The document discusses how the media creator used and learned from conventions when creating a documentary on smoking. They watched examples like "Supersize Me" and "Spinal Tap" to learn conventions. Their documentary used an opening montage, voiceover, interviews, graphics and cutaways to convey information. They researched documentaries on smoking to understand the format. Feedback showed their documentary followed conventions and had a clear brand identity across the documentary, radio trailer and magazine article. However, the ancillary texts could have been improved to better promote the documentary. The creator learned about using conventions and gained insight from audience feedback.

1. 1) In what ways does your media product use,
develop or challenge forms and conventions.
For our project we had to create the opening 5 minutes of a documentary on a
topic of our choice.
In order to get an idea of what our documentary we would have to be like we
watched a few examples of documentaries in order to learn some
conventions that are common in documentaries.
The examples we watched were A documentary by Morgan Spurlock
“Supersize Me” in which he investigated the effects of fast food by only
eating McDonalds for 30 days.
And Spinal Tap. This was a fake documentary that follows a fake rock band
called Spinal tap. And although this was a fake documentary we still took a lot
away from it as a lot of the common conventions we see in documantaries are
there.

2. Existing Documentaries
We decided though the twoi documenatries
we viewed had some feaurtes we would
like to include, there were things we
wanted to do different, as supersize me
uses a particapatory mode we wanted to
an expesontional mode.

3. Initial Ideas
Our next step was to begin to plan what our documentary was going to be on we came
up with a few potential options but decided to choose smoking as our topic.

4. Documentaries on our topic
After we decided our topic we then viewed existing documentaries on
topic in order to get an idea of what our documentary should be like.
We watched 2 examples
• BBC Horizon
• Talking Butts smoking Documentary

5. Conventions
After watching examples of documentaries we had a good idea about how to make an effective documentary
•Opening montage: The first part of a documentary is a feature of the poetic mode
the opening montage. This is a series of fast pace clips used in order to attract the
audiences attention and give them and idea of what the documentary will be about.
It does this by use of short clips from interviews both professional and vox pops,
clips of other things related to the topic such as videos of cigarettes etc and
information shown through graphics and graphs. All this is accompanied by a voice
over to help give more information.

6. Conventions
• Voiceover: A key feature we used that features in most documentaries
especially those of an expositional mode which is the mode ours leans most
towards. The voiceover is a sound only voice we do not see the speaker but
she is often heard throughout. The voiceover is important as it helps to
narrate the documentary and explain to the audience who people are and
give key information and facts to help the audience understand the topic.
• Establishing shots: Establishing shots of a location the shot often is taken
from a distance and pans in order to give the audience a wide view of the
location. We used establishing shots in our documentary to show our
audience where we were helping to set the scene.

7. Conventions
• Interviews: Another important feature that features in many documentaries
we used 2 different types of interview in our documentary
• Vox pop: a vox pop interview are short fast interviews with members of the
public, this allows the public to give there view on the topic.
• Professional: interviews with professionals on the topic for example we used
a nurse, these interviews allow us to get an in depth detail on the topic. This
is usefull as it allows the viewer to get scientific facts about the subject from
a reliable source.

8. Conventions
• Shot composure: The way we composed our shots in interviews was
Important we set up the shot so that the interviewee would sit to one side
looking across the dead space this reduces the amount of the space that’s
wasted, we also stressed to our interviewee not to look at the camera.
Looking Lab coat and
across skeleton clearly
dead space
show she’s a
scientist.
•Mise en scene: The mise en scene is a way of showing a persons role in an
interview this is because we pick up various signs from the background and what
a person is wearing so a good mise en scene helped us show people our
profesinals can be trusted.

9. Conventions
• graphics: Titles and graphics helped us to show other information we could
not portray, such as questions for vox pops, graphs. It also helps makes
good background footage for our voiceover to speak over
• Titles: Titles help us give information about our interviewees as well as
showing the name of the documentary.

10. Conventions
• Cut a ways: We used cut a ways to make our interview more interesting, by
cutting a way to another clip whilist the interviewee is speaking we cut a way
to a video related to what they were saying keeping our audiences’ attention
as the pace of the fast pace clips is maintained.
• Background footage: We gathered various clips of footage such as over the
shoulder shots of people looking at something related to smoking in order to
use as background footage, background footage is used so we could have
some footage for while our voice over was speaking.

11. 2) How effective is the combination
of your main and ancillary texts?

12. House style
• Throughout making our documentary, radio trailer and TV listings magazine we tried
to maintain a constant house style. In order to do this we used the music and speech
clips from our documentary in our radio trailer as well as using the same person to do
the voiceover for both. And we used images from our documentary in our article.
• Target audience: It was important that we knew our target audience in order to make
our 3 products appealing. We chose an audience we felt the subject would be
important to in the end we decided smoking most effects teenagers so we choose a
target audience of between 16 and 26, we felt that the topic effected all genders and
ethnicity however so we decided to aim it at both males and females of any ethnicity.

13. Channels
• Knowing our target audience the selection of where we would put our three
products was important as the three we selected would all have to correspond with
one another
• Documentary: We felt the best place for our documentary was BBC3 we chose
this channel as BBC is a public service and shows many documentaries and
BBC3 often shows aimed at our target audience.
• Radio trailer: We selected Radio 1 for a radio trailer as it is the BBC which works
well as our main product is being shown on the BBC and like BBC3, Radio 1 is a
station aimed at our audience.
• Magazine article: The magazine article was our hardest choice as we felt our
audience would not read a TV listings magazine but we opted for the Radio Times
as its owned by the BBC so it was consistent with our other choices.

14. 3)What have you learned from your
audience feedback
We showed our documentary, radio trailer, and article to a group of 23 students, then gave them a
questionnaire asking them what they thought of them.
•The students we asked were all 12
between 16 and 22 which was 10
appropriate as this was our 8
target audience.
6
4
•Of the 23 we asked 15 were
2
female at the other 8 were
0
male. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Scores out of 10
•We asked people to rate our documentary
out of 10 on average we scored 7
suggesting our documentary was of a good
quality.

15. Main product
We asked if they thought our
documentary followed
conventions of documentaries
the results are shown bellow. Doesn't follow
conventions (20)
Follows
conventions (3)
More people felt our documentary followed conventions that people
who did not. This was good as it meant our documentary had a
professional look.

16. Combination of products
• We asked our 23 students felt there as clear brand
identity between our 3 products. 18 felt it did
whereas only 5 said it did not showing the brand no
identity was fairly clear.
yes
0 5 10 15 20
• we also asked if the trailer and article were
effective at promoting our documentary 14 said yes no
and 9 said no. we would of prefer for more people to
say yes than at perhaps our other task could have
been improved to better promote the product.
yes
0 5 10 15

17. 4)How did media technologies in
the construction and research,
planning and evaluation stage.

18. Blogger
We used Blogger, a blogging
website to upload any work that we
did for a documentary onto. This
was useful as it allowed us to keep
track of all our work such as
research and planning. However we
found uploading things to blogger
could be somewhat difficult at
times. Though other websites such
as scribed and slide share made
this slightly easier allowing us to
upload in different formats we even
had problems with these websites
at times.

19. Recording equipment
• Camcorder: we used a handheld camcorder to film our footage a long with a
tripod to enable us to take steady shots and make our documentary look
more professional. We found the camcorder simple and easy to use and
thought it gave us good results when we viewed our footage
• Microphone: We used a rifle microphone with our camcorder to capture the
sound. We did this as the sound recording quality on the camcorder was not
very high. The mic however managed to record good quality sound.
• Sound recorder: We used a sound recorder to record our voiceover this is
because for the voiceover we only needed sound not video. We used the
same mic we used with the camcorder with the sound recorder.

20. Apple Macs
We used apples Macs for the editing stage of our project. At first I struggled to
get the hang of them as I had not used one before and was unfamiliar with it
but then we eventually got the hang of them and found them fairly easy to
use though we still would of preferred to use a windows computer that we
were more familiar with.

21. Final Cut Express
We used Final Cut Express to create our main product. This is a
professional editing software designed for Apple Macs.
Log and transfer
The first procedure we did before we started editing using
this software was to log and transfer our footage, this
involved looking at all our footage and deciding which parts
we were going to use and which bits we weren't, then we
transferred all the footage we decided to use onto to the
Final cut Software.

22. Final Cut Express
video
Our next task was to put the video clips we wanted to use onto our timeline.
Once our required footage was on the
timeline we arranged it into an
appropriate order, then if needed we
could edit the clips length and speed

23. Final Cut Express
Final cut also allowed us to
Transitions, graphics and still images add transitions this makes
the switch between different
clips
We could also add still
We could also add graphics and images such as a graph
titles to show information in a however to make a still
textual form. image more interesting we
chose to add movement
and zoom into it

24. Final Cut Express
Audio
Our next tasks was to adjust the audio. When dealing with audio final cut
allowed us to remove existing audio of our video clips and add separate
audio clips such as music and voiceover. We found this useful as we
could remove sounds from one video clip and replace it with sound form
another, this allowed us to make a cut away which we used to maintain
the audiences' attention when an interviewee is speaking for a for a long
time.
We used a separate
video over the sound of
interview removing part
of the original video.

25. Final Cut Express
Audio-music and voiceover
We could also add voiceover and sounded to our documentary.
Final cut was useful for adding this non diegetic sound.
Audio-normalisation
It was also important that all our sound was level. To make sure it was we had
to normalise all our sound. Then by setting each clip to the same level it
prevent changes in volume throughout.

26. Garageband
We used apples garageband software to create our radio trailer. We recorder a
separate sound file using the same recorder we used for the voiceover to
record the voiceover for our radio trailer.
With garageband
We used pre we were able to
recorded music add a new
from the voiceover clips as
garageband well as sound
library for our clips of videos
backing track, from our
we used the documentary to
same music create our trailer
from our
documentary
sound bed.
In general we found making our trailer very easy to do with the garageband
software.

27. Photoshop/In Design
• Firstly we had to manipulate our images in Photoshop by changing the contrast and quality of the
images.
• Then we placed our images into in design so we could place them into our double page spread
we desired them to create the best possible effect
•In design also helped to manipulate our
text where we wanted it on the page.
•Have a masthead and strap line.
•It allowed us to pit our text into columns.
•Have drop capitals.
•Put our text into boxes.