Produced by: Susie Richardson and Matt Turner
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
For our A2 coursework, we decided to do a documentary as we believed it would present us with the challenge of finding interviewees that linked to an interesting topic and would be absorbing through the development of our ideas. We used real life documentaries to link to with our own documentary. The main chain of documentaries we used to link to was Channel 4 Dispatches. We felt that they would be good to link to as they focused on interesting topics and we felt that our documentary would fit in well with the conventions that Channel 4 used when creating their Dispatches documentaries.
We wanted to choose a contemporary topic to focus our documentary round. Firstly, we chose the topic of talent and how many teenagers are not part of the stereotypical image that the media has constructed. Our title of our documentary originally read: 'Talent: Nature vs. Nurture', constructing the argument of whether talent is created by either our genes, or the environment around us. The media constructs the idea that all teenagers are part of the hoody/gang/knife culture, and that they go against the norms and values of society as a whole. Although, many documentaries nowadays include information and prejudice towards teenagers which focus around the crimes that are committed by teenagers and the trouble and chaos that is caused as a result of teenagers growing up in society today. However, it is never considered that these crimes are committed as a result of young people being rejected from society. We also looked at Wall to Wall Production Company, which produced documentary films such as Man on Wire,which focused on the man who walked between the Twin Tower buildings on a tightrope. We looked at this documentary film for inspiration on the layout and planning of our own.
And so, as a way of challenging some of the conventions of a real documentary, we chose a topic that challenged the idea of teenagers being associated with knife culture, and tried to portray and represent them in a more positive light. This is why we chose to focus on talent, and how teenagers have good qualities as well as, in some cases, bad ones.
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These two screen shots show the similarities and conventions we followed in regards to the titles of the interviewees.
More ways in which we followed the conventions in our documentary include the way we interviewed our interviewees. In Dispatches documentaries, most of their interviews are done in the same place, they interview people in their own surroundings which in effect, is also what we wanted to achieve, however, we interviewed our subjects in different places to give a sense of interest to the documentary, a sense of excitement rather than the same place and the same person. For example, we took footage of the school rugby team playing at the fields and embedded it into our film when one of our interviewees, Jonathan Bond, was talking about the differences of Rugby and Football as main sports in Private and State sector schools. This video shows an example of Channel 4 documentaries interviewing people in the same surroundings as the establishing shots. The fact that we included the rugby footage gives a clear sense of a private school atmosphere, which we thought was a good angle and part to feature as it gave a clear sense of a debate and included real material of private school life, creating a debate in itself. Again, we followed the conventions of a typical documentary as it’s certainly a convention that people are interviewed in situ, so that there’s a clear link between where they’re filmed and the topic they are discussing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5oeeDKaYWo
Although we went against the conventions of a typical documentary made by Channel 4, we followed the rules of a lot of the conventions also. For example, for our ancillary poster, which was a newspaper advert, we used the same layout as a poster for the Channel 4 Dispatches poster. This is the layout of a Channel 4 poster, compared with our own:
As said before, a lot of where we either followed the conventions or challenged them was technically. So the titles were almost the same as the channel 4 ones, with white block writing and a small font in the bottom left hand corner of the shot.
Between each shot we used additive dissolves, which is a simple fade effect. This is the effect that real documentaries use when editing the documentary and including transitions. The shots we used were also similar, in the sense that we had a variety of establishing shots, mid shots and close ups to add variety to the footage. We did not use panning when we were filming, as this is not a typical convention of the shots used in documentaries.
At the start of the documentary we used statistics that we had found during the research and planning stage of our coursework. We used InDesign, a computer programme to create the newspaper layout effect, which we thought was effective as this topic is very much a political problem and area that is high up in discussion at this point in time. We followed the convention of having statistics in our documentary to break up the footage and add interest and visuals to our documentary, as unlike music videos or films, there are many different things and shots happening, documentaries can follow the role of footage upon footage, so we thought that this statistics idea would be good to give the viewer a break and read some text. This is what it looked like when we had fully assembled our documentary.
In many documentaries, there is a voiceover that is placed over footage that maybe needs an explanation. This is known as ‘the voice of God’, since the voice is unseen but is the authority that guides the viewer regarding what they should think regarding the context of the narrative. We used a voiceover over the statistics pages and when introducing the different interviewees. We had a balance of following and challenging the conventions of a documentary as we wanted to make the documentary as lifelike as possible, however put a personal spin on it as students.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We were given a choice of ancillary tasks to choose from in the brief for our Advanced Portfolio Coursework. The options for a documentary were:
- A double page spread magazine article
- A radio trailer
- A newspaper advertisment
We chose the radio trailer and the newspaper advertisement. We wanted to create a good link between our main product and the ancillary tasks that we created in terms of the distribution and advertising of our documentary. As our documentary had a lot of audio information, we thought a radio trailer would be good to condense this information down into a 30 second clip of the vital information we wanted to create through the production of our documentary. As well as this, a radio trailer is a completely different media text to a paper advertisement, which gives variety to the selection of media products we selected in the development and production of our project.
For the newspaper advertisement, we thought this would be a good chance to again follow the conventions of a normal media product of channel 4. We followed the conventions of the posters and adverts created by channel 4 on their documentaries.
We decided against creating the magazine spread as we felt that this was quite time consuming and we would not have enough written information to fill the space of the double spread. We also ran ahead on filming time as we had technical setbacks as many of our interviewees had to pull out last minute. However, we felt that the radio trailer would give a good opportunity to condense the audio information, and the poster would do the same but with a visual effect. Also with a magazine spread, there would be new software that we would have to learn about, which again adds to the time issue, and neither of us had the technical or creative experience to create the magazine spread.
As I have said previously, we tried as much as possible to make our ancillary poster resemble a real channel 4 poster. As our target audience is primarily teenagers and also the parents of these teenagers, we wanted to attract them. As channel 4 has become a majorly popular channel in recent years, it would be reasonably simple to attract teenagers and adults up to the age of around 40. Channel 4 shows a variety of programmes that attract all ages, from 'Glee', '90210' and The 'inbetweeners' to 'Desperate Housewives' and 'Come Dine With Me'. We felt that because channel 4 programmes are so popular, if we followed the conventions of the original poster we would be able to get through to our target audiences reasonably well.
The good link between the ancillary tasks and the main product was a main factor we wanted to achieve. To do this we used many of the aspects, visuals and audios that we used in our main product and incorporated them into our ancillary texts. For example, the picture on the ancillary poster is also used at the beginning of the documentary as footage, this is a big link between the main product and the ancillary tasks in terms of visual effects.
As we didn't have credits at the beginning of our extract, it was hard to try to link the font between the main and ancillary tasks. Although, the colour text in the titles of the interviewees is the same as the text colour of the poster. However, in the ancillary poster we followed the conventions of the typical channel 4 poster.
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
During the planning stages of our documentary, we wanted to find out what our target audience wanted in a documentary and what they found entertaining. We wanted to meet their demands and entertain them whilst giving the documentary an interesting angle. We wrote up an eight-question questionnaire to ask teenagers at school. We made the questionnaire short but effective in gathering all the information we needed to find out what our target audience wanted. Initially, we based the questionnaire around what they liked in other documentaries, such as Dispatches, which we would intend to use the good aspects in our own documentary production. Initial questions were; “Do you prefer documentaries to be interesting, funny or factual?” and “Do you prefer radio or TV documentaries?” However, we decided to ask more direct questions about what our documentary should be like, and not what they liked in other documentaries. We asked more specific questions like “How long do you think our documentary should last?” and “Do you think our documentary should avoid bias?” These questions allowed us to find out exactly what our target audience wanted. We distributed 50 of the questionnaires, which we thought was a reasonable sample that would gather us a view that was representative of the sample we took. Out of the 50 that we distributed, we received 32 complete questionnaires, of around equal amounts of males and females between the ages of 17 and 40. This gave us a very representative sample of feedback. The feedback answered the questions that we had asked, and gave us ideas about how long our documentary should be, whether we should focus on one topic or more, and whether we should introduce humour into it as well. Most people said that they liked documentaries that focused on one topic, otherwise it resulted in confusion between the comparison of many topics. We also found that most of the teenagers said that they like to see humour in documentaries, however, as the topic we chose to focus on is a serious political matter we decided that humour may be slightly inappropriate. We approached people at our school and also state school pupils in Berkhamsted Town Centre. The feedback was very useful and it helped us greatly in the initial planning as well as moving onto the actual filming schedule and recording. Due to the feedback from the questionnaires, we decided that our documentary should focus more on being interesting rather than predominantly factual. We thought about the different ways that we could show this through our documentary, and we came up with the idea of including a lot of footage of our interviewees in action, giving the interviewees a surrounding and setting, for example, the footage of rugby in relation to Jonathan Bond's interview.
During the production stage of our documentary, we showed clips of our documentary to students in our year to gather feedback on what they thought of our work so far. We had very positive feedback, particularly from media students who could especially appreciate the lengths we had to go to to get this work done. The general impression we received was that we had a good balance between the factual and serious side of the topic of education, whilst making it entertaining to watch. This encouraged us to carry on at the same level throughout the rest of the documentary.
After assembling our documentary, we showed it to members of our target audience, including some of the people we gave the questionnaires to before starting to film our documentary. It gained a very positive reaction. Our sample told us that the documentary was very informative and interesting. We had a good balance between being 'enlightening' and 'entertaining'. The documentary followed the conventions of a real documentary in the way that we showed action footage as well as interview footage, which we thought was a good convention to follow, as it also gives the documentary a sense of realism. The product was as well received as we had planned. If we had another chance, we would probably have included less topics about education and done a more concentrated version. As we wanted to bring many different topics in, we felt it was probably too crammed together, and if done again, we would choose one of the topics and concentrate more on this. We should probably have done one major topic and included interviews from specialists in the one topic, as interviewees were a major problem in the planning of our documentary. However, we were very pleased with the documentary and our target audience’s reaction, which was far superior to what we had expected.
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Producing a documentary requires a lot of equipment and technology. We wanted to experiment with lots of different equipment. Although already familiar with the equipment from our AS Foundation Coursework Portfolio, our A2 work was much more advanced and required a lot more technological experience in the planning, filming and editing stages of our project.
From the very beginning of our coursework we were using technology. We used word processors such as 'Pages' for Apple Macs and Microsoft Word to write down our ideas and organise them in an order that was logical in the planning stage, for example: Brief, Introduction, History of Documentary, Synopsis etc.
During the process of our documentary-making, we used Blogger.com to create posts to update on the different processes we were using and going through. We blogged about such things as creating our ancillary tasks, starting to film our main product and what equipment we needed, and also the process of editing our documentary as well. Blogger was a simple and straightforward way of logging our progress throughout the project. It is all done online so there was no need to word process our ideas, print it off, and then lost the sheet somewhere along the line. The information was safe on the computer and looked good.
In regards to contacting our interviewees, this wasn't that difficult as two of them are our teachers and we could access them at school. However, Jonathan Bond, an ex pupil of the school we study at was more difficult to get hold of. We decided to get in touch with him through the use of Texting and Email. Email was simple as again it was through technology, quick, easy and it was easy for him to respond, whereas if we had set up a meeting or written to him by letter this would cause confusion and would be hard to follow through.
At the very beginning of the project in the planning stages, we took pictures of people acting as interviewees to get a sense of what would be a good background and angle to have the interviewee at. This was a good exercise as it gave us an idea of how to have the interviewees when actually filming for our documentary. Furthermore, during the planning stage, we used a Flip camcorder to document us interviewing people to get their opinions on documentaries. We asked similar questions to the questions asked in the questionnaire, for example:
- Do you watch documentaries often?
- Do you feel that documentaries are made and targeted at older people?
- Would you watch documentaries more if you could relate to the issues raised within them?
As stated earlier, these questions were very useful in the planning stage of our documentary as this pushed us to focus on a topic that would be of interest to teenagers and encourage more teenagers to watch documentaries, as they are very versatile in the topics they raise and the way they are made.
We had the advantage of using Apple Macs when editing and assembling our documentary. When making creative projects, like documentaries or music videos, Macs are usually better and much more well equipped for the job. Macs have many different types of software that have been created for the making of these projects. iDVD, Garageband and Final Cut Express/Pro were all software material that we used when creating our documentary. Although Mac's are completely different to PCs, they are easy to learn how to use, and in the long run they are much more reliable and straightforward to use when creating a documentary, for example.
We used Final Cut Pro, which was produced by Apple Inc. which is a video editing application. We used this to assemble, edit and digitise our documentary. There were issues here as we had previously used Final Cut Express, which is much easier to use whereas Final Cut Pro is much more difficult to digitise footage etc, however, we made our way around the obstacle and got used to a more complicated programme quite easily. Final Cut Pro was very useful as we could clearly watch the footage we had taken and decide which ones and sections to use in our real documentary and which ones to discard, or which ones we could change and edit. We had to use this programme as it was the software that was downloaded onto the computer we were using to work on. The digitising aspect was much harder as we used a HD Camcorder, and some of the leads were not connecting to the computer as well as we had hoped. When editing our footage, there were not any problems, however, we knew the editing had to be much more precise for it to look like a professional documentary, we had to take care of a few slips in the editing to make it look sharp and finished.
Usually, in real documentaries, there is music in the background, this is usually at the beginning when the documentary is introducing someone or a place using establishing shots. However, as we decided on our documentary being an extract from the middle of the documentary, we felt that we did not need music. Also, there was the issue of commercial music, due to copyright laws, no one, including the groups who were producing a music video, were allowed to use commercial music, so we would have that setback to deal with as well as the effort to find a song as well as editing and creating our main documentary task. However, in terms of audio ambience, when the establishing scenes were showing, such as the rugby, we turned down the sound on these clips as we had a voiceover. But this gave the clip an ambience overall of the voiceover as well as the rugby sounds.
The internet was a major use of technology that we used throughout the production of our documentary. We used the internet to do our initial research at the beginning of our project, all the way through to documenting evidence of work and 'blogging' entries onto Blogger. It gave us the opportunity also to watch videos of existing documentaries on Youtube, a leading website which documents videos. This helped us to develop our ideas so that they followed some of the conventions of real media products.
There were many other programmes we used for the construction of our documentary. One being LiveType, which is a programme that allows you to create titles as a separate video, which can be added to other videos. As, again, we had used this programme at AS Level, we were familiar with the settings and the way it worked. We used this programme when we were creating the newspaper articles with the statistics that fade onto them. For the information we used LiveType to create the text and exported it as a separate video and then lay it over the still image of the newspaper article on the timeline in Final Cut Pro.
Linking back to our ancillary tasks, for our radio trailer we used a programme called Cubase, which allowed us to create our audio footage for it. Cubase was easy to use, the computer is connected to a microphone, and the microphone records the speech and copies it onto the timeline in Cubase. The speech recordings can be saved and copied onto the timeline in Final Cut Pro. This is how we created our radio trailer. The audio footage can be edited and moved around in Final Cut and then exported as a file.
Finally, the last piece of software we used on the computer was iDVD. We used this to put our film onto a DVD. iDVD also allows you to choose a title menu that can match the genre of your work. Pictures and music can also be added to the main menu for the film and finally it can be burnt onto a DVD disc.
Media technology was the main contributor to the production of our film. It was used from research in the planning stage, to the editing in the construction stage. Technology in the making of our documentary allowed us to improve and expand on our creative ability and allowed us to achieve many things such as the radio trailer and researching into the history of documentaries themselves.
