Media question one done

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

When creating our documentary, my other group members and I decided that we wanted a sense of actuality. By deciding this, we used people with real opinions as opposed to actors with scripts, to convey a realistic approach. During our research process we watched a number of documentaries, one in particular called ‘Mixed Britannia’ featured on BBC2. This documentary had a similar theme to ours which was ethnicity, and the documentary showed real-life incidents and people who were able to share them with the audience. The most common convention in a documentary is the interviews and essentially makes up a documentary as they provide insight and realism into the topic.

As you can see from these two screen shots, on the left we have an image of a woman called Pamela being interviewed and telling her story on ‘Mixed Britannia’; on the right we have an image of Jag Jagdev being interviewed on our documentary. Both interviews were real.

As well as our own filming, we added various still images. However, we wanted a documentary which was mostly our own work therefore we only had one shot of still images which was to highlight the history of our documentary which was an aspect that added a sense of background knowledge. Similarly, in ‘Mixed Britannia’, there are various still images throughout the whole documentary yet we decided to put our own twist on it by adding several smaller images into one clip as shown below:

Throughout our research process we saw several different ways in which narration is used. Narration can be a voiceover, which is added afterwards to the production, or it may be a commentary by someone on screen talking directly to the audience. Two documentaries we watched beforehand were ‘Supersize Me’ and an episode of ‘Airline’. On ‘airline’ the principal source of sound was mostly diegetic, with people talking to the camera however the narration was also voiced over the documentary in a plain speaking tone. On ‘Supersize Me’ there was also a mixture of voiceover and ambient sound however; the narration was colloquial in an attempt to relate to the audience. By watching both techniques, we decided that a voice over narration would be the best ideal for our documentary and the rest of the sound would be ambient for example, interviews and vox pops.

Picture here shows Morgan Spurlock creator of Supersize me who stars in the documentary as well as voicing the documentary.

Image depicts random people at the airport who feature in and whom the documentary consists of.

A number of stylistic elements used in ‘Supersize Me’ helped us to create our documentary and follow forms and conventions for example; in the sense of camera hand-held cameras were used

often to show a sense of realism. Jump- cuts were used to shorten interviews so that the audience would be captivated throughout. In the sense of graphics, appropriate images were used to break up speech; and where formal interviews were being shown, tripods were used to show that it was an important message for example, our interview with college coaches, and in ‘Supersize Me’ the interview with the law professor as shown below:

Our other media product was the double page spread magazine article. In order to collate our ideas together, we decided to draw a rough plan of what we intended to include in the actual article. The arrows signify the features found in a real article, this helped us to follow the codes and conventions.

DROP CAP

TITLE

GRAB QUOTE

Below is an image of the finished article and a real article.

As you can see we used many codes and

conventions of a real article which included the drop cap at the beginning of the article; the rule of thirds, in which we used two thirds of images in order to appeal to a younger audience; and also still images from the documentary in at attempt to promote our documentary.

Our last method of promotion was the radio trailer, which we created in garage band. In order to get an idea of what a radio advertisement sounds like we listened to a variety and understood that the basis was simple,

BYLINE

TEXT

RULE OF THIRDS

we had to keep the same theme tune of the documentary and include snippets of narration. The orange boxes are narration from the documentary and also the radio narration. The one blue box is the theme tune which was also featured in our documentary.