1. In what ways does your media product use,
develop or challenge forms and conventions of
real media products?
EVALUATION QUESTION 1
2. INTRODUCTION
Our A2 Advanced Portfolio brief required us to create three media texts; a five
minute introduction to a TV documentary, a double page spread TV magazine
listing and a radio trailer for our documentary.
We had complete choice over the topic for our texts and as a group decided upon
an informative style documentary which will give our audience an insight into the
ways they may be influenced by brand names and advertising. We thought that this
would be a relevant topic to our age group which meant we were able to put
forward ideas easily as it is something our whole group could relate to.
Before we began to construct our products, we conducted research into different
codes and conventions of existing documentaries.
3. We used two male presenters to provide the narration for our documentary and used a combination of on-
screen and off-screen presentation. Our presenters were aged 18 and 17 which was done so that we had the
ability to connect with our target audience more effectively as our target audience is students aged between
16-25, who are mainly students.
We got the idea of using an on-screen presenter by watching “Supersize Me” on Channel 4. Morgan Spurlock
provided both the on-screen and off-screen narration but we thought his time on screen was particularly
effective and this was something we wanted to replicate with our product. But we decided to develop this
convention by using TWO presenters. We did this in order to keep the audience entertained throughout by
adding variety to our documentary, I felt the two presenters had very complimenting personalities for each
other and this worked well throughout.
NARRATION
4. We strictly followed the codes and conventions when setting up the camera
positioning. We wanted to create a very professional looking product and to do this
meant to make sure the camerawork followed conventions. Our experts for our expert
interviews were always positioned off-centre and not looking at the camera, to give the
impression of an actual conversation without showing both party’s.
CAMERAWORK
^ Example from
“Supersize Me”
^ Example from our
documentary
5. Another convention we used was the use of an establishing shot. We used these as a quick and
clear way to introduce the location and setting to our audience. This technique is used very
commonly throughout many different documentaries and we thought it would be essential for us
to include in ours. An example we found was in Channel 4’s “Supershoppers” which regularly use
establishing shots outside of supermarkets to give a brief setting to the audience. We used an
establishing shot before our voxpops in Solihull Sixth Form.
CAMERAWORK
6. Another code/convention we used was the inclusion of figures and stats to support the
information we were giving. Once again “Supersize me” gave us the inspiration for this as we
believe the way they presented the figures was in a more entertaining way and was much more
effective than just showing them on screen with text.
FACTS AND STATS
Here “Supersize Me”
used nice looking
graphics to display
locations of McDonalds
restaurants worldwide.
7. Our magazine listing was created in order to boost the popularity of the documentary on
BBC Three and help advertise it. In order for us to create an effective magazine listing we
did research into existing ones. We looked into Radio Times and TV Choice and found out
that is that the colour scheme was always consistent and so that’s what we needed to do as
well. We remained consistent with our red, black and white colour scheme in order to keep
the identity we are trying to create and make our audience more familiar with our products.
Another technique used was to get image stills or screenshots from the documentary and
use them on the double page spread. This helps to give a visualisation of the text in the
listing but also provide the audience with an insight into the visual style and content of the
documentary itself and help persuade them to watch it.
Finally, the titles of the shows listed in existing magazines were all bold and stood out from
the main text, so we did the same. We created a custom font by taking an idea from
“dafont.com” and making adjustments to it for it to suit our own house style. This allowed
us to be bold and attractive to our target audience whilst also having our own identity.
TV LISTINGS MAGAZINE
8. We created a radio trailer to be played on BBC Radio 1 in order to help
promote our documentary. Before we could begin creating, we had to research
into existing trailers and found out that between 30 seconds and 1 minute was
the ideal time length. This is because consumers are usually driving when
listening to the radio so anything longer will become uninteresting.
Due to our colloquial style documentary, we wanted to convey this in our
trailer too and we did this by using an upbeat backing track and a mixture of
different electronic style sound effects. This created a modern atmosphere and
almost a “club-like” effect, making the documentary itself sound exciting and
fun to watch.
RADIO TRAILER
