1. Evaluation Question 1
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms
and conventions of real media products?
2. Documentary
• Before we created our documentary, we watched pre- existing documentaries and listed the codes and conventions we wanted to
include in our magazine. We watched student documentaries such as “Selfie” and pre- existing documentaries such as “Botched up
Bodies” and “Supersize Me”. From the documentaries we’ve watched, there are both conventions we liked and wanted to include, along
with conventions that we thought would not suit our particular magazine. In the student documentary “Selfie” there was two presenters
that complimented each other very well when discussing the fun topic of social media. However, for our serious topic of body image and
plastic surgery, we felt that it would be more suitable to have one presenter to be more connected with our target audience. From all the
documentaries we have watched, we definitely wanted to include multiple vox pops and expert interviews in order to keep audience
interest at a high throughout. We thought vox-pops were a fun and quick way to get a variety of public opinions to feature in our
documentary. Expert interviews were also a must as we not only wanted our documentary to have a professional element, but we
wanted our audience to have a professionals point of view and inform them with facts and statistics about body image and plastic
surgery. From watching Morgan Spurlocks documentary ”Supersize Me”, we was inspired with their multiple picture collages and
decided we wanted to do a collage full of plastic surgery wrong-doings. We have developed the convention by having lots of archival
footage in our documentary to provide the audience with background information, for example we have footage in the Bullring and we
included the convention of having pans of the interview rooms. We also followed the convention of having a variety of different cut
shots, including different transitions in order to make them professional. Another main convention that we followed was having an
upbeat backing track to making the documentary more fun to watch and keep the audience engaged. Theorist, Stuwart Hall, established
three different readings: preferred, negotiated or oppositional. Our reading for our documentary is negotiated. It’s a fairly balanced view
on plastic surgery and allows the audience to create their own opinions on the subject.
3. Radio Trailer
• After doing research on who we think the best broadcaster is for our radio trailer, we decided to chose Capital FM as their target
audience matches the audience we want to capture within our documentary. On the media website on the school Mac computer,
there are multiple examples of student radio trailers which was really helpful to listen to when it came to researching radio trailers.
As the length of radio trailers are fairly limited, I find it interesting to see what conventions other groups thought was vital to
include. The conventions we thought were critical to include was of course voice overs, an upbeat backing track, small clips
(preferably from vox pops or expert interviews) from our documentary and finally the time, date and channel of where the
documentary was going to be shown. We listened to three student radio trailers which were “Make up your mind”, “two week
challenge” and “ Social Media; how does it affect your everyday life”. All three of these documentaries have multiple voice overs of
the presenter giving the audience details on the documentary. We followed codes and conventions by having multiple voicer overs,
by the same presenter in the documentary (a form of branding) and included many clips from our vox pops and expert interviews.
We also followed conventions by having an upbeat, pacy backing track in order to instantly capture the audiences attention and
entice them to listen to the trailer. One way we perhaps have challenged the conventions of a radio trailer is not including any
sound effects as its a fairly sensitive topic and didn't think it would be suitable for our kind of documentary. Following codes and
conventions, we have included the details on the date, time and channel on the release of the documentary at the very end of the
radio trailer as we know it will be the last thing said in the radio trailer and will hopefully stay in the minds of the listeners. We have
also followed codes and conventions by including sufficient details within the voice overs on what are documentary is about; giving
the audience an insight on whats expected in our documentary.
4. TV Listings Magazine
• For inspiration on how to create our TV listing magazine will did multiple forms of research. We first, look at the previous
years listings magazines in order to see what conventions they followed and how they structured their magazine. From
looking at many different student magazines we then listed what we need to include within our TV listing double page
spread, such as what channel, the date, time, images from our documentary and of course the article itself. After doing
research on two different TV Listings magazines, we decided that we wanted ours to be published in the very well known
“Radio Times”. We analysed a couple different TV listing pages to see what codes and conventions they follow and how
we are going to follow/change some of the conventions. We have followed the main codes and conventions in our TV
listing magazine by firstly including images from our documentary. Each image has an individual image caption therefore
informing and enticing the audience into aspects of our documentary. Grab quotes are conventional within the magazine
industry and we have included them where we thought was appropriate but didn't want to use too many as we didn't
want to give too much away about the documentary. One way we have challenged the convention of a TV listing
magazine, is that we have done a mixture of free flowing article and Q/A. Instead of sticking to one style of writing we
thought it would be more interesting to write about the documentary and then interview the producer to give the
audience as much information on the documentary and its release as possible. We also followed codes and conventions
by including the logo for radio times in the corner of the magazine implying they are proud publishers. In order for the
information on the release date to stand out, we yet again followed the codes and conventions by making it bold and
placing it at the beginning of the article as that is the information we want the audience to read; welded into their minds
until the release date.
