millies evaluation for monday!

8/2/2019 Millies Evaluation for Monday!

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/millies-evaluation-for-monday 1/22

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ADVANCE PORTFOLIO EVALUATIONMILLIE PRENTICE

In what ways dose your media products use, develop orchallenge codes and conventions of real media products?

The brief was to make the first 5 minute extract of a documentary.

Each member of the group brought their own knowledge of codes and

convention together for all 3 of our media products due to the AS

coursework last year and the class time used looking at them.

After brainstorming different

ideas such as; bullying, binge

drinking, teen pregnancies;

outweighing the positive andnegatives of the footage we

would use and if there was

going to be interesting vox

pops and expert interviews

available. After this we decided

our topic was going to be

bullying. Our first task was to

create the 5 minute opening

extract of a documentary on a

topic of our choice. Being only

5 minutes this meant that wecould really focus our attention

and research into the opening

to ensure we had as many

codes and conventions to

guarantee some extent of

professionalism. During class

time we analysed existing documentaries such as

Super Size Me, 2004 American Documentary and

Airline 2004-5 to establish what these codes and

conventions actually was so we could then

transform them into our product.

The first hurdle we encountered was what our

opening sequence should consist of (after the

aural contents page.) The opening sequence is

some of the first few frames a viewer sees,

leaving a lasting impact and is used to draw the

viewer in so we needed to make sure it would

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Brainstorm of ideas on Bullying



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straight away be interesting. We started to storyboard different ideas

and eventually I decided that we should have a montage of different

vox pops being asked if they could name 3 types of bullying. We acted

upon this creating a rapid initial montage featuring at the minimum 7

people each saying one word answers, with a motif of the word

´cyber.µ Most documentaries feature a montage at the start meaning

we would be following an existing convention. We imagined this

montage would show what most young people are aware of and after

these frames (the montage) we would discuss it to an extent the

audience weren·t already aware of.

During the research and planning stage we noticed that nearly

every interview (especially expert interviews) was set up to follow the

rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is commonly used when framing a

person/character, it is an imaginary grid divided into 9 sections. It is a

basic rule when filming to allow the image of the frame to be more

balanced and pleasing to the

eye. We already were aware

of this being a code and

convention for framing due to

our AS coursework, yet we

discovered through research

of watching existing

documentaries, that while

filming an interview the person

being interviewed was to be

place in either the left hand

third or the right, with their eyes

placed in the top third, looking

in the opposite direction. We also noticed from watching various other

documentaries that the interviews must be framed in medium close

ups. We decided to make sure that every interview we filmed followed

this code and convention (as you can see in the chart below.) Yet, we

wanted to maintain a professional effect so we knew that we must get

the mise en scene correct. As you can see from the print screen above

of Paul Ashdown, taken from our 5 minute extract, we made sure he

was in an office based room, with a computer to enforce his job title as

a principle. However we did challenge the code and convention of

the mise en scene during interviews as the expert interview with Mike

Hatton (shown on page 3, next page) didn·t have an appealing

setting; it was simply a green background. To improve this we couldhave made the mise en sense more visibly appealing, with posters

about media and bullying in the background. This was a last minute

interview though, due to the sound levels on Jag Jagvar interview

being muffled, so we were unable to get the facilities to improve the

setting for Mike Hatton·s interview.

Example of an ex pert interview used in our documentary.The mise en scene im lies rofessionalism



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I noticed that during the expert interviews and before in the

documentary Super Size Me they would include aesthetically

appealing cutaway shots to insure the audience would not loseconcentration from seeing the same frame continuously for 30

seconds. As Super Size Me was about McDonalds they included the

restaurant menus and the McDonalds logo. Fly away also used

cutaway shots these where mainly of people·s suitcases to fit in with

the theme of the documentary of an airport. A cutaway shot is usually

of something other than the main story line, a close up of a different

part of the story. They are used as a ´bufferµ between shots to help the

Ex pert interview, taken from Supersize me

Ex pert interview, taken from our documentary

Eyes positioned lookingaway from the camera

Eyes positioned looking

away from the camera

Small space above the

head

Small space

above the head

Mise en scene(office based)



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editing process and/or to add interest or information to the

documentary/film. We decided to develop this code and convention

in our 5 minute extract to aim for a professional presentation and to

maintain concentration levels with the audience. We used various

different cutaway shots. While discussing cyber bullying we would show

frames of mobile phones logging into social networking sites. When

talking about issues that have been in the media we framed

newspaper articles. We also used a cutaway shot of a school sign to

indicate what was coming up later on the programme. We dubbed all

¶filler footage· other than interviews as this meant we could use them

anywhere with voice over.

In the documentary Super Size me we

noticed that before an expert

interview they would set the scene by

using an establishing shot. One

example, is when Morgan Spurlock arrives at the doctors and they pan

right of the building with the next

frame being the interview. This code

and convention seems to

be distinguished not by the scale

i.e medium, long shot but by its

function. We decided to use this shot

before the expert interview with the principle as we thought by

showing the college it not only sets the scene for where the interviews

are based but allows them to see what the importance of a principle.

After analysing existing documentaries we decided to challenge the

code and convention as many documentaries only use straight cut

edits for example Airline. Fade through black is sometimes used in

documentaries after thought provoking points to allow the audience

time to analyse. We decided against using fade through black as well

as our documentary is going to be biased using a Rhetorical narrative

not giving the audience time to think. We mostly used straight cuts yet

These are different exam les of some cutawa shots used in the 5 minute extract of the documentar

An example of an establishing shot weused in our documentary pan left - right



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we did challenge the convention by using cross dissolves we used

these when using the same scene but a different frame. For example,

during the Principle of Sixth Form College, Solihull interview the first

frame was him typing on the computer, and then there was a cross

dissolves then the second frame was the interview itself. We also

applied cross dissolves to text that appeared on the screen, such as

the title and peoples names during interviews. I do not think this

affected the quality of our 5 minute extract as it still had a professional

quality to it as we did not apply a mixture of transitions only one kind

(the cross dissolve.)

By looking at the degree of creative treatment of recorded material

you are able to categorise the documentary into 3 sub genres. The first

is a realistic documentary this imposes minimal treatment of recorded

material i.e ¶fly on the wall· this is objective. ¶Fly on the wall· is a term to

describe real life situations, and usually will include a presenter like in A

Good Smack, Channel 4 were camera crews where left in the homes

This screen shot shows a variet of the different transitions available to use.

The transition thatfeatured in our

documentary



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of the

participants/characters

to be filmed 24 hours. It

could be argued that fly

on the wall element

makes the characters

act towards the

camera for example, in

Airline a man (going on

holiday) argued with

the staff member

aggressively trying to be

the ¶alfa· male in the

situation. It could be

argued that if the

camera wasn·t there

would he have acted like that? In our documentary we had elements

of fly on the wall when we filmed groups of people walking yet we did

not intrude a camera into anyone home/life or include a presenter so

our documentary only has slight elements of realistic documentary. The

next sub genre is formalist documentary. This imposes a particular

narrative structure on recorded material i.e ¶fly on the soup·. Fly on the

soup is more of a biased opinion of the situation, usually including

expert interviews from the film maker·s opinion. We used elements of

this in our documentary as we filmed experts who are clearly against

bullying such as a youth worker and principle. We had choice the

choice of edits meaning that we were able to create the biased

opinion as we could miss out frames that we didn·t want to use.

However, if we was to make the whole 30 minutes of the documentary

we would of also included an expert interview saying how banter

could be mistaken for bullying and how banter can be a good thing.

The third sub genre is subjective documentary this expresses the

filmmakers personal view. Many documentaries will express the film

makers view sometimes leading to biased results unless they talk to

both sides of the argument. In Super

Size Me the documentary mainly

features Morgan Spurlock·s personal

view of unhealthy eating and did imply

biased statements. They talked tohealth experts who explained how

McDonalds where bad for their health.

We developed this genre convention of

subjective documentary for our

documentary as we expressed our

opinions on bullying by collecting facts

when researching and giving the



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audience the impression of it being the worst thing to happen to

someone. However, I would agree that this is biased yet I feel that the

target audience would agree being the topic is so strong. Any

documentary could contain elements of all of these sub genres!

It can be argued that a documentary (like any film or story book) has

different tones: serious, light hearted, optimistic, pessimistic,

celebratory, condemnatory, resigned, uncritical and ironic. Our

documentary developed a serious tone as we used minor key music

and discussed a serious topic (bullying). It also had elements of

condemnatory as condemnatory means you tackle the subject of the

documentary to create a bad name for the subject. In our

documentary we condemned bullying, we stated how bad it can

emotionally affect people so the audience would agree. We only

interviewed people who were against bullying and didn·t enquire into

interviews to say it would be a could thing.

As well as developing and challenging codes and

conventions for the 5 minute extract of the documentary

we also had to do this for our radio trails. We produced

this on the software called Garage Band, which can be

found on the apple macs. After listening to several

different radios trails such as: David Attenboroughs Radio

4. We noticed that they all lasted approximately 30 ² 45

seconds long, so we decided we would make ours last just over 30

seconds to give it a professional feel and so it wouldn·t drag. We also

noticed that they had used clips from there documentary. So we

chose to use a vox pop interview and an expert interview ² we chose

the clips that will have a lasting impact and gave strong points.

From looking at the other documentaries we learnt that we had to

ensure the sound levels were clear, some documentaries consisted of

ambient sound such as the wind when interviewing vox pops so we

wanted to follow this convention but some times we found that when

changing the sound levels they would become non existent.



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To manipulate the sound levels we used this tool bar,

found on the right hand side of Final Cut express. By

simply clicking the arrow it enables you to put a smalldot on the sound bar and drag this up and down to

your required volume. From watching other

documentaries we discovered that the sound was

constant meaning the voice over would always be the

same pitch and volume and so would all the interviews,

so we decided to develop this convention. This made

our documentary flow better.

As well as following codes and conventions for the documentary we

had to ensure we followed them for the radio trail to enable us to

maintain a high quality of work.

Like the documentary we ensured that the sound levels were clear and

easily understandable, making sure it included all the necessary details.

We noticed that all the radio trails we looked approached the

audience in an informal way, when directing to the audience when

the documentary would be aired the radio presenter would say

´tomorrowµ or ´next Tuesday.µ We decided to challenge this

convention as our documentary uses a serious tone as discovered by

the theorist Bill Nichols. Ours gave the exact date using the quotation

´8pm, 17th April.µ We challenge this as we wanted to create a serious

advertisement as well. By talking seriously it makes us question whether

BB3 was the right radio station to advertise on.



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Manipulation of the sound levels,

used to create clear voices with nomuffle

Effect added at the start andend on radio trails we lookedout, we noticed they startedwith a sound effect andfinished with the same one.

Music used found

on the mediaresource centre

non copyright

Voiceover same

voice used in our documentary

The radio trailer in Garage Band during the editing process

Clip used from our documentary.



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Just like our 5 minute extracts and radio trail our magazine article

(double page spread) follows the codes and conventions of existing

magazine articles. However one thing that challenges the codes and

conventions is two of the pictures haven't been Photo shop. Adobe

Photoshop is a graphic editing program which is used by professionals

to adjust the auto levels and over ride the brightness, although we did

photoshop one picture we should have ensure all where done. We

used InDesign to create the layout and place all text on the page.

Our knowledge on codes and conventions of magazine articles comes

from our AS coursework where we had to create a double page

spread. The codes and conventions we followed are:

The magazine article (double page spread) to advertise our documentary

Date andmagazine

Title

Grab Quote ± quotationtaken from the article helps

attract the readers.

Drop Cap ± showing thestart of the

article

By line ± thewriters credit

Standfirst ± mini title giving

extra information

Photocredit

Caption ± helps anchor

image

Date,

time,channel



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How effective is the combination of your main task and

ancillary products?

I feel that all three of our media products interconnect nicely. The radiotrail features the same voice used on the main product (5 minute

extract of the

documentary.) We

decided to do this so the

audience will be able to

make a clear distinction

between the products. The

voice we chosen to use

had a weak Birmingham accent, usually in documentaries and radio

trails they will always have the present with a fluent voice with no

recognizable accent yet, this was impossible as we all had accents inour group. All three of the products include a memorable fact that

states "69% of children in the UK reported being bullied in 2006"

although this isn't a recent fact we felt it sti ll added impact. We

featured this in all three of our products, in the radio trail it was one of

the first diegetic sounds to be heard (voiceover), this is the same with

the documentary. It was used with in the first paragraph of the

magazine article. This fact helps interconnect all three of our product,

almost giving it a catchphrase. Without the title being mentioned, this

fact immediately allows the viewer/audience to understand the topic

and generates a serious tone as its specific.

TARGET AUDIENCE: Originally we wanted our target

audience to be 16 - 35, but after completing the main task and the

ancillary products I feel that the target audience should be wider,

perhaps 16-45. This then allows for teenagers who have suffered

bullying in the past or who may have friends that have and also

parents who could have been through it with their child or want to

know how to deal with the affects if the situation arises later in life. All

social classes will be part of our target audience (A, B, C1, C2, D, E) this

is because bullying affects anybody, no matter what there

background is. The target audience can also be divided up due to

psychographics: resigned, struggler, mainstreamers, aspirer, succeeder,explorer and reformer. Our documentary could be aimed at aspirers:

this is because aspirers want to be different; they aim to be better by

changing their appearance and fashion. Aspirers would be attracted

to our documentary as people who usually are bullied feel they need

to change (found this our through research.) The genre will be 50:50

equal divide between males and female this is again because both

genre groups are affected by bullying.

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We chose to air our documentary on

BBC 3 as the target audience

demographics of the target

audience includes 16 - 34. I feel this

age group will be the main people

watching our documentary. BBC3

also focus on new upcoming talent,

and with one of the main selling points in the magazine article being

that three college leavers have made the documentary it

interconnects nicely.

BBC3 have three rules which I feel are all suitable for our

documentary..

The channel needs to be disciplined about focusing on the young - its

centre of gravity will be 16-34 year-olds: people who are young in spirit

and mindset.

BBC Three is ¶Never Afraid to Try new Stuff· and that·s why we will

continue to innovate with

breakthrough comedy, stand-outentertainment, brave documentary

and intelligent factual formats. Our

content needs to have potential to

innovate across platforms.

BBC Three should provide an

environment for the development of

new ideas and talent and for existing

talent to take risks, becoming a

genuine laboratory for BBC One and

BBC Two.



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Choosing BBC3 to air our documentary meant that we had to

advertise on a BBC radio station to create a connection. With radio the

BBC all together has a listening audience of 34,940,000 people. Yet,

advertising across all radio stations means that it would reach people

who are not interested in the documentary and would be pointless so

we decided to narrow it down and advertise on BBC Radio 1. BBC

Radio 1 has a listening audience of 11,665,000. It is aimed primarily at

15-29 age groups, but its main audience is of the 33 age group. Thisallows for the original target audience reaching teenagers and their

parents. However, this may only reach younger parents.

The documentary features fast edits at the start due to the rapid

montage I feel this helps attract our audience straight away.

For the magazine article (double page spread / listings page) we

decided to use all our images from the documentary. This helps

interconnect as they images will be remembered. We chose to use

images of people with r ecognisable faces ² helping create a brand

image.

Image from documentary



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We chose to advertise the article in TV TIMES. TV Times is a televisionlistings magazine published in the United Kingdom by IPC Media, a subsidiaryof Time Warner. It is known for its access to television actors and their programmes. It currently publishes broadcasting programmes for all major

television channels. The BBC is the biggest television institution thereforefalling under the category of µmajor television channels¶ so I feel it would besuitable for it to be published here. However, I feel this magazine is also notsuitable to advertise in as it focuses mainly on soaps. Its target audience is20 -50¶s age group, this therefore reaches out target audience bar the 16-19but these will be reached by the radio station helping interconnect.

The article, dose help attract the target audience due to its layout and

choice of colour scheme being neutral based. The choice of question

and answer form makes the documentary seem highly interesting and

easily readable. The subject of the article is clear from first glance and

the airing of the documentary stands out due to the use of bold

making the combination between the products affective.

Overall, I feel that all our products, the main task and the two ancillary

tasks combine successfully. They look as if they belong together, they

sound as if they belong together (aural and written) and are clear and

effective in promoting the documentary. The radio trail is exciting, yet

keeping the serious tone that the documentary portrays. For all the

reasons presented above I feel they are very successful.



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What have you learnt from the audiencefeedback?

Before making our documentary we created a small scale research

questionnaire asking the public a series of questions to give us an

influence on what to base our documentary around.

With over 50 % of

the 20 people we

asked saying they

had been bullied

in the past wedeemed this to

be a suitable

topic for our

documentary.

With 8/20 people

saying they would

only be able to

concentrate on an

interview for 21-30

seconds we insured

that we did not

exceed this. During

our feedback questionnaire we

noticed that nobody said this needed to be improved, so following our

research enabled us to create a high standard.

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To collect our audience feedback I created a simple questionnaire,

asking our classmates to rate our products overall, and also how

interesting and suitable they were. This following graph indicates how

15 of our classmates rated our products overall.

Overal Results

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

excellent good fair poor

quality?

n u m b e r o f p e o p l e

documentary

magazine

radio trail

In the majority of cases our class found our products to be excellent

and good, with the documentary being of the highest standards.

Nobody thought any of our work was poor. This was great feedback

and made us feel as if we had created high standard of work.

We also asked a question whether the audience found the use of

effects, in the documentary suitable. We used a few transitions (not

usually a convention.) When the results came back we were

astonished to see that 100 % had said yes.

Another question in which we asked was wether the layout of the

magazine article would attract them. The answers were promising as

Did you find the use of effects suitable

yes

no



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14/15 people said it would. By ensuring we followed all codes and

conventions for this we were able to create a decent magazine article.

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

people

yes slightly no

answers

Did the layout and appearence of the magazine article attract you

Series1

We used an open question, allowing the audience to write

improvements which we could make. The feedback suggested that

we improved the sound levels on the documentary, the majority of the

sound levels had been manipulated correctly making the voice over

and interviewees clear however, in one case on the expert interview

with Paul Ashdown the sound levels appeared muffled. Another

suggestion was that we could improve the doubke page spread by

using photoshop to make the image of Mike Hatton (media expert)

standout. Nothing was to be improved with the radio trail.

Overall, we received positive feedback.



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How did you use media technology in the construction,

research planning and evaluation stage?

When producing our media product we used a variety of technology

and software. We were familiar with the use of some but others took

practise. We also used technology during our initial research. During

class time we analysed several documentaries, radio trails and

magazine articles, to do this we required home technology such as a

television, and standard computers. We used

internet resources such as BBCiplayer and 4OD to

watch documentaries and websites such as theguardian news to find out statistics. We used

Blogger.com to upload any information we had

deemed useful and to use as a collection of our

research and planning.

I feel that the use of

blogger.com wasn't sufficient enough.

Although it allowed us to share our findings

with the other members of our group we

was only able to upload text and images

and on many occasions I struggleduploaded videos that I had found on

internet sites such as youtube.com. With

various over blogging websites such as

tumbler it would of made it easier to be

able to produce our work and insure

presentation was of the highest.

While creating our main product (the

documentary) the most important

technology was the digital camera. This

aloud us to video/record movingimages and sound. The cameras the

college provided were up to date,

making it easier for us to upload our

footage onto the apple Macs. The

cameras there selves where small and

didn't weigh much they were easy to fit

inside a handbag making it easy to

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travel around to the different scenes without wasting time. After a few

sessions filming we learnt how to override the automatic white balance

to make the scene either brighter or darker to make the picture stand

out and look natural. We also learnt how to change the focus, we took

a few shots were the foreground was out of focus which made the

shots look professional. I personally found the camera very useful. We

used tripods to mount the camera, you had to ensure that the green

bubble was centred - this is how you know that the tripod is straight

making the shot still and level. This was helpful when panning and tilting

during establishing shots as it ensured us our shot was steady paced.

On the camera there were ports for headphones and a microphone

meaning we could monitor the sound and pick up on any interference

such as white noise this was useful

during interviews. We used a directional

microphone as it made it easier to

reduce white noise. We able to save

valuable filming time as in most cases

the microphone was already set to the

correct levels. One problem which we

did encounter while filming an expert

interview was that the microphone

didn't seem to be picking up the sound.

This wasted time as we had to go and

change the microphone. After tis we

learnt to check all equipment before

hand.

Most of our post production took place on the colleges apple macs.

Genuinely I dislike apple Macs as they are different to my everyday

computer at home but I feel they where easier to work with on creative

projects.

To edit we used Final cut express, This software was new to me but

after a few session I soon learnt that it was very similar to windows

movie maker and was able to transfer my skills over. The first step we

took was to log and transfer all of our footage, this took two days.

During this time we selected all of the clips we were going to use giving

each one a name so it was easier to find for future stages in the

production. Once we had selected the suitable footage it appeared in

the browser and we was able to use it anywhere in our sequence.

We then started to work from our storyboard however, after a few

lessons we decided it was best not to follow the storyboard although



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there was some great ideas we decided to improvise. We started to

make an assembled edit; this is all our chosen clips appear on a

timeline in a draft format. We had to open our clips on the viewer and

select in and out points to give us a rough idea of the beginning and

end of each frame.

Next we added clips; this was done by dragging them onto the

timeline in an approximate position. We watched this rough edit

several times making small tweaks when we needed to.

Eventually, our final product differed from the rough edit as it included

several transitions on text and clips, manipulated sound levels and text

overlays.

For one of our clips (low angled shot of people·s feet walking by) we

adjusted the speed. This is noticeable and is used only as space filler

but I feel this is my favourite shot and is visually appealing so it works

well. There is no voice over used in this scene simply music.

When recording our voice over final cut helped. We were able to see

the slot in which the voice over needed to fill , giving us the amount of

seconds allowing us to only record what we needed. We used

microphones and recorder equipment, which we were able to adjust

the volume and sound levels on to create sound that once uploaded

would not need to be adjusted any more.

Overall, I feel that final cut express was

a sensible choice of software allowing

students to create professional works

of art.

When designing our double pagespread we used Adobe in Design. We

chose this as we had previously used

this software before when creating our

AS coursework so we was familiar with

how to use it however, it can be

confusing. It is very similar to Photoshop

which our group was more aware of.



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Indesign is a good use of software as everything is created in a frame

you use a box for text and pictures meaning we were able to create a

draft layout first and add to this as we went along. This software refers

to colour using a CMYK reference, a technical measurement used

primly in the printing and magazine industry. This aloud us to create the

colour scheme of a neutral red with out making it too bright which

would of given it a childish effect.

When it came to the production of the radio trail, we chose to use

apple Macs Garage band. this could be described as a prosumer

programme, as its an accessible, home user product. It has loads of

professional features.

Arranging the clips on here was similar process to that of Final cut

express. We had to link the music together to ensure it had a

continuous flow as we only chose a short clip. The track volume settings

provided graphical representation which is adjusted by a drag of the

mouse, making it easier to add transitions and effects.

Recording the voice over was definitely simpler as we recorded itstraight onto the software instead of using a microphone and

recording equipment. We were able to create a new track by clicking

the red record button, we were then able to use the visual EQ to

manipulate the sound levels. The only disappointing side to this was it

took two attempts as the first time the class was full of students and was

to noisy.



Overall, I believe that Garage Band was the simplest

software/technology to use. Its operation gives virtually anybody the

ability to create professional radio trails and music.

millies evaluation for monday!

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