Media Evaluation

Alice Maitland

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

We found this cutaway especially useful as it helped us provide visuals for our voiceover. Allowing our documentary cutaways to flow and fit with our script effectively – thus keeping attention of the audience.

Panorama documentary Our documentaryPanorama documentary Our documentary

• Before creating our documentary we decided on a channel for our documentary (channel 4) and a target audience: (young adults and up ,17+) we then carried out research into other documentaries such as channel 4’s panorama documentary ‘’are the net police coming for you?’’ and looked at the different forms and conventions.

• When watching the documentary we noticed many cutaway shots in the documentary opening titles, we found this a very effective way of keeping the audiences attention, it also made the documentary very fast pace making it interesting and appealing to young adults (our target audience) as you can see below we have gained inspiration from the types of cutaway shots they included.

Panorama documentary Our documentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg5Oa6MQe_o

we noticed that before interviewing the musicians or experts they had clips of them working or performing before hand.

We decided this was good as it allowed us to introduce the expert speaking before hand, also presenting visuals of the

experts and adding variety to the cutaways preventing our documentary from boring the audience, therefore we

decided to use this convention.

Panorama documentaryOur documentary

Panorama documentary Our documentary

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

We found these shots most useful for when introducing the expert as it provided visuals and entertained our audience, it also showed the authority of the experts as they where working.

By following the same style shots such as close ups,medium close up and mid shots and showing the same content (guitarist, experts) our documentary will appeal to our target audience and our chosen producer channel 4.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg5Oa6MQe_o

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

We also noticed the titles for the experts where presented in white, bold, clear font styles. Therefore the titles where

easy to read as they where clear and in a simple font style The titles showed their name and their occupation. As you

can see below we copied this ,however we didn't copy the idea of including the logo as we decided this wasn’t needed.

White, bold clear font styles used

logo

The experts where also framed in either a medium close up or a mid shot, we decided to use the mid shot as it allowed

us to display the mise en scene more for example the computers, office surroundings, office chair. Therefore this

allowed us to display more authority when needed.

Mid shotMedium close up

Panorama documentary Our documentary

White, bold clear font styles used

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg5Oa6MQe_o

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

We also looked at the mise-en scene in the expert interviews and found that it was very common for the expert to be

in front of a computer, in office room sitting in an office chair with pens and paper on the desk, we decided to use

this convention in our documentary as we found it to be very effective as it showed the experts authority therefore

giving the impression to the audience that the expert knows what they are talking about and are very busy with work

and research. Sound levels where also shown to be quiet when the expert was talking as to emphasis the importance

of what they where saying.

computer

Office chair

Paper and pens

Office room

As you can see we copied this convention as we kept the expert interviews very formal for example using the common

mise-en-scene of computers, office chairs ect. We also kept the background noise very quiet as we filmed in an office.

We also set up work on the screen of the computer with a main image downloading on the news article. Therefore our

interviews complied with the media conventions of real products.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg5Oa6MQe_o

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

We looked at the documentary “super size me” to gain further research knowledge on codes and conventions of media

products. When watching the documentary we noted down the conventions of Vox pops.

We discovered that Vox pops where commonly in either 1 or 2 different locations the setting would be busy and very

different to the experts interviews (quiet office rooms) and framed in a medium close up Shot, you would be able to

hear background noise to emphasis their lack of authority and how they where normal day to day people.

As you can see we challenged some conventions for example the framing of the shot, we decided to use a mid shot as

this would display more background footage (mise-en-scene) therefore showing the surroundings and putting

emphasis on their lack of authority, this helped the audience to relate to the Vox pops when watching. We chose to go

for young teenagers for our Vox pops as this was the most popular person that downloads their music. We also

decided to interview a range of ethnicities and made sure to interview both genders thus helping the audience to relate

to them further. When questioning our Vox pops we picked a public area (the corridor of the refectory) as this wasn’t

too noisy that we couldn’t hear them, however it wasn’t to quiet to imply authority either therefore keeping the interview

informal and casual. Therefore we included digetic sound to emphasis lack of authority.

Public setting

People in the background

Medium close up

Mid shot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHKCb0_2oD0&feature=related