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

For our A2 Media Advanced Portfolio we were to produce: An extract from a new documentary TV programme lasting approximately 5 minutes. Together with the following 2 additional task, a radio Trailer advertising the documentary and a double-page spread from a listings magazine focused on the documentary. A documentary present’s information about factual topics can have a variety of aims, to record important events and ideas, to inform viewers, to communicate opinions and to create audience interest. A number of techniques or conventions are used in documentaries to achieve these aims. A voiceover; The voiceover in a documentary often provides the audience with factual information talking directly to the audience, encouraging them to think that they have some kind of specialist knowledge on the subject. Our documentary ‘Life Choices’ uses a voiceover for this purpose’ opening the documentary giving facts and figures about the rate of unemployment “with over 11 million people ages 16 to 64 unemployed.” Providing the audience with shocking figures in attempt to lure the audience in and portray our knowledge. The voiceover is used throughout the documentary for this purpose and also to introduce interviews.

Interviews are another common technique included in documentaries these can be through Vox Pops or formal interviews with experts.

Interviews with experts are commonly used to authenticate the views expressed throughout the documentary and provide evidence or further knowledge. We included two formal interviews the first with Emma Hurste, Solihull sixth forms careers adviser where she gave her views on the importance of university and gave statistics on the amount of students that do go onto further education. Our interview

with Emma Hurste could be improved however as the lighting through the window makes the rest of the screen look rather dark. We also interviewed Hilary Hargrave, HR Advisor; where she continues to discuss the significance of university and what employers are looking for. Vox pops are also used in our documentary interviewing students from the college to get views on jobs, universities and education and what their plans are for the future. The interviews throughout the documentary successfully provide the viewer with information and opinions on the topic chosen; which consequently meets the aims of a documentary. In ‘Supersize Me’ Vox pops are also used in order to give the audience opinions and facts that back up the message portrayed throughout. All interviews used include mise en scene which uses appropriate settings etc. to the subject, our formal interviews were both filmed in offices with a desk and no busy background as this made it clear the interviewee’s were professional’s and have knowledge. Whereas our vox pops have a more basic background some were filmed outside the college building representing the college because of the subject discussed and this is where our students.

Vox pop from ‘Supersize Me’

Text is another convention of documentaries regularly used to anchor images with dates/information, we did not use text when anchoring images however we used text when introducing our formal interviews and an interview with a student we felt was fairly formal and so needed introducing. We also used text at the beginning of the documentary to show

the title. Supersize me and fairy job mother both commonly used text to anchor images and to identify interviewee’s

When watching other documentaries in the process of researching conventions, many opened showing establishing shots of either the area in which is being filmed, when we filmed our documentary we had establishing shots in Solihull of people around the touchwood entrance and of the job centre identifying the area and the topic of our documentary.

Non diegetic music used throughout the documentary and always at the beginning, we used garage band to create a song that we then used at different points throughout our documentary. Supersize me’ used music at the opening and it then continued when it filmed a group children singing a song.

There are a number of different documentary modes that are used throughout the media industry, such as; expository which is intended to explain or describe, has a voice of god narration and is a direct presentation of facts. Observational which contains little or no narration has long takes. Interactive this is where the film maker is on the screen as in ‘Supersize Me’

Our documentary

Fairy Job mother

This is our final magazine article we produced for the magazine “What's on TV”. Before producing our magazine I looked at various other magazines including “What’s on TV” to look for conventions used in different magazines. This helped us get an idea on how our article would look and the layout to use. We also had our own layout ideas that we used with those of “What’s on TV” to create our own article. The topic of our documentary greatly affected the choices we made without article, we didn’t have the page too busy as our topic is serious and the article needed to look

professional. With all the magazine articles I looked at when doing research I found that the images used were always the predominant part of the page. The images used for television styled articles generally had shots from the programme on the article and then also pictures of featured people, or relevant images to topic. We therefore used two images that were shots from the documentary. The shot of the job centre we used to show the audience of this article the topic of the documentary straight away to include employment/unemployment. The second image used from the documentary is people in Solihull this image makes the audience aware that it is a social issue our documentary will be addressing. We also found in other magazine that the actual written article is generally pushed to the corner of the page and doesn’t take up much of the space. We followed these conventions with our article, the text being in the bottom right hand corner of the double page spread and takes up approximatelya quarter of the double page spread.

For our radio trailer we first listened to a number of different trailers, we established an average time of 30-50

seconds long. We also saw that in radio trailers

used for programmes/films extracts of the media was put into the trailer; there was also music in the background throughout the advert.