it can potentially sometimes cause. We also incorporated one of the main icons of our documentary (Marilyn Manson), in order for the audience to know what to expect, as he is a controversial character.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?DOCUMENTARY

From this pie chart, we can see that our documentary; ‘Music, Mind, Mayhem’ was clear and understandable for our viewers, this makes our documentary more likely to represent genuine and professional media texts.

From these results, we can see that our documentary was not very influential for our audience. This tells us that our documentary should have been filled more with shocking facts, this would have helped our documentary to have more of an impact on the viewer’s thoughts and opinions on the subject.

From this feedback, we know that the research that we carried out related to our documentary subject was relevant and necessary to our documentary, we can see that our viewers have learned something.

From this feedback, we can see that from 1 to 10 (1 being low and 10 being high), our audience did not enjoy it drastic amounts, although they did not dislike it.

From this feedback, we know that our sound levels were far from well managed, although must have not been too noticeable as some feedback came back positively.

From this feedback, we understand that our documentary clip intrigued the audience enough for them to want to carry on watching the further potential documentary. This is a positive sign, due to it telling us that our documentary clip was interesting enough for people to want to watch more.

DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD

From this feedback, we can see that our audience thought our page layout was a level 3, 4 or 5 out of 5, this is positive feedback, as we learn that we have made good use of the double page that we had to work with, and this feedback tells us that we did this correctly and effectively.

From this feedback, we can see that our audience thought our double page spread looked at a professional standard as it follows conventions of a professional article, this may have been due to the well put together layout, the colour schemes and the use of imagery.

RADIO TRAILER

From this feedback, we can see and understand that our audience found our radio trailer perfectly informative with an ample amount of information included on our documentary; ’ Music, Mind, Mayhem, for them to be able to get a rough understanding of what it will be about and when and where it will be on, etc.

From this feedback, we can see and understand that our audience found our radio trailer clear and easy to understand. This is positive and helpful, due to the radio trailer only having its audio quality to be able to inform the listeners, and so doing this correctly is important for the qualities of a radio trailer.

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?RESEARCH AND PLANNING:First, we decided whichtheme ofdocumentaryto go for, out of, these fouroptions, we chose ‘Musicsinfluence, due to it having the most toelaborate on and more to research as it is such a current concern.

I hand drew a brief storyboard of what we wanted our documentary to roughly look like once it was finished, once we had an idea of the path we were heading in, we could begin to carry out more in-depth research into our actual theme of documentary, such as statistics and facts...

PLANNING

RESEARCH

Once we had chosen our desired topic of our documentary (rock and urban music’s influence on teenagers), we started our in-depth research into the subject, investigating statistic s, stories and cases on how this music has influenced people. We chose to focus on rock and urban music, as rock music often speaks of killing, Satan and suicide, and urban music often speaks of gun crime, drugs and violence, and therefore are most likely to have the most influence on today’s teenagers.

FILMING- Documentary.After the research and planning, we began to make a start on the filming of our documentary, going by the ideas we had planned on our storyboards and research, etc. To film our documentary, we used a Canon HG20 HD Camera.

This camera was useful, as it had suitable settings and aspects to it, which enabled us to zoom in and out on chosen filming material, in order to add some alternating camera angles and shots, for our documentary to seem somewhat more interesting to watch.

Whilst filming our documentary material, we used a tripod a lot, in order for our footage to be completely still and professional, for it to imitate a real life documentary further. The tripod especially came in handy whilst filming our professional interviews , as they were the longest clips of footage, therefore the tripod gave us the stability for a longer period of time, which could not be accomplished hand held.

For our audio, we used a ‘directional microphone’ in order to record any sound, such as vox-pops or professional interviews and our script. In order for us to hear what was being recorded, we plugged headphones into the camera, which was also connected to the microphone, this helped us to check sound levels...

...and ensure that there was not too much background noise overpowering the initial desired sounds being recorded, to ensure that there was no unwanted background noise during the recording of our script and radio trailer, we recorded in a quiet room, in order to help us concentrate on what we wanted recorded.

EDITING

As soon as each of our clips were transferred, we had our entire documentary footage and sound all together and ready to edit. As a group, we experimented with alternating editing styles.

Once we were satisfied that we had enough necessary footage for our documentary, we began with the editing. We started by uploading all of our clips onto the Apple iMac (we did this as we went along, as we didn’t want to loose any footage from our daily filming. This process was somewhat straightforward as all we needed to do was copy the filed documentary footage clips into our media drive. Once we had finished this short and simple process, we began the actual editing by opening Final Cut Express (Apple iMac editing software), we used this to edit our entire documentary. We labelled each of the clips to make it easier and simpler for ourselves.

Double Page Spread To produce our double page magazine article, we used Adobe InDesign, this program helped us to create our double page spread. We initially wrote the article on Microsoft Word, in order to copy and paste it into InDesign, this made the process easier, as it had spell check and was just an overall easier process of going about writing our article. To create a suitable theme and image of our article, we kept in mind one of the main themes of our documentary; Rock music, and so worked our colour scheme around that topic, we used reds and blacks, although maintained a very similar layout to the Radio Times article that we had previously analysed. We made use of the column tool, in order to split the text into two columns.