A2 Media Studies Evaluation

Ben Miller - LOOKWest

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

products?

• As we needed to create a local news broadcast that could realistically exist, the first thing that we did was to analyse the only products already available; BBC Spotlight and ITV Local, to examine the forms and conventions within regional news.

• We knew that there would be certain conventions inherent in local news that we would have to adhere to for our product to be recognisable as ‘news’, but we also believed that we could find a fresh approach within the term ‘local news’.

• What we discovered from our research, was that there were two main aspects to the broadcasts; structure and tone.

• Despite the differences between Spotlight and ITV local, we realised that both tone and structure were almost identical, because each fell under the brand identity of a much larger corporation

• The structure of the programmes fell into a basic framework; opening title sequence, studio, headlines/news belt, main story with its main interview first followed by secondary interviews.

• We decided to stick to this framework as it has already developed over the years as the most efficient way of presenting the news.

• However, the tonal convention was something we wanted to challenge.

• For the tone, we wanted the emphasis to be on ‘local’, as much as on ‘news’.

• Therefore we decided on a more laidback approach, while still keeping enough speed and slickness to appear professional. This challenged the convention of news, even regional, being fairly clinical and severe.

• We tried to accomplish this in many ways, especially with our studio:

The BBC studio , which is determined to look extremely modern and professional, but risks looking cold and clinical as a result, despite the warm colour scheme.

The LOOKWest studio is more relaxed, but also more practical. We wanted it to look like the workplace of journalists (hence the newspapers), where the news is filmed, rather than a studio the journalists enter to present the news.

• We also reduced the formality, because we felt that our presenters should look like journalists at work, rather than being ‘dressed up’ to report the news.

• The change in tone was one of the major challenges to real news convention, but one which we felt was essential in distancing ourselves from the ‘corporation’ style of the BBC and ITV.

• Another traditional convention of local news is attempting to appeal to a very wide audience and we also wanted to be able to reach as many people as we could.

• However, we knew that in reality we would be watched mostly by people who wanted an alternative to the clinical BBC and ITV services.

• Our more laidback, warmer approach was therefore essential and we came up with the idea of certain drinks the presenter would have, which would be associated with the time of day the broadcast went out. The breakfast drink would be coffee, the lunchtime orange juice, 6 o’clock wine and tea/cocoa at bed time.

• While this is unorthodox, we felt that it would help relax the overall programme.

• Our focus on keeping everything local also meant that our opening title sequence focused on areas that the audience would recognise, rather than Spotlight’s abstract using of spirals and indistinct shapes.

• The music then helped to give a sense of excitement, as people may not initially be interested in seeing sights they know anyway

Well known locations around the Torbay that are used in our OTS

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

• The combination of our news broadcast and our website pages is extremely effective, as the website is able to convey a lot more about the background of the show, than five minutes of footage.

• The web pages help to convey the feeling of our presenters as serious journalists, as we keep journals of events and stories that we are investigating ourselves, in addition to the stories covered in the programme.

• These include film and theatre reviews, sports coverage and local politics.

• In addition to this, we were able to improve the synergy of the site and the broadcast by having a catch-up page. Although we would not do this with regular news, if people miss the news they normally just wait until the next day, as we were doing ours as part of a ‘community specials week’, we had clips from the other days on the site, as people may be more disappointed at missing one of the specials.

• We were also very focused on making our product interactive for our audience, and included a ‘Your comments’ page on the website, to which we would respond, creating a bond between product and user.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

• Our audience feedback has been very interesting, as we had been predicting what people’s reactions would be and finally we get to see whether we were right or not.

• The main thing that we learned was to remember that the people watching are doing so for the first time, without any prior knowledge of the format. This would not be the case for a real media product, which would already have a history behind it.

• We created it as one in a series, with an established history, instead of making a prototype for a brand new broadcast. Therefore, from audience feedback, we realised that people had not understood the idea of the drinks, and had been wondering why a news presenter was drinking on television. However, once this was explained to them, they believed that it was a good idea.

• Overall, most of our feedback was positive, a woman in her fifties claimed that it felt “like an authentic TV program” and on first viewing applauded the pace and the professional style of the program. This was very helpful for us, as, although more in depth analysis would have proved interesting, the immediate response was the most relevant, as any type of news is made to be seen once, rather than analysed.

• However, we also managed to appeal to younger audiences as well, an eighteen year old claiming “the construction of the opening introduction was brilliant”, but we were also gratified that she said “i can recognise all of the locations”.

• Another young person (19) stated that it was “most certainly a local thing” which meant that our key aim had been achieved.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation

stages?

• We used various media technologies to create our product.• Obviously a camera was used to film the actual piece itself, but we

also used far more wide ranging technologies.• Originally we used IMovie to edit the broadcast, but we encountered

a number of technical errors with the program as it repeatedly crashed, which made progress extremely slow and complicated

• This meant that we had to re-edit everything on a Windows computer, using AVS. Although this was better, the various layers of sound needed, original background noise, voice-overs, music, made the process difficult, due to the size of files.

The Internet was used in different ways continually throughout the project. Obviously, having everything online meant that we were able to access it from anywhere, so we did not need to be sharing materials for our evaluation. However, there were also a lot of other ways of using the internet: • To create the music, using

Aviary:

• To research, using Youtube and BBC Iplayer:

• And to receive feedback. As we put our final version onto Vimeo, we were then able to get feedback from everyone who watched it.

Comments by viewers

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