The document analyzes conventions used in Channel 4 youth documentaries and how the author's group employed, developed on, and challenged some of these conventions in their own youth-focused documentary for Channel 4. They researched examples like "Disarming Britain" and "Britain's Forgotten Children" to inform their documentary style. They used conventions like a range of interview subjects and locations like schools but developed them by broadening the age range and occupations of interviewees. They challenged conventions by having a young presenter provide narration rather than an older "voice of god" narrator.

1. Genre Research:
By researching through multiple past examples of youth orientated
Channel 4 documentaries, it provided our group with the ability to
use, develop or even challenge the conventions of modern Channel 4
documentaries.
Some examples we looked at were ‘Disarming Britain’ and ‘Britain’s
Forgotten Children’, both of which primarily focus on modern youth
within society. We narrowed our wider research to Channel 4 later in
research as Channel 4 has its own unique way of presenting
documentaries in its own style and structure in comparison to a
wider variety of documentaries over multiple channels and
broadcasters.

2. Used Conventions
Representation within modern society and culture is a popular topic and
theme that takes place in a range of Channel 4 documentaries. This was
one of the primary reasons that
we chose Channel 4, it gave us
the opportunity to present a
youth perception investigation
in both a stylistic and informative
way.
To achieve this we decided to use a
balance of professions for interviewees
to create a non-biased production and
placed this between scenes of general
views and statistic based animations.
This is similar to that of the more recent
Channel 4 documentaries such as the
Connecticut Shootings documentary,
with its expressive range of opinions from multiple members of the public and law
enforcement as well as presenting evidence through graphs/percentage charts.

3. As for stock characters: students, teachers and experts are generally considered to take
part in our genre of documentary. This was something we felt was necessary to include
within our documentary on youth to steer away from developing a ‘moaning-session’
with the limitations of just young people. To further improve this we could have included
more from an experts field of view, but we still wanted to focus on the publics views to
gather a generalised perceptive finding.
We also decided to use one of the typical stock settings of a youth documentary, a school.
This was something that we felt was a location which a broad range of young people could
associate with seeing as education is a key aspect of youth culture that people in Britain
can identify with.

4. For our print work we researched the channel 4 production package for advertisement
layout. We followed these rules and conventions for our advertising banner and
decided to present our documentary in a simplistic light: brick wall background and
set of diverse teenagers in the style of a police line up.
By following these conventions we simply established the name of the documentary and
time of airing. The channel 4 logo was also researched into where it would be placed in its
advertising rules of conventions. The way in which we developed on this however was
that we presented this teasingly highlighting the youth representation stereotype; only
when our presenter and aim of the investigation is revealed do the audience understand
that it is an attempt to defuse youth stereotypes.

5. Developed Conventions
Although the way we presented our
interviewees was indeed a mainstream
used convention, we felt the
incorporation of a broad age range and
diverse occupations to enhance the non-
biased tone of the show. By doing this we
managed to successfully broaden our
target audience which was evident in
audience feedback questionnaires.
Once this was investigated, we had
our young presenter retrieve vox-pop
interviews to gain even more
data, this was deliberate to gain an
understanding on how young people
think others see them.

6. Challenged Conventions
A popular choice of in the navigation of
Channel 4 documentaries is the ‘Voice of
God’ voice over technique. We decided to
challenge this and bring in a young presenter
to lead the show and provide narration. This
would allow us to have someone on the
middle ground, empathising with young
people while still considering a mature
attitude to adult/expert opinions/views.
On our magazine article we
presented our main presenter
as himself yet divided by two
opposing stereotypes (the
geek/the hoodie). This would
allow readers to understand
the aim of the show and as an
image it is quite interesting due
to the triple persona factor of
its appearance.