Evaluation - Question 4

Evaluation Question 4 from Callum Daley

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 1

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

In order to use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products, the first thing that my partner and I had to do was actually identify what these conventions are through research. We began this research by watching a wide selection of documentaries in order for us to identify any general trends between the documentaries. We noticed several trends within these documentaries, but this is a very general media form which has many variations in genre and style, therefore we needed to look more specifically at the type of documentary that we had planned on creating and the genre that it would be. I looked on the internet to find a reliable source that provided me with the information on categories or genres for documentaries and found that a theorist named Bill Nichols had made a model that distinguished these types of documentary named ‘The six modes of documentary’ This allowed us to identify which of these six modes our planned documentary would be categorised in, meaning that we could research the forms and conventions of this specific documentary type. This research concluded that forms and conventions was a lot more common for some aspects of the documentary than others. The main one being shots. Because of this we tried to adapt some of our camera shots so that they could follow this common convention as closely as possible, but there were barriers that stopped us from doing so, meaning that not featuring some of the shots that were common within this genre caused us to challenge these conventions. As we were creating an observational documentary with a fly-on-the-wall style, the documentaries that we researched such as Educating Essex, Educating Yorkshire and Big Brother all featured high angled shots that through CCTV style cameras which we could not provide or budget. This meant that unfortunately we could not feature all of the typical forms and conventions of our specific genre of documentary, but we still elaborated on this to keep it as realistic as possible for our chosen genre. We did this by using shots that were similar to other camera shots, angles and movements that were used throughout the similar documentaries that we researched. These include the medium close up shots that we used for the interviews of the students and teachers, as well as the high and low angled shots of the teacher and the students in the lesson. This technique used for the common convention that we found from our research signifies representation as it makes the teacher look far more superior to the students. There were some shots that we originally took but when editing the video that we realised we had to redo slightly different so that they followed the conventions a bit closer as they did not fit in properly. This allowed us to fit with our chosen genre a lot better. Although this does not reference away from the genre, one convention that is noticeably challenged in comparison with the main documentaries that we researched, is that we actually featured a countertype of the typical school students behaviour and attitude as we allowed them to appear interested and motivated, as opposed to in Educating Essex and Educating Yorkshire where they clearly showed a bad attitude towards the teachers and their education. We deliberately featured this countertype as we felt that it would be a good way of attracting an audience as we thought that they may be getting bored of the common stereotypes portrayed in these types of programmes. We thought that it would be a good idea to differentiate it in this way.