A2 Media Evaluation

Charlie Mason

In what ways does your media product use, develop or

challenge forms and conventions of real media

products?

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

products?• For our coursework we were tasked with

creating the first 5 minutes of a TV documentary.

• Our documentary is the first episode of a 3 part series called ‘So You Think You’re Old Enough?’ discussing the controversial topic of sexual health.

• We had to complete lots of research into the codes and conventions of a real documentary.

• We used the documentary series ‘The Sex Education Show’ to gain ideas of what to include in our documentary.

http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%3Fv%3Du6XPUehrtvY

• After watching ‘The Sex Education Show’ we found useful conventions of a documentary that we decided to use in our own work such as:

Montage

We took still images of topic related objects to create our opening montage. We made it fast paced with music alongside to interest the audience into watching the documentary.

• Interviews with target audience

By included these interviews we gained the opinions of our target audience and what they think about how sexual health is addressed. We found that on ‘The Sex Education Show’ they asked teenagers of their views to do with the particular question they are asking, so we decided we needed to include their opinions to get both sides of the argument.

• Ident

We decided through research that our documentary would most likely be shown on Channel 4 like ‘The Sex Education Show’. This meant that at the beginning of our documentary we had to include an ident for Channel 4. We recorded the voiceover for the ident and then added it on.

• Interviews with professionals

By arranging interviews with professionals we found out useful information that would benefit us in giving the audience the correct and beneficial information. Also it makes the documentary more professional and serious, making the audience take notice and listen to the advice given.We found that it would help us to get our point across as people are more likely to take advice from professionals – which we found out when watching ‘The Sex Education Show’.

• Parent interview

We included a parent interview as this gave us another viewpoint about the debate. We saw that ‘The Sex Education Show’ used this technique when finding out about issues raised by teenagers.

• Presenter

We decided to have a presenter for our documentary as we found that similar documentaries such as ‘The Sex Education Show’ used one. We thought that by having a presenter it made it more personal, because it is a sensitive topic and the audience could relate to the presenter and feel as if she is talking to them individually.

TV Listings Page

• When creating our listings page we had to research the main techniques that are used.

• We looked at various listings pages and picked out the conventions that we liked the most and the ones that we would definitely use.

We needed to make sure that the TV listings was consistent to the documentary. We decided that the title of the documentary was enough to grab the attention of the reader as it is a question which makes the reader think about and ultimately make them read the article.

We included this line to add to the title before the audience reads the article. It makes them want to find out more as it doesn’t give too much away.

We included quotes from our documentary so that it gives the reader an idea of what the documentary is going to be like. The quote also links to the image of a parent which shows one person’s view of the debate.

Along with the image of the parent we embedded a caption to add context to the image. Again we used a question to make the reader think about what they think the answer should be.

For our image we decided that an image of the presenter would be best as our article was an interview with the presenter discussing the creation of the documentary.

We looked at the conventions of TV listings pages and found that they all use drop cap.

Page numbers

Names of people associated with the creation of the article

Radio Trailer

We used Garageband to create our radio trailer. This program allowed us to easily put sound clips together alongside music in order to create the trailer easily.

How effective is the combination of your main

product and ancillary texts?

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

When creating the TV listings page and the radio trailer we had to make sure that they linked together well so that they created a brand identity and targeted our audience. To do this we looked at other TV listings and radio trailers and used some features to link ours together.

We decided to have an interview with the presenter of the documentary for our article. We included an image of our presenter.

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

We also decided to included responses from our presenter in our radio trailer. This then links with the TV listings and when the audience watches the documentary they will recognise her voice and her appearance.

We also used a similar name for both the TV listings and the documentary. Our documentary is called ‘So You Think You’re Old Enough?’ and the title of our listings page is ‘SEX: Are You Think You’re Old Enough?’. This means that after the audience has read the article, when the documentary is on TV they will recognise it and remember the article making them watch it.

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

We tried to make sure that our documentary, TV listings and radio trailer linked together to create a brand identity. I think we did this quite effectively by using the presenter in all three of these media types. However I think that we could have added more to make the brand stand out even more. To do this we could have incorporated the same font and colours in our documentary and TV listings. Also we could have used the same music for the documentary and the radio trailer.

What have you learned from

your audience feedback?

What have you learned from your audience

feedback?• We have learnt from our audience feedback that our topic was

very relevant and reached the target audience well. Our audience thought that the interviews we used were very useful as they gave views from all the different people involved in sexual health – the parents, the teenagers and professionals.

What have you learned from your audience

feedback?

• However we also got some negative feedback from our audience. There was some minor issues such as editing problems and sound level issues. These issues are small but are still important as they contribute to make the whole documentary look professional.

• If we were to make another documentary we would look back on this feedback and make sure that we pay attention to the small details that make the difference to the viewers.

How did you use media technologies in the construction

and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Final Cut Express

We used FCE to create our documentary as it was the best program for us to use as it was simple and allowed us to organise our footage easily as well as showing us our documentary on a timeline, which was easy to see and use.

FCE allowed us to log and transfer our footage and put the footage into a ‘bin’. This allowed us to cut down footage to the important parts we needed and organise them into the minutes so that we could find the clips needed easily and quickly.

GaragebandWe used garageband as it was an easy program to use for what we needed it to do. We needed to create up to a minute of sound for our radio trailer. Garageband allowed us to import soundbites, music and voiceovers.

Garageband was easy to understand and set out our sound in a clear visual way.

Photoshop and InDesignWe used Photoshop to manipulate our image for our listings page. We used Photoshop as it is a program that contains a lot of effects that we could use on our image.

We used InDesign to create our TV listings page. This program allowed us to create a double page spread as well as other conventions of a listings page, such as drop cap, columns and titles.

Filming EquipmentWe used a video camera, tripod, digital still camera, external microphone and an m audio recorder to gather all our footage and voiceovers for our documentary, TV listings and radio trailer.

The video camera we used was good, however we found at times that it wouldn’t focus. For example we wanted to take footage of someone searching on the internet. However the camera wouldn’t focus enough to see the writing on the screen. We felt that this wouldn’t be good quality so decided not to use it.

Digital Stills Camera

We used a digital stills camera to take images for our montage and TV listings. The camera was good and worked how we wanted it to. The only problem with our images was that we could have been more inventive with the images we took to make them look more professional.

M-Audio Recorder

We used an M-Audio recorder along with an external microphone to record our voiceovers for the documentary and the radio trailer. The only issue we had was that sometimes the sound quality through the external microphone was poor so we had to redo some of our voiceovers. Also we found that sometimes we couldn’t set the sound levels right on the M-Audio, this caused problems when we imported the sound for the documentary. We tried rectifying the issue in Final Cut Express but this wasn’t working so we had to rerecord some of our voiceovers.

Blogger

We used a blog while completing the documentary task. This allowed each member of the group to upload individual work that could be accessed by the others. This meant that when splitting tasks between the group we could all have access to it. Also the blog allowed us to see the progress of our documentary and the tasks we had set ourselves.