Evaluation Question 1

• For our documentary, we intended to follow the codes and conventions of real professional documentaries. As a class we watched three professional documentaries: ‘The Music Biz’, ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’, and ‘That Thing Lara Croft’. All three of these documentaries are single stranded. Alongside this we each chose to analyse a further two of our own professional documentaries to study. I chose ‘The Human Mannequin’ and ‘The Model Agency’.

Genre

• The type of documentary we have produced is a mixed documentary, as we have used a combination of interview, observation and narration. Likewise to professional documentary ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’ which also is a mixed documentary. The major theme within our documentary is phobias, although it has, like many other documentaries been influenced by the power of the media. Likewise to ‘That Thing… Lara Croft’, the media is influenced in it being a feminine look on a masculine idea.

Interviews/Graphics• The interviews we took for our documentary each had relevance to our topic of phobias.

We made sure each person was in the rule of 3rds and after watching professional documentaries, we wanted to make sure we got this exactly right for our documentary, to enhance its professionalism. The graphics used in our documentary were Sans Serif and had a bold white box around its text to make sure it stood out and was clear to viewers who the interviewee was, and what they do that is relevant to the documentary. Also the font we chose for the title in our title sequence was the sae, but with an extra glow around the lettering. This created an almost horror film font that would present a sinister look to our documentary.

Graphics show audiences the interviewee’s name and his profession that relates to the topic.

Mise-en-scene/Cutaways• The mise-en=scene for our interviews was extremely important, as it is a convention of

professional documentaries, we wanted to make sure we could achieve this to the best of our ability. This is significant as it links to what the topic is about, and is more relevant than a random background. Additionally, the cutaways were an extremely important factor in our documentary, and likewise to professional documentaries they stop jump cuts and they relate to what the voiceover/interviewee is saying. Like ‘That Thing…Lara Croft’ they have cutaways of the game footage and the game being played, which is also what we intended to do to make sure we got the right codes and conventions involved.

Both mise-en-scenes relate to the profession of the interviewee. Neil Foster has a relaxed and calming background, representing his job as a hypnotist.

Editing

• In terms of editing, we did follow the codes and conventions especially when using cuts. In regard to our own documentary, there are cuts throughout to separate the interviews from the voiceover, this is purposely done so that the documentary is broken down for the audience. The sound in our documentary is female, with a posh, clear voice. We thought that a male voiceover would be more fitting for the topic of phobias, but we decided to challenge this idea and use a female voiceover, that anchors the audience just as much as a male voiceover would. To add to this, we added a soundbed of Intro – The XX, which is quite sinister that fits the demographic of phobias. Likewise, to professional documentary sound beds, in ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’ the sound bed is a Marilyn Manson song, again fitting with what the documentary is about.