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.

Production - Main Task

Planning - (Script)

Production - Ancillary Task 2

Production - (Ancillary Task 1)

Research - Codes and Conventions (Ancillary Task 2)

Ancillary task 2 research from Callum Daley

Research - Codes and Conventions (Ancillary Task 1)

Research - Target Audience

Research - Focus Groups

To research further into my target audience, I used a focus group of mixed ages and genders and I described what our documentary planned to feature and asked them if they would be interested in watching it. I have made this chart below to present these results. This has allowed me to spot trends and identify my target audience easier. You can clearly see form the chart that the there is a trend within the female audience, at all ages females were more popular than males which means that we would need to ensure that our documentary would meet the demands and expectations of females because they would make up over half of our audience.  It is also noticeable that there are two key age groups that have an interest in the documentary; these are as expected, teens and 25 – 50s. The reason behind these two age groups standing out from the rest is that the teens are students themselves and the 25-50s are the parents of students at schools, This means that these two age groups have interest towards the documentary topic as it could concern them.

Research - Codes and Conventions (Main Task)

Big brother from Mitchell Hinchley

Research - Codes and Conventions (Main Task)

Cops from Mitchell Hinchley

Research - Codes and Conventions (Main Task)

Educating essex and educating yorkshire from Mitchell Hinchley

Research - Codes and Conventions (Main Task)

I have done some research on similiar documentaries that have recently been on television. Channel 4 are currently showing 'Educating Yorkshire'. This is a documentary about a school that shows scenes of lessons and general school life, and talks privately with teachers and pupils. Me and Mitch will be adapting a similiar style to this for our documentary, so i believe that this is a good example to use as an inspiration for us.

Planning - (Tutorials)

Although i have experience in using Photoshop from my portfolio last year, i thought that it would be appropriate to watch a tutorial to refresh my knowledge and teach me anything that i have not done before that would be useful for this years portfolio. This was a good, long tutorial that was the most popular one among other tutorials that were on YouTube.

Planning - (Tutorials)

Slideshare was also a new program to me, therefore i used YouTube to find a tutorial video that would teach me the basic skills to be able to present my research and planning through Slideshare. This is the video that i used.

Planning - (Tutorials)

I have decided to use prezi to present some of my research and planning but i have never used prezi before. For this reason i have used used the learn & support section of the website to find this tutorial in order to find out how to use prezi effectively. This is the tutorial that i used.

Research - Codes and Conventions (Main Task)

This prezi explains the six modes of documentary, allowing us to identify different genres and styles for our documentary