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

Seamus Carrie

At the beginning of the year we were given information on the tasks that needed to be completed as part of the coursework section of A2 media.

These tasks were; to produce a 5 minute short documentary or an opening of a documentary, a double page spread and a radio trailer to advertise our

documentary. Before actually creating any of this we carried out extensive research into existing products to inform us on the style and content of such

media products.

Our research began with studying the common codes & conventions of documentary film . We tried to assimilate all of the conventions that

reappeared amongst a wide spread of documentaries, which included ideas such as; Voxpops, interviews with experts, voiceovers, exposition and

background footage. This research was able to help is decide on what must be included in our documentary in order to successfully conform to the

documentary genre. Now looking back at the completed documentary we can review the conventions we used and how effective they were and can

evaluate weather they were used successfully or not.

Our documentary explores the affect of social media on mental health in an expository way, with images and facts being presented with voiceovers

explaining the argument at hand. Our documentary can be said to serve a rhetorical purpose as it does slightly favour the argument that social media can cause mental health issues. Both Voxpops and expert interviews were

used in the documentary to ensure that we had ideas both from the general public and experts within areas related to the content of our documentary these were all medium close up shots and were filmed in a ‘fly on the wall’

style and the person being interviewed looked off camera to the interviewer and giving no acknowledgment that the camera is there. This is a convention and style of filming which we learnt from watching existing documentaries.