Documentary Artical review

Final Production Piece

Media Production Evaluation

Media Evaluation

1) In what ways does my media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
I tried to make my production (documentary) conform to as many codes and conventions of documentaries as possible. I did this to enable it to look slick and basically make it look like an actual documentary product, otherwise if I decided not to conform to these codes and conventions I thought that it would not look or even resemble a documentary and I thought that people would be confused as to what they were watching exactly. When considering my production before planning and filming, I decided that it would conform to as many codes and conventions as possible, because when looking and researching into other existing documentary films they all mostly include the essential elements that documentaries have. So I included the following; Voice-over, vox-pop, talking heads, statistics and interviews, The only element I emitted from my plan was archive footage, for the reason that it was difficult to get hold of, I planned to get footage of an exam room with students sitting an exam and that it would be a pan around the room but I found difficulty so I had to deal with not having this footage, To get around that I decided to film my own footage of a classroom pan. To get around the problem altogether of procuring archive footage I decided to film a bus and a train driving past, which will link in with statistics I include at that point in the production. Also in documentary films I noticed that they seemed to use the same song/soundtrack throughout and that it linked or suited very well to their documentary and captured the mood of the documentary appropriately. When considering my choice for the soundtrack, I had in mind to not have a fun, upbeat tune because the topic in hand that I am tackling is serious. So i decided to have a neutral sounding soundtrack that gave off a more ‘hip’ vibe since it is about students but at the same time does not influence the mood to either sad or happy in anyway. In documentaries and also reality television shows I noticed that they set up scenes to keep continuity in the actual film, and scenes that had been deliberately set up. The part where the camera is in Karl’s hallway at home and it shows him walking through the door, Obviously I set up the camera facing the door to make the whole walking through the door and just got home scene look authentic and real, where as in actual fact it was set up, like as done in other documentaries and reality shows that I have seen. For example; when the presenter of a documentary knocks on someone’s door, the camera cuts to the inside of the house where the homeowner opens the door to meet the presenter, this could have been easily set up by filming both parts completely separately from each other.


2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I had a clear image in my head of what my ancillary text would look like taking into account my documentary product and the issue that it is based on. It would have to have a picture of a student looking stressed so immediately when someone views this piece they already have an inkling to what it is about or what the program might be covering. Furthermore, I knew the basic layout of the piece which would have been picture at the top and text and the bottom. I chose this layout because the image is supposed to be the element to draw people in to look at the page, and when you look at media products such as posters you tend to look at the centre top and work your way down. The image is there to keep you looking and the text comes afterwards when you scroll down with your eyes. Moreover, I took into account also the channel for broadcast which will be Channel 4. In my opinion Channel 4 is a more youthful oriented channel, with plenty of colours and they ooze this youthfulness by use of fonts and visuals. In my print artefact I tried to achieve a youthful image, and to self reflect on this, and by looking at my audience feed back, they agree that it suits the product and that it looks like a professional television advertisement and I agree. You would not expect this type of advertisement plugging a show on for example BBC1, BBC2, BBC4, ITV or Sky. These channels are more professional and when it comes to advertising they may chose to adopt more mellow colours, I purposely left the BBC3 channel out because this channel again is a more youthful, but since the end of my documentary signals a break, it would have to be on a channel that has ad breaks, since BBC do not it would not work. I found the picture that is shown on my print artefact, I was originally going to nab this image from my production and incorporate it in the printed product but I decided that it was not an appropriate image because i thought that it would not effectively portray exactly what the documentary is about, so instead I got and image off Google images which has been the main success point of the artefact. In my production, I made a reference in the introduction of the documentary that it was part of a series about stress, so I decided to mention this in the artefact that it was last in the series about stress to give them some coloration and to make them link a little better.

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?
When analysing my audience feedback, I thought that the responses seemed to be rather positive! All the responses said that the production in its self was ‘excellent’ which I am very chuffed with, and also they thought my blog was good too. Most seemed to think that the shot composition was excellent. When asked what they thought my production showed of me personally they chose the option that suggested I demonstrated ‘high imagination and creative flair’. The editing received high praise in the responses, scoring an average of 1 or 2 on a scale of 1 - 5 (1 being good, 5 being poor). One thing that scored very low was the mise-en-scene scoring 4 on the same scale as mentioned just, however this was an irregular score. I think what this person means by this is that they didn’t like how the production was structured and what exactly I put into the production, like for example the way I did the talking heads part when I spoke directly to the camera, and when I was in the library holding a psychology book talking to the camera. I tried to locate a book that might have some link to the topic in hand but didn’t manage to, and so a psychology textbook was the closest I could get, it would’ve been better than holding say a maths or business textbook. In the suggestions for how I could improve, most went for the same thing that the part in the class room, some of the voice clarity isn’t very clear coming from Karl, this maybe because he was not speaking loud enough or it was the distance that he was from the camera or possibly the natural environment noise you usually hear when filming. I did try to rectify this by increasing the audio volume at that specific point in the timeline, to the point that I increased it to it’s maximum DB level, however it didn’t make a dramatic difference as it is still slightly unclear. If you listen carefully enough, you can hear what is being said by Karl in that part. When looking through the possible improvements, I noticed someone had raised another point about the volume at another point in the timeline. This was to do with when Karl got on the bus, one person told me that the volume was too loud and the noise of the bus was over whelming. I responded to this criticism positively by lowering the DB level slightly to a more sensible level a point that it is in line with the volume of the rest of the documentary. Again another suggested improvement, this time a little different to do with mise-en-scene was that they thought I should’ve filmed more vox-pops with people. Since this was in the post-production period and because I had to keep to a 5 minute limit it was not conceivable for me to go out and do this, but I took it into account and to a point I agree with that.

4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Through out this media project of planning, researching and constructing a media product, we used technologies in almost every step along the way. First of all, the planning, which require probably the least amount of technology use where we planned what we were going to produce and much of this was paper based with story boards, planning, schedules and timelines. However we did start up a blog on the internet so we can keep track and document our progress that is also visible by the teacher so he can also track our progress. There were tools in the blog that we had to get used to such as embedding which is where you import a video from, example ‘YouTube’, copy the URL link and embed it into a post. As well as this we’re able to import JPEG images from screen shots that we have made or images on the web.

In the construction period which is the main task we relied heavily on technology. To make the actual production I need to have a DV video camera and a DV tape to film the documentary. After the footage has been captured we used the software ‘Apple Final Cut Pro’ to log and capture in the edit suite. Here we used a variety of editing tools to piece together the footage such as transitions like ‘additive dissolve’ and ‘cross dissolve’ (these were the two I used the most). Manipulating the footage was made easy by for example the use of ‘wireframe’ which allows you to move the image around and it is especially good when you’re putting text over a shot because wireframe allows you to drag the text to go where ever you like. With the interviews I did I needed to make sure I had the names of people somewhere in the shot so with wireframe I could move the text around freely. Using the DV camcorder I also recorded a voice over for my documentary; I log and captured the recording of the voice over, delete the video and keep the audio file and incorporated it in the timeline.

I had to use technology like the Apple Macs in the edit suite to create the print artefacts, I used the Apple software ‘Pages’ to create the advertisement for the documentary, I cut and paste images for the advertisement from Google images. I rearranged pre-set templates and changed the default colour to make it look my own. I re-sized the text so there is no extra dead space in the text area on the advertisement.

When coming to write the long 2000 word evaluation which was going to be put on my blog, I wrote up each stage on Pages so I could track the word count correctly and also so I could select an appropriate font to make my evaluation look slick. Throughout this evaluation I have imported images from my production and print artefacts to go with points I have raised in the evaluation. The images gathered from my documentary are freeze frames that I saved to the desktop and uploaded then clicked and dragged into the appropriate place.

Role Allocation

Actors and persons appearing in my documentary,

• Karl Barrett - Main focus of the documentary as I follow him around college and at home following his life for a short week
• Zena Nolan - This was the college counsellor who I interviewed and asked about student stress. She acted as the 'expert' in my documentary, which when watching documentaries I noticed they always had someone who knew what they were talking about.
• Emily Roach and Charlotte Pell - These two were students from Karls college which i interviewed also to ask about stress and whether they suffer from it. This interview acted as a vox pop because it just looks like i went up to them in a coffee shop and asked them to do an interview.
  
• Annisna Rukar - This was also a vox pop done under the same circumstances as the joint interview with Emily and Charlotte. I prepared them both for the questions i was going to ask because they needed to decide axactly what they're going to say.
• My Media class - I set up my media class to act out a class room situation. I will use this in my documentary as a fly on the wall feature with karl in the class, and i will also use it in the video montage part towards the end of the video.
• Tom Lees - The part that Tom plays isn't very big but he still appears in the film at the end in the montage part. He has a none speaking part because there is a voice over and soundtrack over it.
• Me - I play the documentary maker and interviewer of the whole film. I also appear two times when I act as a talking head introducing the next part to the documentary which were the coffee shop interviews and the interview with Zena Nolan.

Channel4 Advertisement

This advertisement is for my documentary. I included the date, time and channel of broadcast including the channel4 logo. The picture it's self is meant to be a student looking stressed, all i did was type student stress into Google image search and this was one of the top images, which i thought suited the advert well. Originally i was going to grab a screen shot from the documentary it'd self but soon realised that there was not a good enough shot on the documentary that could fully display the message given by the picture used.

New Final Proposal for Documantary

The name of my Documentary is Student Stress. I have planned for the Documentary to be aired at prime time on Channel4 at 8pm. I was considering having it as a Panorama report, but when doing research into Panorama I found out that they tend to report on current affairs and big news stories. The subject matter of my documentary, I didn't think, would suit the style of Panorama.

Channel4, however, have a large youth audience. It's this audience to which I am aiming this documentary, as well as parents of students. Channel4's audience has been found to be 16-34 years (mostly males) which covers college students and also possibly parents too.

The genre of this documentary is an investigative documentary. Investigating stress of students an if its a popular trend among students to suffer from stress or is it just a small group. Investigating statistics to back up points raised in the documentary.

The style of this documentary is to appeal to the younger audience, by using a soundtrack by Outkast in the background. The only element I have decided to leave out, that is typically popular in documentaries, is archive footage. I am planning to film shots that I was originally to get archive footage for; like a classroom pan, and shots of trains and buses. I have decided to add the element of talking head, with me talking directly to the camera in the library reading a book, and at a computer to look as if I am doing some research. These shots will be infrequent, I am only planning to do about two of these in the final production piece. I am planning an interview with a college counsellor. When considering the framing for this interview, I have thought about having the counsellor on one side of the shot and her desk and computer/laptop on the other side so it gives her a sense of high importance and status. Framing the more informal interviews with the students is going to be about the same as the formal interview, with the interviewee at one side of the shot and their work on the other.

Subtitles may be difficult to handle, with different shots needing subtitles, for example 'their name', I may need to change the colour of them so you can clearly see the subtitles against whatever is in the shot. For example, a shot which has a white board in the back ground, I should consider a black or dark font, and for dark shots or backdrops I shall need to use a lighter font.

Filming My Documentary

The filming process took longer that i had actually planned because i relied heavily on Karl Barrett's input and involvement and not all the time was he indeed available. I decided to give the documentary a fly-on-the-wall feel to it by adopting a hand-held camera style effect when following Karl through college and in the park.

I knew interviews were a crucial element i would have to include if i was going to be successful in this production. I managed to film an interview with the college counsellor, Zena Nolan, on her views on student stress and what advice she gives to students on how to deal with it. I think this gave the documentary a really high standard and a professional look. Interviews were also filmed with students, and i tried to make it as if i have just asked then to film an interview because it is filmed in a cafe. A feature in documentaries and news reports are the names of people who are being interviewed shown on the visual.

I shot some fill sequences that just pack out the documentary to make it long enough. Shots like a train passing by, so i can link it to a statistic about train travel by students. Another shot of a bus driving by, again to link it to a statistic about bus travel. Other shots such as a classroom pan, that give it yet another fly-on-the-wall feel, have been used so i can link it to exam result statistics that would be added in the editing process.

It is important that i follow Karl in as many situations as possible. I have filmed him in the park meeting friends and in class. So i filmed him on his way home, which meant that i would film him getting on the bus and the bus pulling off. Shots like these are very simple but very effective. I have seen shots like these in documentaries before and thought it would create a good affect.

I managed to organise a classroom scene. To make it look authentic, i got the teacher to write notes on the white board that relates to what the class will be talking about, which was based on 'How to make a Documentary film'. The teacher asked a question and Karl came in with a response. This was filmed with a tripod overlooking the table to which the students were seated around. I panned from the teacher to Karl when they interacted.