media eval 2

Why Shouldn’t We?

As part of our media advanced portfolio we as a group were intended to produce; an extract from a new documentary TV programme which lasted approx 5 minutes.) In addition we had to create the following 2 ancillary tasks; a radio trailer which advertised our documentary and also a double-page spread from a listings magazine which focused on our documentary.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?The documentary that we produced had a purpose to ask the audience

various rhetorical questions about the topic of legalising cannabis. As a group we decided to name our documentary ‘Why Shouldn’t We…?’ which follows a series, our documentary being ‘Why Shouldn’t We Legalise Cannabis?’ We decided that this would be our chosen title as its catchy and leads to many different ideas to support and go against the argument.

Bill Nichols an American documentary theorist propose that there are 6 main documentary modes; poetic, expository, observations, participatory, reflexive and performative. Our documentary doesn’t support or feature the poetic mode as our documentary features continuity of a consequence and is also objective. Therefore the first mode that ‘Why Shouldn’t We’ supports is the expository mode.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?Grierson supports the expositional mode as he states it’s an

explanation for the move away from poetic documentary in terms of visual practice and story telling by using various rhetorical questions – this is shown in both our title and also throughout the voiceover. Factual information is also a feature of expositional mode; our documentary supports this as it uses statistics ‘……’ and also in opinions given by interviewees ‘…..’ this helps pass on key information to the viewer.

Narration is a distinctive feature of the expository mode, which ties in with our documentary as our voiceover is omnipresent, omniscient and objective. This is used to explain and argue out or documentaries rhetorical content.’ Why Shouldn’t We’ collects footage which aims to strengthen the spoken narrative – cutaways were used to support this. For example in our interviews Julie and mike… . This refers to Nichols ‘evidentially editing’ as the images help to illustrate what the commentary is about therefore helps to persuade the reader.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?Observational documentaries tend to observe, allowing viewers to make

their own conclusions, our documentary didn’t contain much features of the observational mode. However we did use the camera while moving with subjects and staying in the action this was displayed in the canteen whereby we left the camera at an anchored point on the tripod. However our documentary features music, interviews and narration therefore doesn’t strongly support the observational mode.

Participatory is whereby the filmmaker is visible to the viewer, however we chose not to have a presenter featured in our documentary but just to use a voiceover therefore our documentary doesn’t support the participatory mode.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?Both the performative and reflexive mode doesn’t support our

documentary as the performative mode targets documentaries, which involve the filmmaker in the story to give an autobiographical description of the subjective truths made by the filmmaker. Whereas the reflexive mode tends to present the viewer with footage of how the documentary was made. For example In Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929,) he features footage of his brother and wife in the process of shooting footage and editing, respectively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dziga_Vertov

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dziga_Vertov

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

After focusing on the documentary modes that our documentary fell under, market segmentation was our next important consideration. An ideal market segment identifies a certain group of customers which have similar needs and demand similar products. Psychographic segmentation aims to divide the market into groups based on lifestyle and social class. Firstly the social class is provided from the socio-economic scale, we decided to focus our documentary on c2, D and E. Reason being is due to the stereotype of those taking drugs are likely to fall under the occupations of these particularly the unemployed and unskilled manual workers. Lifestyle involves classifying people according to their values, beliefs, and interests. Young and Rubican, an advertising agency, provided the Cross Cultural Consumer Characterization known as the 4 C’s – resigned, struggler, mainstreamer, aspirer, succeder, explorer and reformer. ‘Why Shouldn’t We’ aims to attract strugglers – those of which are alienated with a few resources with a heavy consumption of alcohol, junk food and lotteries. Even though this is a low lifestyle and we would like to aim high with the documentary, our audience who is going to watch it are more likely to be struggler than succeeders or aspirers.

We chose channel 4 to broadcast our documentary as from completing secondary research we found that BBC

three already featured a documentary ‘Cannabis what’s the arm’ therefore this would have been to similar to our documentary. However channel 4 has only featured a documentary on cocaine therefore our documentary targets a gap in the market.

Statistics (dated 6th feb – 12th feb 2012) taken from http://www.barb.co.uk/ suggest that channel 4 reaches more than 3 times the BBC three, this justified our decision on whether we should choose channel 4 or BBC three. Channel 4 targets a large audience depending on the type of program i.e. soap opera, documentaries etc and through its portfolio including E4, More4, Film 4 etc. However as channel 4 broadcasted a three part series named ‘cocaine’ we can see that this will attract a similar audience.

http://www.barb.co.uk/


Before we started to film our documentary we had to complete various research and planning into other documentaries to outline the main conventions, we focused on Super Size Me. Super Size Me is a direct cinematic documentary that features Morgan Spurlock. The documentary is shaped into the narrative of an investigation as it focuses on how modern society is represented. Super Size Me contains detailed stylistic elements such as voxpops, graphics and location. However as this documentary is cinematic it was hard to relate the conventions as our documentary doesn’t fall under cinematic. Therefore I completed research into a documentary that had similar features and of the same topic ‘giving up the weed’.

Giving up the weed is an observational documentary which focuses on J Rock’s, an actor and

rapper, power to stop smoking cannabis. Giving up the weed features various stylistic elements such as interviews, vox pops, various shot types and camera movements, transitions.


Shot TypesAfter comparing our documentary to channel 4’s, giving up the weed, we were able to make the comparison about the shots used in the documentaries, the most common type of shot was close up. The helps engage the audience as it is a lot more focused. Both of the shots below are extremely similar – both focuses on the ‘spliff.’


Extreme Close UpThis shot type gets right into the subject and shows extreme detail, however this shot doesn’t show emotion or general reactions as just in both of these images focuses on the eyes. In order to improve this shot we could of used the choker shot to show the mouth, this will help to express the emotions of the character.


Cutaway / Establishing ShotsCutaway’s are a shot type which are often show something other than the current action i.e. picture. We used cutaways in our documentary over our expert interviews to add interest and information to break up the interview – to keep the audience interested. Established shot is used of image 2 as it shows the audience where the action is taking place.


Archive FootageWe filmed archive footage off YouTube. The video was a music video which featured clips of cannabis. We used this as a closure to our documentary as it gave time to allow audience to assess their views on our chosen subject – should cannabis be legalised.

The Focus PullThis is a creative camera technique which allowed us to change the focus of the shot.The image below displays this as it focuses on the tree and not the subject – smoking. This works very effectively.


Expert interviewsExpert interviews are a key convention of documentaries as it allows people being filmed to speak directly about the subject. Interviews were conducted with experts to give various fact and options related to the legalisation of cannabis. However our interviews may be put across as being bias – only showing one side of the argument. A convention we followed was the use of text outlining who the interviewee was and what there role was.


SOUNDThroughout our documentary we used both non-diegetic and diegetic sound. Non-diegetic sound was used throughout the documentary this was shown through the non-copyright piece of music and also the sound effects recorded of the telephone message. However diegetic sound is present when the interviews are taking place as the sound is onscreen.

MISE-EN-SCENEMise-en-scene was an element we had to consider when filming our footage particularly our interviews. We had to ensure the lighting of the footage was of a balance so the subject was clear, we had to make sure the setting was appropriate. An example of this is through our voxpops (background of smoking sign) and also the expert interviews – background of ‘liberal democrats..’ on screen behind Mike Pattinson. Also we filmed people with props such as cigarettes, lighters, grinders etc, this helped to set the scene of the clip.


VoxpopsAnother typical convention similar to interviews are voxpops – voice of people. We asked various people around college ensuring we gathered a range of open ended questions, it was important that we considered the shot type and framing. Medium close ups were the most frequent shot types that were used throughout, we also added text with a freeze frame enabling the audience to read the question.


Scrolling textOne of the amendments we made was adding text to our achieve footage. Therefore we added a text which scrolled down the footage – either over the existing footage or just a plain black background. Both worked extremely well as it engaged the reader in what the footage was showing.


The majority of documentaries contains exposition at the beginning whereby it introduces the important themes of the documentary. However our documentary challenged this form of convention as we used a picture of an error message and then it suddenly went onto a voice recording of ‘talk to frank’ whilst footage was shown of the talk to frank website.

In other documentaries the voiceover often states what the documentary is called and what the documentary was about. In my opinion our opening sequence was very successful as it was interesting and engaged the reader.


Headline

Caption image

anchored by text

Byline

Page Numbers Rule of

thirds

Images relating to subject

Fact file

Pull Quote

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

After completing the three tasks the question we had to ask ourselves was whether they all attracted our target audience and whether our article and radio trailer promote our documentary.

In my opinion I feel the tasks all interrelate extremely effectively through the use of images, voiceover music and captions. Firstly the article features various aspects of the documentary – images of cannabis, pull quote from the documentary etc. This therefore engages the audience in finding out more about the documentary, furthermore this leads the audience to read the fact file which gives brief but precise information about the documentary. Therefore if someone is just flicking through the radio times and they come across our article if they just look at the images but not the text they can find out more from the fact file.

In addition to our article the radio trailer features the same copyright music however the voiceover has changed to a girl this gives the documentary variation. We created a montage of voices which layered over eachother at the start of the radio trailer this worked effectively as similar to the start of the documentary it gave the trailer individuality and creativity.

Our documentary mainly featured our target audience 17-25 year olds, however the only difference was the expert interviews. The positive of using people that fall under our target audience is the audience can relate themselves to the individuals in the documentary.

Both the article and radio trailer work in favour in promoting our documentary.

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

IMPROVEMENTSAfter assessing all of our media text I feel that we could of improved the way in which our article and documentary related. Therefore instead of using new images we could of used images which was featured throughout our documentary – this would create a stronger brand identity.

BRAND IDENTITYBrand identity is an extremely important element of our documentary as it is important that our brand identity is clear so consumers can easily perceive our brand.

Therefore in order to ensure that our brand identity was always met we used the same sorts of image, texts and clips for all 3 media products. Our title ‘Why Shouldn’t We’ was constantly used as this rhetorical question was extremely catchy and after a point was made through our documentary the audience could re address the title asking themselves ‘Why Shouldn’t We.’

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

After completing our documentary, we carried out field research by handing out 20 questionnaires to our target audience in order to find our their thoughts and opinions on our three media tasks.


4

2

8

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4

What do you think the strongest feature of our

documentary was?Voxpops

Voiceover

Opening Sequence

Music

Interviews

We asked our audience which feature they thought worked the strongest in our documentary. The most popular answer was the opening sequence, this supports my own opinion as I think this was the strongest part of the documentary – as it shows actuality.

As music and the voiceover had the lowest value these may need to be improved – therefore we could ask open question to our target audience to find out how to improve.


Low23456789

High

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Out of 10 how suitable do you think our trailer is for our target audience (17-25 year olds)

No. of participants

Rati

ng

I feel this question is important as it gives us feedback on whether or not our trailer attracted our target audience. Our results show that 13 people rated our trailer 9/10 for attracting our target audience. Therefore this suggests that by varying shot types, framing, mise-en-scene etc we have engaged our audience and completed our aim and purpose.


Similarly this question reflected the audiences thoughts about our double spread article – this was a general overview. 8 people out of 20 rated out double page spread 7 out of 10, even though 8 people rated higher than 7, this suggests there is room for improvement.

Low23456789

High

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

What are your first impres-sions of our article out of 10?

No. of participants

Rati

ng

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

WHITE BALANCEBefore recording, George set up the white balance on the video camera by getting a white piece of paper and placing it in front of the camera whilst recording. This ensured that the objects, which appear white in person, are rendered white in the footage.

FOCUS The focus button was a bit of a pain when recording our footage as when zooming into the subject the object became out of focus. In order to overcome this problem when zooming in we used manual focus to adjust it so the image was clearer and sharper. If we were to improve this for the future it would be interesting to find a video camera with auto-focus automatically built in this would save a lot more time and make the footage look far more professional.

Each lesson we were given a different tripod this was sometimes a problem when adjusting, as some of the dials were different. For example one had cog-like dials, which were harder to control than the pull mechanism used on many of the tripods. However as long as we ensured the sprit level was correct the framing would be in the correct position

HARDWARE


FINAL CUT PROFinal cut pro is a video editing software which enables people to create their own videos, there are many features of final cut pro which differ from other software such as apple’s I Movie. At the start of the project I was unfamiliar with this program and it took a lot of getting used to however I was able to develop my skills through adding text, adding transitions, changing the speed of footage, adding a voiceover/music and build up layers etc.

Firstly to open all of the footage which we had taken we had to ‘Log and Transfer’. This is shown in both of the images (right). File > Log and Transfer, then to browse the files to find the video format (.mov) files.

SOFTWARE


Viewer Preview

Layer - Footage

Layer - Sound

.mov files

Final Cut Pro - overview


Input of text

Size of font

Colour of font

TEXTThe arrows represent different features that relate to text. The text shown was used over the top of our voxpops. We changed the font and colour to suit the background so it stood out and used a suitable size so it didn’t take up to much of the frame. Font


TRANSITIONS In order to create a flow for our clips from one to another we used a variety of transitions. Firstly we went to the effects tab and were able to browse the available transitions into categories. Cross dissolve is the default therefore this was our favorite and the most popular throughout our documentary. We found that the transitions that were in bold could be played into real-time without rendering. Finally we dragged transitions to the edit point ensuring that there were extra frames each side of the edit point.

ORGANISATION We organised the clips in logical order to help us manage and find our assets easily into folders. By choosing ‘new bin’ from our project tab in the browsing window, this meant that we could drag an item into each bin sorting them into subjects and topics. TRIMMING After resembling the clips into order we trimmed the clips to try and make the 5 minute mark. We clicked on each clip and used the shortcuts 'I (input)' and 'O (output)'. 'I' being at the start of the cut and 'O' being where the clip needed to finish. The eraser tool or the scissor tool both enabled us to cut the clip. We then put the clips onto the timeline, repeating these stages for each of our clips.

cross dissolve effect


SOUND LEVELSBelow is an image of how to edit the sound levels, this allowed us to change the pitch, speed and length of the particular clip.

RENDEROnce we moved or edited a piece of footage we had to render it – Sequence > Render All > Video. This enabled the footage to work once being played back.


GARAGE BANDGarage band is a program specific to apple, which allows people to create their own music through adding existing sounds and sounds which are defaulted to the program itself.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?EDITING Below is an image of how I split a piece of footage so that it allowed me to cut a section out. Edit > Split, I then deleted the section I no longer wanted.

Entertainment & Humor

media eval 2