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

Existing Documentary

To help us gather an understanding of the necessary conventions of a documentary we watched existing documentaries. We evaluated two professional documentaries (Botched Up Bodies, Supersize Me) and four student documentaries (Selfie, Meninism, Branded, Are You Obsessed). By using professional documentaries it allowed us to understand what is required for a professional looking documentary. After watching the student documentaries we could also understand the requirements for a 5 minute documentary; it allowed us to understand what is crucial for our coursework.

Meninism

Supersize Me

Documentary By watching the existing documentaries we decided to utilise both an on screen and off screen

presenter. After watching “Supersize Me”, Morgan Spurlock inspired us to include an on screen presenter to involve the audience more and keep them interested. By having a teenage girl as our presenter it connects with our target audience of teenage girls. We also used a voice over so we could adopt the use of background footage with stats and facts coming up on screen. This allowed us to add an extra layer of information to our documentary. Vox-pops and interviews with professionals are also key conventions of a documentary. By watching both student and professional documentaries we identified the convention of using interview. Student documentaries such as “Selfie” and “Branded” utilised vox-pops as a way of displaying the common public perception of plastic surgery. By using vox-pops it helped us highlight this point in the documentary, the professional interviews give a good contrast in point of view. Professional interviews were a key part of “Botched Up Bodies” as it displayed a reliable source and a professionals opinion on the situation, for this reason it was crucial we used it for our documentary. A further decision made for our documentary based on existing products is the use of montage editing, which was utilised in “Supersize Me” to exaggerate the point being made. For our documentary we adopted this idea to show how plastic surgery can go wrong. By presenting this as well as having the counter argument gave our documentary a balanced argument as we wanted our audience to have their own opinion as a negotiated reading (Stuart Hall).

Vox Pop we used in our Documentary

Montage Editing from our documentary

Example of background footage from our documentary

Professional interview used in our documentary

Title of our documentaryThe on screen presenter who featured in our documentary

Radio

After researching the three different radio broadcasters (BBC Radio 1, Heart FM, Capital FM). We decided, due to the audience of Capital FM being that of teenagers and our target audience being teenage girls it made sense to decide our broadcaster as Capital FM. We also listened to past student examples of radio trailers that were located on the media website. By listening to these radio trailers it helped us understand what crucial parts we needed to include in the short 60 second time limit to keep the audience interested. We listened to three student radio trailers (Make Up Your Mind, Two Week Challenge and Social Media; How Does It Affect Your Everyday Life). Some conventions that were highlighted to us from these radio trailers were: to use the same presenter as our documentary, by having the same voice promotes the style and register in which the documentary has. We also had an upbeat backing track which would attract the audience and keep them interested throughout. As well as this we have followed the convention of including clips from our documentary; by having snippets of our vox-pops and professional interviews it allows the audience to experience some of the documentary the way that they would if they were to watch it. We avoided conventions such as sound effects due to plastic surgery being a serious topic and the sound effects might counter this approach. Considering content of the radio trailer and the information provided we have followed basic conventions of informing the audience when and where the documentary is being aired as well as what the overall message of the documentary actually is.

TV Listing Similarly to both the documentary and the radio trailer we used student products for inspiration with our

double page spread. We derived different conventions from looking at three student examples of double page spreads; these include images taken from the documentary, grab quotes, clear title and subheading, a by line as well as including the article and the date and place the actual documentary will be aired. By including all these features it will adhere to the conventions of our desired publisher, The Radio Times. We chose to aim this for the radio times as it is the most common and popular TV listing magazine and reaches out to a very large and varied audience. Images from the documentary are crucial to show the type of viewing that the reader will get when watching our documentary. As well as this it makes the double page spread seem more professional and more attractive to someone just flicking through a magazine. Grab quotes are a common convention of magazine articles and are used to hook the reader as they would usually be something interesting. A clear title and sub heading are used as a common convention, a clear title highlights what the article is about and in our case is the name of our documentary; and then the sub heading goes into more detail about the topic giving a quick overview of the article. The date, time and place in which our documentary is showing is included in the sub heading as it is something that we wish to stand out and be read before our article. One way we have challenged the common conventions of a TV listing is by having a mixture of both a question and answer article with a free flowing article. By doing this we are supplying the audience with the optimum amount of information as the documentary has both a description and the producers opinion.

Title

Subheading

Grab Quote

Images from documentary

By Line

Article

Date, Time and Location of Documentary