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

real media products?

• Before we made our media product we all did research into other documentaries that had been made in the past. Some of these documentaries were based on our documentary topic of illegal downloading, ‘Panorama: Are the internet police coming for you. But we also watched documentaries such as Morgan Spurlocks ‘Supersize me’ and another Panorama documentary of ‘The killing screens.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg5Oa6MQe_o

After viewing these documentaries we made sure that we used these codes and conventions in our documentary. This would give our documentary a sense of realism. We stuck to codes and conventions by using certain production modes. In our documentary we had examples of the expository mode which was through of by Bill Nichols (2001), which was relating to Morgan Spurlocks Super size me. We used this to give people a first impression and try and persuade them to follow the argument of our documentary. Other ways that we stuck to regular conventions was by adding a voice over narrator, this was to help the documentary flow through the scenes and give people some guidance as to where we filmed our documentary or to explain some vital information. We also used interviews from vox pops ( the popular voice) this was to get an idea of who was illegally downloading and to see if they knew the consequences of such acts. We also had expert interviews, these were people who had knowledge of illegal downloading or was in work that related to our topic. To give our documentary a sense of actuality we used archive footage of music videos and other clips. Other ways that we kept it realistic were by having a sense of cinema verity in interviews. Also it had a sense of a public affairs documentary as we chose to place it on BBC 3. Other elements involved: poetic to create mood or tone with use of a montage of pictures at the start of our documentary, observational mode and also reflexive mode.

When creating our magazine article we made sure to follow codes and conventions of similar magazines. We looked at magazines from The Radio Times predominantly. This was because that we chose The Radio Times as the magazine our article would be published.

Both our magazine article and the one from Radio times use 3 columns to display their information.

Both use a title (masthead) in bold to draw the attention of the reader, but it also is in the top left of the page. This is because the top left is the first place a person will look due to how we read and follows the codes of a professional magazine.

Like a professional article our magazine uses images to help get the message across, and support our article.

When creating our radio trailer we made sure that we kept to common codes and conventions. We started off by listening to examples of radio trailers and looked at how certain pod casts and news bulletins were produced. After we started to make our radio trailer. Our radio trailer stuck to common codes and conventions by having a voice over, backing track, interviews with experts and vox pops and also the vital information. When making our radio trailer we kept the same music from our documentary and used it for our backing track for our trailer. This was to make sure that we had continuity throughout the piece.

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

• After completing all of our three tasks we think that they relate to our target audience well. This is because we think the documentary is fast paced and keeps our audience interested in the matter raised. Also when creating the magazine article we made sure that there was a fine balance between how much text and information there was to how many pictures were on each page. This was to make sure that our audience would not get bored with our article and loose interest in what it was promoting. In creating the radio trailer we had a clear message about what the documentary was about and we had a clear day and time stated. This was all done in a 30 second clip as it was on radio and did not want to drag on too much.

• When looking at the magazine article and the radio trailer, I think the magazine article promotes the documentary well, this is because there is relevant pictures, taken from our documentary and the article gives you an insight into what the documentary is about and also how we made it. The magazine may have been better if we had added more colour and eye catching graphics, but on a whole I think that it did the documentary justice. The radio trailer I think went well, I think that the backing music fitted (as it does in the documentary) and that it is very informative. The only thing that may have been improved would of been to keep the same voice who did the documentary voice over to do the radio trailer, but we thought that it worked well with two different voices.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

• After finishing our documentary we conducted a survey on how successful it was to a group of students all in our target age range. And after looking through our questionnaires we had some mixed reviews. We asked on a rating of 1-10 how successful the documentary was the average rating was an 8. This we thought was pretty good feedback, and we also left comment boxes for our target audience to say how we could improve our documentary and get more people into the 9/10 brackets. After looking at our article response we found that people would rather have more images and less text, but other than that we had a good feedback for our magazine article. The most critiqued of our three pieces of work was the radio trailer. We had comments saying that the backing track on the radio trailer was too loud for the voice over and they said that the voice over faded out in places and became unclear. On a whole our audience feedback was positive and was how we expected, none of the comments were bad they were able to give us advice on how we can improve and we took that on board.

Another question that we asked was if our media products ( especially our documentary) had discouraged people from downloading illegally

Most people said that it did not discourage them, and we think that it will always be the case. If you have a free way of getting your music that you like, people will see that as a bonus illegally or not. So we do not think this is a negative reflection on our documentary.

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

When filming our documentary we used many different terms of media technology. To film footage for our documentary we used a Cannon HG20 video camera to capture the footage, a directional microphone to make sure we had top quality sound and a pair of earphones to help us judge the sound levels and make sure they were correct.

We also used a digital voice recorder and an external microphone to help us record the voice over for our documentary and also our radio trailer.

• In the planning stages of coursework we were collecting information and placing it onto our groups blog, which was on www.blogger.com. We used this system of presenting our work throughout the course- I did not like this form of presentation and would have preferred to hand in hard copies of our work. Other resources included channel websites and places to get our information. Some of these were BBC, Radio

Times, BBC3 and Wikipedia for our information.

To create our three pieces of work we used Apple Mac computers and we used Final cut express to create our documentary. We logged and transferred all of our footage that we shot and placed it into a sequence. We then started to cut and crop our footage to fit into our 5 minutes time limit. When we had a rough idea of where clips and interviews were going to be placed we started to add in some shot transitions and cut-a-way shots to make sure we kept to the codes and conventions of real documentaries. We also made a backing track in Garage band, which we later imported into our

documentary.

We then started making sure that the sound was all correct so we normalised some of the audio in some clips and then used the pointer tool to lower the decibels of some audio, this was to make sure that the sound did not become distorted or hard to understand. We also added in text at certain points of our documentary using to tools to help shape the text and place the text where we thought it worked best.

To create our radio trailer and backing track for our documentary we used the program ‘Garage band’

For our backing track we took beats from the Garage band archive and blended them together. We took one that was a synth bass and two other plain synth track. We placed the one over the other to give our backing track a quick flow to make sure that it kept the reader interested.

We then used Garage band to create our radio trailer. This involved taking sound bites from our documentary, consisting of vox pop and expert interviews, and placed them into Garage band.

We then kept the same backing track and started to place the sound bites in the required places cropping and cutting the files to make sure they sounded good. We also adjusted the sound levels on the backing track to make sure that it would not drown out the voice over and sound bites.

To create our magazine double page spread we used Adobe programme InDesign.

We used various aspects of in design to create our double page spread. We used tools such as the text tool, the rectangle tool to create boxes and add colour and we also placed JPEG images into our article.

To create our text we selected the text tool and drew a text box the size of the page we wanted to fill. We then selected how many columns we wanted our article to be and we started to write our article.

We then created coloured boxes to add some appeal to our magazine and then we added drop shadow to our boxes to make them stand out and give some other dimensions to our article.