In what way does your media product use, develop or

challenge forms and conventions of media products?

Arun Dey

One of the tasks set up for our media assignments was to create a documentary and we had decided to base it on of the most popular websites in the world: YouTube. Before we could do this however we needed to know how a documentary actually worked.

We had looked into previous works in order to get an idea of what codes and conventions we could use and how we would present them. An example of this was found in the independent and controversial documentary by Morgan Spurlock; SuperSize Me, where he challenges himself to eat nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days to determine how much it would affect his health and the problems that the fast food industry has had on American society. We used this as a basis to create our own documentary and we used similar codes and conventions to make our documentary as professional as possible.

https://vimeo.com/16516935

What codes and conventions we used in our media product

Main Title

A common feature that we used was in the form of a main title in order to introduce our topic to the audience. As you can see here, both titles reflect a colour scheme which relate to each topic. Spurlock used red and yellow to relate it to McDonald’s while we used black, red and white to relate to YouTube.

What codes and conventions we used in our media product

Voxpops

This feature is one that we felt was very essential. We wanted to have the general public’s thoughts on YouTube such as how often they used it, who their favourite YouTubers were and whether they thought is was a legitimate career choice.Like SuperSize Me, we gathered up some opinions from the general public as it would help the audience feel that the documentary can connect with the public and that we want everyone to get involved.

Above: Voxpop from SuperSize Me.Below: Voxpop from our documentary.

What codes and conventions we used in our media product

Expert Interviews

Our documentary needed to be make a fair judgement at the end of the preview so the audience could determine whether YouTube is a good career or not and we couldn’t rely on the general public for all of our answers. This is where we gathered up some expert interviews to help us out. These included two local YouTubers, who provided facts about what they did and any advice they would give to people looking for a career in YouTube.

Above: Interview with Gene Grabowski from SuperSize Me.Below: Interview with local YouTuber Elise Hollins from our documentary.

What codes and conventions we used in our media product

Archive footage

This is what, we felt, was the most important part of the documentary. In order to back up our facts and to stay on topic, we gathered some archive footage to show the audience who exactly uses YouTube for a career, gathering a mixture of both famous people and some unknowns. SuperSize Me used archive footage as a form of persuasion and we had decided to follow suit by sending a clear message stating that anyone can get involved in YouTube no matter how old you are or what you love to do.

Above: Archive footage of cartoon from SuperSize Me.Below: Archive footage of TomSka from our documentary.

What codes and conventions we used in our media product

Shot Types

Zoom/Establishing shots: This shooting technique was used when we used an establishing shot for Solihull Sixth Form so that the audience would know where the majority of our documentary would take place.

Close up: The close ups were used for our voxpops so that the audience could have anice, clear view of who we were interviewing and it connotes a feeling of interest and That the voice of the public matters to us.

Low angle/high angle shots: Both these shots were used with the background footage with our title.These were used to showcase the most popular product associated with YouTube among the

generalpublic: Apple.

What codes and conventions we used in our media product

Setting

We kept consistent with where the documentary would take place, meaning that we mainly operated within the Solihull area, paticularly Solihull sixth form. The fact that we kept it there is proof that we wanted to reach out to our intended target audience (16-25 year olds).

Background footage featuring students at the Solihull Sixth Form

What codes and conventions we challenged in our media products

Participatory mode

We as a group, thought that the participatory mode wouldn’t sit well with our audience because we felt that it wasn’t needed to make our documentary successful and we felt that our use of editing along with helpful archive footage would more than make up for it.

Morgan Spurlock interacting with the audience.

What codes and conventions we challenged in our media products

On-screen facts

Another feature that we didn’t use are on-screen facts and figures. The reason for this is that we wanted the documentary to feel more like an actual television documentary than what you would see on the internet, as TV documentaries rarely present on-screen information and mainly carry out this operation via voice-overs.

On-screen facts about how much companies spend producing adverts for food.

Conclusion

To conclude this, I feel that we have made good use of the codes and conventions of standard documentaries while similarly trying to challenge some in order to create an identity for our own.