1. In what ways does your media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media productions?
The first way in which our documentary uses conventions of real media is through the use of a Voice of God voice over. We got this idea from the documentary March Of The Penguins, which is narrated by Morgan Freeman. We thought it would work really well with our characters and storyline to have a voice over and so we added this after we had edited the rest of our production.
We have also included talking head interviews, which is a classic documentary convention which we felt was necessary in our production. We got this idea from a number of documentaries, as many use them, but the main inspiration for this was from 'Steve Jobs: The Billion Dollar Hippy', which we watched during our research stages. The talking head interviews in this documentary were all about Jobs himself from the point of view of the people who were close to him, which we adapted and used in our own production to make it more realistic and professional. Unfortunately I could not find a talking head interview from the Steve Jobs documentary online, so I found a press junket from Catching Fire: The Making Of instead, as it is in the same style.Our documentary also develops and expand on many of the conventions of a documentary. The main way we did this was through the use of cinematic shots. Instead of focusing our shots on scenery (like many real documentaries do), we focused ours on Alex walking through the scenery, which we felt was more appropriate than a random field. We did, however, use some establishing shots of Ware to open our documentary with, as we felt this would set the scene well.
Even though our production mostly follows the forms and conventions of a real documentary, it does challenge some of these. An example of this would be that at the start of our documentary, although we do have titles, we do not have casting titles throughout the opening. By this I mean that many documentaries have titles at the start to show the viewer who the director was, who edited it etc, whereas we do not have that, as we felt we didn't need it and we didn't want to detract the attention away from Alex.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?
Our main product is quite sleek, with blue boxy titles and smooth transitions. We wanted our production to look professional and so these titles worked really well. We used an HD video camera and this made our work look very high quality. We used a dark turquoise colour for our main titles and this, again, was to make the production look professional and smooth. The humour within our product was quite subtle and this made it easier to write the script, because we did not need to write a whole script with really funny lines which would appeal to everyone.
Our first ancillary task (the promotional magazine advert) has a black background and a very rounded font, whereas our documentary titles were quite a square and sharp font. Although these fonts don't match, and they probably would've worked better together if they had matching fonts on reflection, we felt this was not important because we wanted to attract our target audience and we felt that rounded, bubbly writing would help us to do this. The magazine ad is very professional looking and we are very happy with this, as it gives off the right idea to people who would potentially pick it up in a shop with the intention of buying it.
Our second ancillary task was our double page magazine spread, and this is quite different to our other products. This publication is much more colourful, with a light lilac background and bright yellow box to show what else is on during the week. Within this article are various quotes from Alex himself and highly influential people such as David Cameron and Russel Brand. This makes our documentary seem more popular and therefore would attract more of our target audience. The font, again, is quite rounded and bubbly and this gives it more of an approachable feel, by which I mean that it makes it look like an easier article to read.
I personally think that, although our ancillary tasks are quite different to our main product, they work well together because all of them are smart and professional looking which is exactly what we want to achieve.
Our main product is quite sleek, with blue boxy titles and smooth transitions. We wanted our production to look professional and so these titles worked really well. We used an HD video camera and this made our work look very high quality. We used a dark turquoise colour for our main titles and this, again, was to make the production look professional and smooth. The humour within our product was quite subtle and this made it easier to write the script, because we did not need to write a whole script with really funny lines which would appeal to everyone.
Our first ancillary task (the promotional magazine advert) has a black background and a very rounded font, whereas our documentary titles were quite a square and sharp font. Although these fonts don't match, and they probably would've worked better together if they had matching fonts on reflection, we felt this was not important because we wanted to attract our target audience and we felt that rounded, bubbly writing would help us to do this. The magazine ad is very professional looking and we are very happy with this, as it gives off the right idea to people who would potentially pick it up in a shop with the intention of buying it.
Our second ancillary task was our double page magazine spread, and this is quite different to our other products. This publication is much more colourful, with a light lilac background and bright yellow box to show what else is on during the week. Within this article are various quotes from Alex himself and highly influential people such as David Cameron and Russel Brand. This makes our documentary seem more popular and therefore would attract more of our target audience. The font, again, is quite rounded and bubbly and this gives it more of an approachable feel, by which I mean that it makes it look like an easier article to read.I personally think that, although our ancillary tasks are quite different to our main product, they work well together because all of them are smart and professional looking which is exactly what we want to achieve.
3. What have you learned from your target audience feedback?
Our documentary is aimed at teenagers and young adults between the ages of 16 and 28. this is because our documentary is quite light-hearted and comical and therefore would possibly not be as widely enjoyed by an older demographic.
We collected a lot of feedback throughout our production process, and we found all of it very useful and tried to apply as much of it as we could. Our first cut feedback was especially helpful to us as it gave us the time to fix certain things before our final cut.
The general opinion was that our framing and steadiness of shots was excellent and that the material was highly appropriate to the task. With regards to the miss en scene of our documentary, our audience thought that there was a nice variety of different lighting, camerawork and settings and that this worked well with our production. The audience felt that the quality of the sound was very good, but that some subtle music was maybe needed to enhance the viewing experience.
In response to this feedback, Amy and I decided to continue working at the same level of motivation and determination because we were also told that if we continued as we were going, our production would be a Level 4 piece of work. We added some subtle music to the taking head interviews, which in the end we felt worked really nicely and made the overall product look more professional. We also continued to vary our shot types and settings in order to keep the documentary interesting and engaging.
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We did a lot of research before starting out documentary and this was so that we could get a proper idea of what we wanted to produce before we started the production process. We researched various other documentaries and to do this we used the DVDs of the documentaries, my MacBook to play and watch them on and Blogger.com to keep track of all of our research as we went along.
While planning our documentary, we continued to use Blogger.com to keep track of our progress and ideas and this made it a lot easier to keep on top of it all. We also used Mircosoft Excel to produce our production schedule which was easy to use and made it easy to refer back to throughout the development/production process. We also used Microsoft Word to take note of what we needed to do and how much we needed to get done during each filming session.
To film our documentary we used a Nikon D3100 HD camcorder, which worked really well for our production because the HD made it look professional and well-made. We used a standard issue tripod which made the shots a lot more steady and smooth, and also created more of a contrast between the tripod shots and the handheld shots. To record the Voice of God, we also used a shotgun microphone which helped us to produce a clearer, less fuzzy voice over which added to the professionalism of the production.
To edit our documentary we used Final Cut Pro X on my MacBook Pro. This gave us the chance to experiment with a higher quality of editing software, which ended up being highly useful, and there were tools on Final Cut that are not available on programmes such as Adobe Premiere. An example of this would be the stabilisation feature, which makes handheld shots look less shaky and a lot smoother. We also found a background noise removal feature, which was incredibly useful throughout the entire post-production process, especially because we filmed a lot of our footage outside, where the wind was interfering with the microphone on the camera a lot. We used Adobe Photoshop and Publisher to create our ancillary tasks and these were easy to use and helped us to produce professional looking final products.
In the evaluation process, we used Final Cut Pro X again to edit together our evaluation comparison video for question 1 and this helped us to get our point across and demonstrate how we used different forms and conventions of real media products. We also used Microsoft Word to initially write out evaluations on and then we transferred this to our online blogs on Blogger.com.
We did a lot of research before starting out documentary and this was so that we could get a proper idea of what we wanted to produce before we started the production process. We researched various other documentaries and to do this we used the DVDs of the documentaries, my MacBook to play and watch them on and Blogger.com to keep track of all of our research as we went along.
While planning our documentary, we continued to use Blogger.com to keep track of our progress and ideas and this made it a lot easier to keep on top of it all. We also used Mircosoft Excel to produce our production schedule which was easy to use and made it easy to refer back to throughout the development/production process. We also used Microsoft Word to take note of what we needed to do and how much we needed to get done during each filming session.
To film our documentary we used a Nikon D3100 HD camcorder, which worked really well for our production because the HD made it look professional and well-made. We used a standard issue tripod which made the shots a lot more steady and smooth, and also created more of a contrast between the tripod shots and the handheld shots. To record the Voice of God, we also used a shotgun microphone which helped us to produce a clearer, less fuzzy voice over which added to the professionalism of the production.To edit our documentary we used Final Cut Pro X on my MacBook Pro. This gave us the chance to experiment with a higher quality of editing software, which ended up being highly useful, and there were tools on Final Cut that are not available on programmes such as Adobe Premiere. An example of this would be the stabilisation feature, which makes handheld shots look less shaky and a lot smoother. We also found a background noise removal feature, which was incredibly useful throughout the entire post-production process, especially because we filmed a lot of our footage outside, where the wind was interfering with the microphone on the camera a lot. We used Adobe Photoshop and Publisher to create our ancillary tasks and these were easy to use and helped us to produce professional looking final products.
In the evaluation process, we used Final Cut Pro X again to edit together our evaluation comparison video for question 1 and this helped us to get our point across and demonstrate how we used different forms and conventions of real media products. We also used Microsoft Word to initially write out evaluations on and then we transferred this to our online blogs on Blogger.com.
