The document analyzes conventions used in Channel 4 youth documentaries to inform the production group's own documentary on youth perceptions. It discusses conventions like focusing on modern youth issues, using a balance of interviewees from different professions, and including stock characters like students and experts. The group decided to use a school setting familiar to many youth. They also used techniques like voiceovers but added a young presenter. Some shots included effects to highlight significance. The documentary featured diverse interviews with a student and sociology expert.

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. Developed Conventions
A popular choice of in the navigation of Channel 4 documentaries is the ‘Voice of God’
voice over technique. We established this as our primary form of navigating our
documentary however, to develop this further we decided to include a young presenter
to bring something new and innovative to the table. We felt this was a strength as it
allowed the presenter to both empathise with young people yet keep a non-biased
middle ground in a serious investigation.
Certain meaningful shots amongst our general views would have colour/blur
effects on them to highlight their significance towards the youth perception.

5. Challenged Conventions
When deciding to incorporate our own
sense of iconography unto this
documentary, in our five minutes we
chose to establish two interviews with
mass diversity. Using both a student and
an expert in the field of sociology allowed
us to experience two interviews that
shared both similar and different views on
the perception of youth.
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 the young
people think others see them.