Evaluation for my media a2 coursework, taking the lead.

1. Question 1
CODES AND CONVENTIONS OF MY
DOCUMENTARY

2. Research
At the start of coursework we watched 3
documentaries as a class and researched 2 of our own.
We listed down all the codes and conventions that
each documentary possessed so that we could become
familiar with the codes and conventions when creating
our media product. We looked at „The Music Biz‟, „The
Devil Made Me Do It‟ and „That Thing: Lara Croft‟.
Then in my own time I looked at „Married to the Job‟
and „24 hours in A&E‟. All of these documentaries have
a single narrative structure which reflects the
documentaries we have made.

3. Sound
For our documentary we used a voiceover, we decided to pick
a male to do our voiceover to relate to the saying that dog‟s
are mans best friend. We also thought that the voiceover
should be clear, standard English and easy to understand, I
think we achieved this. The voiceover kept an unbiased
opinion throughout the documentary, the voiceover helped
the point of the documentary which was to understand how
dogs have affected our lives, to keep an unbiased opinion we
used facts that we found out during our secondary research.
During our title sequence we used the song “Hound Dog” by
Elvis Presley; we used this as it related well to our
documentary as well as the music is well known, catchy and
dramatic.

4. Interviews
We created a mixed documentary, which we asked lots of
different people to participate in interviews so our documentary
was varied. For our documentary we used lots of different
camera shots, we used a medium close up/close up for our
interviews so the audience could clearly see the interviewee. We
added white graphics in the corners of the interview introducing
the interviewee to the audience which follows codes and
conventions, the graphics are clear and easy to read.

5. Interviews (continued)
We followed the rule of thirds for our interviews.
When we researched the codes and conventions we
noticed that no matter what camera shot was used, the
interviewee‟s eyes are always a third down the screen.
Another code and
convention is that the
interviewee‟s are on
the left or right hand
of the screen.

6. Interviews (continued)
We made sure during our interviews that the direction
of the interviewee‟s eye line is always directly across
the frame and at the interviewer. In the left image
below shows an example. The interviewee is looking
towards the right where-as on the left, the interviewee
is looking to the right at the interviewer.

7. Mise-en-scene
Mise-en-scene is an important code and convention.
The mise-en-scene represents what the interview is
about and should always display something relevant.
For our documentary we used dog toys, dogs and
photographs for our mise-en-scene.

8. Cutaways
Cutaways are another important code and convention,
they hide jump cuts so that the interview runs
smoothly. We varied our shot type and subjects as we
wanted to display a variety of cutaways to keep the
audience interested as well as make the cutaways
reflect what the interviewee is saying.

9. Editing
Mostly our editing consisted of conventionally used
straight cuts, this made the documentary run smoothly
as the cuts were so fast that the audience rarely ever
notices the cut which makes the documentary more
professional and runs much more easily than adding
any other cut. However we did use a fade out at the
end of the 5 minutes and at the end of the title
sequence.

10. Editing (continued)
When editing our interviews we also edited some of
our interviews. We found that we initially had too
much space in the background so we enlarged the
frame.
Before
After

11. Archive Footage
We included some archive footage that related to what
our interviewee was saying. We used archive footage
when the interviewee mentioned something that we
had no footage of. For example, the groomer
mentioned breeding Cavalier King Charles Spaniel‟s so
we included archive footage of some puppies.