Media coursework evaluation document

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

According to Bill Nichols, there are 6 different types of documentary, which all have different traits and conventions. Many documentaries use many elements from each type, which I believe we did for our documentary.

The first type is poetic, which tends to be subjective interpretations and uses little rhetoric content. I do not think that our documentary has elements of this type in it as its purpose was to inform.

The second is expositional mode, this uses rhetoric such as factual devices and opinions (in interviews) in order to persuade the viewer. I believe that this is what our documentary style represents the most, as its purpose is to inform the viewer and we did this by using interviews and statistics.

The third is observational mode, where the documentary observes something to allow viewers to reach their own conclusions. This style was partly used during the footage of people’s legs walking. It was also used in footage which we did not include, such as of people eating.

The fourth style is participatory mode; this is where the film maker is visible (direct cinema). This style was not used in our documentary as we used voice over, however I feel that it works well for more serious topics, such as those on panorama e.g. What the Pope Knew.

The fifth style is reflexive mode which shows footage of the editing stages into a documentary in order to demystify it. This style was not used in our documentary as it was not appropriate and would not help to inform the viewer.

The final style is performative mode which tells the story of the film maker to persuade the viewer about a certain topic. This is similar to participatory mode, however uses narrative to persuade. This was not used in our documentary; however it could have been an option and works well as seen in the documentary, Supersize Me.In order to begin to make a professional-looking documentary, we had to begin by researching into similar products. Our channel remit and questionnaire helped narrow our focus into documentaries on body image, health/ dieting and size 0 and fashion areas. There were many documentaries on the Channel 4 website which helped us with this and others such as Supersize Me, many of which were different styles. From these, we were able to see the codes and conventions they used and this allowed us to decide which techniques we would use in our documentary, for example using expert interviews, using a range of shot types and pans and tilts throughout etc.

Example of documentary research from blogger.com

Our expert interview was set up in the counselling room of the college. We saw that it was common to have your expert interview with a related background. This can be seen in the Supersize me expert interview, where the background is books related to eating disorders/ health.We struggled however when it came to filming with Julie, as we had seen many different shot types used during our research – we debated whether we should use a medium close up or a medium shot. As seen in Supersize me, they have used a medium close up, which focuses more on the face. It was decided that the medium shot would be best used, as we wanted to show the background. We also made sure that Julie’s eye-line was 1/3 of the way down as we saw this was a common theme. It was also made sure that we displayed Julie’s name and her job in a caption, which we found common during our research, which shows she is a professional. We displayed the name for 8 seconds and used transitions to make it look like a real documentary.

The ways in which I think we did not fit the codes and conventions with our expert interview is that Julie was positioned in the centre of the screen, however, as seen in the Supersize me interview, the

Eyelines on the line between 1st and 2nd third

Expert interviewee name on the bottom left

Suitable background: Counseling room and books on eating disorders

interviewee is usually positioned either in the left or right third. I think that this would have made our documentary look more professional and doing so would have enabled us to use a medium close up so more focus was on Julie, whilst still showing the background either on the left or right hand side.

During the planning stages, we first thought about how we should begin our documentary. From our research, we had seen that many people had used an introduction, followed by short clips from throughout the documentary to show what was coming up. We agreed as a group that we would use this style, as it was clear that this is what professional products use. We chose clips which we thought were the most visually appealing, as well as which showed what the documentary was about. We also had mixed opinions on how to narrate the opening. It was seen in our research that there were two main ways in which this was done – the first was a piece de camera, where the presenter talks straight into the camera; the other is using voiceover, this would our documentary either expositional or performative. At first, we agreed on the piece de camera, as we thought this made it look more professional and high-brow, however it was then decided that as we were producing it for a Channel 4 audience, voiceover was more suitable (if we were making it for a BBC audience, the piece de camera style would have been used). In retrospect, the voiceover worked very well for our documentary as it allowed us to show footage related to the documentary which I think looked more aesthetically pleasing.

We however faced some difficulties with the voiceover, the main problem being getting the sound levels the same throughout. The voiceover had to be recorded many times on different days, as sometimes the equipment did not work very well and we also changed the script to fit the footage, particularly during the vox pops. It was important that the sound levels remained constant, so that they could be heard over the background music and in order to follow the forms and conventions of real documentaries. The recorded footage

was sped up to be twice as quick.

This was to show the name of the episode.

This is the Supersize me opening. It is similar to ours as it uses a plain black background and bold font.

The opening to our documentary was fun and upbeat through the use of background music and speeding up the footage we recorded. We felt that this was important to attract our target audience and was important that we showed the name of the documentary before it began. We also decided to add in which episode it was, as it was part of a series. This was added in during the editing stages and we also showed the name of the documentary again and what the focus of the episode was on in order to follow the codes and conventions of documentaries.

We also used vox-pops during our documentary. We found that these were only common in some of the documentaries we watched, however we thought that as our episode focused on teens and we were filming in a college, that it was important that we had teenagers’ opinions. We were inspired by Supersize Me, as it gave you opinions and I felt that these worked well with bringing the documentary together. I think our vox pops will help to appeal to young people who watch it, as they will be asking themselves how they feel about the issues raised.

A montage of images was used, inspired during Supersize Me which shows celebrities and models who are thin who are commonly shown in the media, and these are the people that our target audience aspire

Screen shot from Body Image & Me and Supersize Me

to be. It can be seen below in both cases, the pictures ‘fly’ onto the screen; they are also of a similar size and are on a black background.

Byline

Drop cap

Secondary images & captions

Grab quote

Main image

Title and standfirst

Rule of thirds

Screen shot from Body Image & Me and Supersize Me

There are many similarities between our article and the real Closer article which make it follow codes and conventions. Firstly, the use of one main image of the person the article is about, supported by a caption. The real closer article has used a full-length image, however when researching and planning our article, we saw that magazines used a range of image sizes in articles. The secondary images are also similar in that they are slightly slanted and have captions with a black background behind them.

The colour schemes are similar – using blue and pink. These colours were used to appeal to the target audience of women as it makes it look feminine.

Both of the articles also have grab quotes from the article. These are effective in order to make someone stop to read them, and so are more likely to read the whole of the article. They are a convention found in most articles, particularly real-life articles.

At the bottom of both of these articles, it has the page number and name of the magazine – this is a feature we found common when doing our research and planning.

However, I feel that our article challenges some of the forms and conventions of real media texts. The main difference is, as seen in the real closer article, there is a clear rule of thirds, through use of images and columns, where as ours fits this structure less. I feel this makes our article look less professional.

Voice over track

Background music

Intro music

Background music for documentary clip

Volume levels

It was seen from our research that radio trailers comprised of predominantly voice over and background music. Other features are sometimes used, such as extracts from the programme being advertised and ambient sounds. These things came into consideration during the production of our radio trailer and we thought that it was important that we used the same person who did the voiceover during the documentary for the radio trailer and also that we used upbeat music which would appeal to the target audience. Three different music tracks were used for this. The first was a short clip that ‘introduced’ the trailer, we then used different music for the voiceover and documentary extract. We did this as we felt that the same music throughout was too repetitive. Overall I think that the music worked well, however, the sound levels on the music were slightly too loud for the volume of the voiceover, and it should have been more subtle. We decided not to use any ambient sound as we felt that the music was enough. I feel in many ways, our radio trailer does fit in with the codes and conventions used in other similar products.

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

As mentioned above, our target audience is women aged 16-24. After creating our products, I feel that all of our products will appeal to this audience. The documentary focuses on teens, using vox-pops which involve views from teenagers from a college (16-18 year olds) so viewers will be able to relate to them. The article is an interview with a

Body Image & Me – Target AudienceOur formal proposal and questionnaire outlined that our target audience would be 16-24 year olds, who are predominantly female. Class and ethnicity were unimportant for our documentary, as we felt that this subject relates to everyone.

After making our documentary, I feel that we did well with attracting an audience for 16-24 year olds, as we have focused on teens and mentioned celebrities and media influence in our documentary, which are things I feel are more closely related to this age group than any other. We have also included music and colours (in the article) which will appeal to this audience.

teenager on a topic that affects most young women and the radio trailer is made for Capital FM and helps to promote the documentary.

Our documentary was made for a Channel 4 audience, which we found from our channel remit was the best for our target audience. We tried to make it appeal to this audience by using similar codes and conventions other documentaries from this channel use. We found from our research that this is done through the use of background music, vox-pops, an expert interview and using statistics.

Our double page article was made to be published in Closer magazine, which we found out during our research was a popular magazine for women of a younger audience and it also includes a TV section so it was ideal. We made sure that it attracted our audience by using one focal image of ‘Katie’ who is a young teenager and the article uses a bold title. The font is the same that is used for the statistics used from the documentary (American typewriter) and colours are bright and feminine (pinks and reds).

The radio trailer was made for a Capital FM audience and helps to advertise the documentary. It uses a narrator for the voice over who sounds friendly and quite young and I feel that this is extremely suitable in order to attract the audience. We used upbeat music, which is different from the documentary, as we felt that it sounded better. It was decided that we would make it appeal to a Capital FM audience as it is the most suitable station because it is an rnb/ chart radio station which appeals to a young audience. However, many males also listen to this station, but this is the case for almost all radio stations.

Font: American Typewrite used for both the article and documentary.

Taken from our double page article – Shows when Katie’s interview can be viewed on Body Image & Me.

The Channel and date information was also told in the radio trailer.

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Overall I feel that all of our products create a brand identity of Body Image & Me, however I think there could be stronger links made. I think that by using the same music from the documentary in the radio trailer would have made it better for the audience to recognise and relate the music to Body Image & Me. Also, after creating the magazine article, I feel that the interview with Katie Smith does not help promote the documentary. There were not enough questions within the article which related to Body Image & Me. The majority of the questions are on Katie’s life and recovery, and more focus should have been on the documentary and how Body Image & Me has helped her in her recovery. It was decided during the planning stages that we would create this interview as we felt that we could create an interesting article that would appeal to teens, focus on a topic briefly discussed in the documentary (dieting/ body confidence) and would help promote our documentary the best. However, I now feel that an interview with the producer or a review on the documentary would have made the link between the products more clear.

Nevertheless, I feel that the radio trailer did promote and advertise the documentary very well. This is because it includes the same narrator from the documentary, uses voice clips which show what the documentary is about – Julie Maitland (expert interview) and a vox-pop. It is informative by briefly telling you what the documentary is about (including that it is part of a series), and what channel and time it is on. The article helps to promote the documentary in some ways, such as the final question which asks about how being in Body Image & Me helped her to get her message out about anorexia.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

A questionnaire was carried out on a class of 11 pupils with a range of questions on the documentary, radio trailer and article. There were 10 questions in total on the documentary.

1. How well do you think the documentary fits its purpose to inform teens?Excellent - 7Good - 4OK - 0Poorly – 0




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2. How well do you think it appeals to its target audience? (16-24)Excellent – 11Good - 0OK - 0Poorly - 03. How well do you think the voiceover fits with the footage used?Excellent - 5Good - 6OK - 0Poorly – 0

4. How well do you think the footage used relates to the topic of the documentary?Excellent - 8Good - 2OK - 1Poorly - 0

5. How well do you think the documentary is edited? Excellent - 5Good - 5OK - 1Poorly – 0

6. How consistent do you think the sound levels are throughout the documentary?Excellent - 6Good - 4OK - 1Poorly – 0

7. How well does the background music fit the documentary?Excellent - 8Good - 3OK - 0


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Poorly – 0

8. How well do you think the documentary fits in with other documentaries featured on Channel 4?Excellent - 4Good - 6OK - 1Poorly – 0

9. How well do the first 5 minutes of Body Image & Me grab your attention and would make you want to carry on watching the programme?Excellent – 8 Good - 2OK - 1Poorly – 0

10. How well does the documentary use codes and conventions of other documentaries? Excellent - 4Good - 6OK - 1Poorly – 0

From these results, it is clear that the majority of the people overall thought that the documentary was either excellent or good in most ways, and no one thought that it was poor in any way.

6 questions were asked were asked on the radio trailer.

1. How well do you think the radio trailer fits to the station it will be broadcast on? (Capital FM)Excellent - 1Good - 6OK - 4Poorly - 0

2. How well do you think the music fits in with the topic?


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Excellent - 2Good - 2OK - 5Poorly - 2

3. How informative do you think the voiceover during the radio trailer was?Excellent - 2Good - 4OK - 3Poorly - 2

4. How well do you think the interviewees fit in with the trailer?Excellent - 1Good - 4OK - 4Poorly – 2

5. How well do you think the sound levels are controlled during the radio trailer?Excellent - 1Good - 3OK - 5Poorly - 2

6. How well do you think the radio trailer fits the codes and conventions of other similar products?Excellent - 1Good - 7OK - 2Poorly - 1From these results, it is clear that there were mixed views on the radio trailer. The lowest scoring answers were those related to the voiceover, background music and sound levels. The best scoring question was on whether the trailer fitted to the station.

6 questions were also asked on the double page article.


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1. How well do you think the colours fit in with the nature of the article?Excellent - 0Good - 7OK - 4Poorly – 0

2. How well do you think this article fits in with the typical article found in Closer magazine? Excellent - 0Good - 5OK - 6Poorly – 0

3. How well do you think the interview is carried out?Excellent - 1Good - 6OK - 4Poorly – 0

4. How well do the images add to the aesthetics of the article?Excellent - 1Good - 5OK - 5Poorly – 0

5. How informative and interesting did you find the article?Excellent – 0 Good - 6OK - 5Poorly – 0

6. How well do you think the article fits with codes and conventions of other double page articles?Excellent - 1

Good - 6OK - 4Poorly - 0

From these results, most of the results show that the article scored ‘good’ or ‘OK’ in most of the questions, and nothing was scored ‘poorly’.

From these results, it is clear that overall, our 3 products were successful. The documentary was the best scoring and I feel that this is because this is what took the longest time to create and more research was planning was done before creating it. It was also the most time consuming to make, and this meant that the smaller details, such as sound, were looked into more closely. However this meant that less time was put into the radio trailer and article and I think that this is why they scored lower. More focus should have been put on the overall sound in the radio trailer (music and voice over) and more effort to make the article look professional.In order to further improve these results, open ended questions would have been helpful to gather more information as to why they put these results. Also asking how they felt overall about the 3 texts using the same scale of excellent to poorly, which would be helpful to get a more general feel over the products.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

When producing our media products, we used a range of technology and software, some of which was new to me, such as the software on the macs and some which was familiar.

When researching our documentary, I used the internet frequently. Websites such as Wikipedia were helpful when producing our channel remit. The Channel 4 website (including 4oD) was also

very useful as this is the channel we decided to choose for our documentary. I used the website to look at things such as 4Beauty and 4oD was helpful for watching previous documentaries related to body image, such as supersize vs. super skinny. From

these programmes, I was able to understand more about the features used in documentaries, which was very helpful during the planning stage.

I also used BBC news and the daily mail websites to look into articles which was helpful for the planning of both the documentary and article, as I was able to understand about how real people with body confidence issues felt and used this information to create questions used within the documentary (such as those used during the vox-pops).

During the planning stage, I used Microsoft word to create a questionnaire for the documentary research. Word documents were uploaded onto scribd/slideshare and then uploaded onto blogger.com, which is where all of our research was uploaded to. Blogger was a new website to me, however I found it very easy to use and I think it was overall a good blogging website to use.During the planning stage, hardware was used such as a scanner. This was helpful for uploading hand-written work onto the computer, such as our risk assessment, target audience, and mind-maps of ideas. The scanner was very easy to use and made it easy to upload documents to blogger.com. I also used Youtube.com to look into how to use the equipment such as the camera and tripod. These were very useful when it came to filming, as we had never used this equipment before. We learnt how to use features such as adjusting the white balance (which was very helpful when filming under fluorescent lighting, as this made people look slightly yellow) and also how to use manual focus which helped create interesting and aesthetically pleasing footage.

During the production stages, the video cameras were easy to use, even though it was the first time I had used the equipment and they were also very convenient as it allowed us to upload footage straight onto the computers within a matter of seconds; it was very easy to do and less time consuming compared to older cameras which use tapes. The tripod was also very useful for filming steady shots, such as those used during the expert interviews, and were easy to use after watching the video from youtube.com.

During interviews, an external microphone and headphones were used. These were easy to use as they simply plugged into the camera. However we found that different microphones picked up sound better than others, and we were unable to tell through the headphones the quality of the sound (the sound had to be adjusted later during the editing stages in final cut express.) An external microphone was helpful as it minimised background noise, which was an issue during the vox-pops (as it was filmed in the refectory which had a lot of background noise).

During the editing stages, our documentary was created on the software Final Cut Express. This was a new software programme to me and was quite difficult to use at first. The first thing to do was to import the files of footage we had filmed and watch it through. We made an edit decision list of the clips we would use, as some footage was too poor to be used in the documentary. Once the footage we wanted had been selected, it appeared in the browser and this allowed us to drag it into our sequence.

From these clips, we were able to start building our documentary. We started with the opening. We did this by dragging it from the sequence onto the timeline, and continued to do this and build up our documentary. We were then able to take away any sound that was not needed (such as that during the filler footage) and we started editing it. We used transitions, speeding up/down of clips and added a montage of images.

We used transitions throughout to brake up the monotony of straight cuts. This is an example of how we used ‘dip to color dissolve’.

The first 4 minutes of our documentary in the

timeline.

Video footage

Sound

The razor blade tool was also used to cut clips in half, such as those of Julie Maitland. We did this because we had found from our research that during a long interview, the footage was broken up and other shots were used, whilst the sound remains.

This is the razor blade tool used to cut images in half

An example of when the razor blade tool was used – we decided to add in a different clip in the middle but keep the sound.

We also changed the speed of some clips, such as the opening. 200% meant that the clip would play twice as fast as the original. We could also slow down clips by reducing the percentage to less than 100. We did this during the statistics.

We created a montage of images which ‘flew’ onto the screen as demonstrated below.

To find background music we used the software Garageband to do this. This was a new program to me but it was quite easy to use. From this program we were able to choose from thousands of tracks. It was added into the documentary in a similar way to the filmed footage – it was saved from Garageband as an mp3 and then imported and then we were able to drag it into the timeline.

We then recorded our voiceover using a digital audio recorder and a microphone. This was relatively straight forward to use even though the equipment was new to us. However there were still problems with the microphones as we could not tell if the sound levels had recorded well, so some voice over had to be recorded more than once. This was then transferred onto the macs and imported into final cut express. This process took quite a while and I feel that the equipment used could have been better.

When the voiceover was added to the timeline, sometimes it had to be rendered. This was because the format was incompatible with the software. This made the editing stage longer as a lot of voice over was used.

Text clips were added, such as Julie’s name during the expert interview and for the statistics.

For the double page article, we used the program InDesign. I had already used this program during our AS Media coursework and it was easy to use. Overall this was a good program to use to create the article, as it allowed us to create a professional looking article. Images were imported, text was added, and we used a drop shadow and a drop cap, all of which had been used during last year’s coursework, which allowed us to make it quite quickly.

We used photoshop to edit the images. The original image was quite bright due to the flash on the camera and we were able to adjust this in photoshop by going to file> adjustments> auto contrast and auto color.

Text was added over some footage. We used American Typewriter as our font throughout.

This tool allowed us to draw a textbox

This tool allowed us to import an image

We were able to change the font colour and add a drop shadow by highlighting the text and selecting the colour/ effect.

This image shows the original image (left) and the edited image (right) and how auto adjusting the levels improved the image.

To create the radio trailer, we used Garageband. This was briefly used when looking for background music for our documentary and so we knew how to do the basic things. However this time we had to import voice over and the clips from the documentary. This was easily done by importing it from our area. The software overall was easy to use and I think the best thing about it was the choice of music available. Tracks were found by selecting a ‘genre’ and could be dragged onto the timeline. The length of the track could then be adjusted by dragging it. We were also able to adjust the sound levels easily. For example, we wanted the music to be quieter during the voiceover and this could be done by changing the track volume.Overall I think Garageband was a good program to use to create our radio trailer.

The background music we decided to use was different to the music used in the documentary. The main background music was 80’s Dance Bass Synth and we decided to use something slightly different for the

Examples of the genre’s we could choose from to find background music

documentary clips which was Mini Mono Synth. The music was similar in some ways, but made it so that it wasn’t too repetitive.

During the evaluation stage, I used Microsoft word again to create a questionnaire and I used Microsoft Excel to create graphs from the results. This was easy to do as I have used both word and excel previously.

Example of one of the pie charts created in Microsoft Excel from the questionnaire results

Media coursework evaluation document

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