Evaluation Q1

How does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and

conventions of real media products? The topic for our documentary is the technology in sports, and focuses on its advantages and

disadvantages. Our final product used and developed the forms and conventions of real media

products as well as challenging them.

Documentary

A convention we used that was also in this real media product was VoxPops. Voxpops are used to

show the public’s opinion on your topic in a way that isn’t formal, giving the audience the sense that

the information isn’t biased since it comes from random people. We asked the students at the sixth

form college for our VoxPop.

Another convention that is used in real media products is Archival/stock footage. This is material

that is found from a film library or archive. This kind of footage isn’t taken by the crew and is

generally past footages. These are used to show a

historical event based on the topic or to fill the

documentary in empty places to keep it flowing. One of

our main archival footage was the referee this was

effective

since the

point we

made

before the footage talked about how the audience can

now here the referee’s decisions and why he made

them. Archival footage was used in ‘Supersize Me’

Lots of our camera shots/angles in our documentary

were inspired by other documentaries. Panning,

establishing shots and over- the- shoulder shots were used in our documentaries as well as other

real media products.

VoxPop used in ‘Supersize Me’ Our VoxPop

Our Archival Footage

Archival Footage from ‘Supersize Me’

Establishing shots are used to show the location in which the documentary is set at as well as where

the research was done.

Over-the-shoulder was used in our documentary for one of the interviews; we did this to keep our

documentary

interesting by

making the

audience feel

involved with the

documentary.

Captions are used

in multiple real

media products to

give information

on the interviewee

and their

relevance to the

topic

An expert

interview is

footage of a

person who has a high degree of knowledge on the topic. For our documentary we asked three

experts, who have knowledge on sport or/and

technology. We talked to a PE teacher and a Media

teacher about the pros and cons of technology in sport as

well as a PE student from the college who has seen the

use of technology in sport. This follows the forms and

conventions of real media products since a lot of them

use expert interviews. I.e. Supersize Me

Establishing shot from our

documentary

Expert interview showing captions using an over-

the shoulder shot

Expert interview from ‘Supersize

Me’

Establishing shot from ‘Supersize Me’

We challenged some conventions, for example a common

example used in documentaries is the use of on-screen

statistics. We did this since we already mentioned some

statistics in the voice over, and thought that we didn’t have a

suitable place to place the stats on-screen.

Radio Trailer

From our research for radio trailers we found conventions and forms from real media products,

some of the conventions we used were;

Voiceover- Help persuade the reader to try the product and give information on the product

Music- Music would be used in radio trailers to keep the listeners interested

Advertisement – We included in our trailer information on when and where our

documentary was going to be aired

Several Speakers – Several speakers would be used so that the audience won’t get tired of

the same voice

Snippets from documentary – This was used to give the listeners a ‘taste’ of what to expect

in from the main product. For this we used our expert interviews and our VoxPops

A convention that we didn’t follow is the general time limit, which was commonly 30 to 40 seconds

in real media products. We used the extra time to place more varied content to help us keep the

listeners attention. We also decided not to included statistics or stats since this would overload the

listeners with information that could potentially bore them.

Magazine Double Page Spread

Our Double Page Spread

On-screen Stats from

‘Supersize Me’

We researched into multiple forms and conventions

that are used in double page spreads especially those

found on the RadioTimes. Drop cap is a common

convention used in real media products; this is when

the first letter of the article larger than the rest. We

also used this convention since it created a more realistic

look.

Columns are also another convention that is

used in multiple magazine articles as well

as the page numbers. These are

conventions that we used in our

magazine double page spread.

We also developed some conventions and forms in

our magazine article. We developed the use of

quotes; normally a quote is placed in other places of

the article and wouldn’t expand beyond the columns.

Our quote on the other hand goes across all three

columns.

Real media products would mainly use one image to fill

a space and although we had a main

image we also used lots of other

images to fill the page.

Our article and the ‘New Who’

Doctor Who article from the

RadioTimes.

Our article and the ‘Headlong’

article from the RadioTimes.

Our article and the ‘You’re the

boss’ article from the

RadioTimes.

Our article and the ‘Route to

Glory’ article from the

RadioTimes.