In what ways does your media product

use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

By Jack Beale-Burchell

O As a group we were tasked with creating the opening five minutes of a television documentary, after thorough planning we settled on the topic of the social networking giant, Twitter. The documentary itself used very fast paced opening shots and straight cuts, similar to that of ‘Supersize Me’ to give the viewer’s something for their attention to be focused on, this is a convention of many current affairs television documentaries. The opening sequence also took influence from a series of documentaries on BBC 3 presented by Cherry Healey on a numerous amount of current affairs and lifestyles in Britain at the moment. We used a voiceover as a guiding narrative in the opening few shots in order to give the basic background information on twitter, similar to that of Richard Bacon’s exploration into the world of ‘Cyber Bullying’ then followed it by having an on screen narrator and presenter to guide the audience through our linear style documentary, similar to Reggie Yates’ documentary series on the effects of drugs shown on BBC 3.

O We chose to follow these common conventions as we wanted it to fit in with the style of documentaries being shown at the moment. As we had chosen BBC 3 as a platform to air our documentary, we concluded that it should look and feel like the documentaries that are being shown on BBC 3 in recent years. So from research we found that they have a fairly relaxed and informal style of narrative, with both a voiceover narrative and a presenter, so in order to make our documentary we followed these conventions.

O We also used a mixture of ‘Expert Interviews’ and ‘Vox Pops’ which is very reminiscent of BBC 3 documentaries. In our case we used an interview from Solihull Police and smaller responses from the general public in order to give an exploratory theme to the documentary.

O The editing we used, such as title overlays we made fit in with ‘Twitter’ itself. The overlays were all translucent blue with white text over the top. This style has a look and feel similar to Twitter’s own website, and the overlays used in BBC 3 television documentaries.

O Overall I was very happy with the way the documentary came out; I believe that it followed documentary codes and conventions very closely and this has led to the development of conventions. I believe that the documentary has stayed true to BBC 3’s ‘House Style’ and has tightly developed the conventions of television documentaries, which I think has given it an overall professional look and feel. I am very pleased with the outcome but to name a few areas on which it could have improved, I think the quality of the audio recordings could have been improved, as sometimes noise and wind is very audible and can somewhat mask the words that are being said, also some of the shot framing, for example the interview with the police could have been framed better.

O Alongside the documentary there were two ancillary tasks which included a double paged article on the documentary itself, and a radio trailer used to promote the documentary.

O When looking at the double paged article, we researched into existing publication which would have reviewed a documentary such as this, and we decided to settle on ‘Radio Times’ as it seemed like an appropriate platform on which we could promote and advertise our documentary on. In order to make it realistic we followed the ‘House Style’ after looking at many of their double paged articles and deciding on what the main stay features were. This continued and developed the conventions of the double paged article, the only part of it that could be seen as challenging it would be that the article is set on a light blue background, instead of white, which is the predominant mainstay feature for radio times’ articles.

O When looking at the radio trail we decided that it should feature on BBC radio channels as the documentary itself was going to be shown on BBC 3. We decided that it should feature on the bigger music channels such as BBC radio 1, BBC radio 1xtra, and should be played during radio DJ’s slots, for example Jo Wiley and Zane Lowe. Using this information as a guideline we believed that it would reach the largest possible audience within our target audience.

O With BBC radio adverts for their own programmes, there is no such ‘House Style’ which allowed for artistic license when creating the trailer. The trailer itself had to appeal to a modern audience, but also had to be in keeping with the programme it was being aired during. So we took the approach of using a modern lounge music crossed with trance style track behind the vocal parts which included information about when the documentary would be on and which channel, but also included vocal extracts from the documentary itself.

O I believe that the two ancillary tasks support the documentary very well and the three together all follow codes and conventions of television documentaries and the way that they are promoted. In all I believe that the documentary and the way it has been promoted to be very professional and I am extremely pleased with this outcome as also the feedback will support my judgement.