This document discusses how the media product conforms to conventions of Channel 4 documentaries and advertising. It summarizes that the documentary uses archive footage and images, interviews subjects using the rule of thirds with name bars, and has an authoritative voiceover with repeated background music. It also notes that the print advert features the Channel 4 logo, boxes with consistent text styles, and a focal image, while the radio advert uses documentary music, voiceovers, and airs information.

1. Evaluation Question 1:
In what way does your media
product use, develop or
challenge forms and
conventions of real media
products?
By Jacob Chisnall

2. Channel 4 Documentary
• In this example from the Channel 4 Documentary
‘Japan tsunami how it happened’ there’s
instances of archive footage or still images of the
topic, in this case the tsunami and its effects.
This is conventional of nearly all documentaries,
not just those produced by Channel 4.

3. Channel 4 Documentary
• Another conventional aspect of documentaries is
having interviews using the rule of thirds so that
they’re positioned in one third of the page
looking across the camera and a name bar across
the bottom of the image so that the person is
identifiable.

4. Channel 4 Documentary
• Finally, another code and convention typical of
documentaries is to have an authoritative, all-
knowing voice over and repeated music in the
background, which often relates to the mood or
the topic being discussed.

5. Channel 4 Print Adverts
• The Channel that we would be showing our
documentary on is Channel 4, so we had to
analyse and conform to their style of print
advert. The most common feature of their
adverts is their logo, which is on every one and
usually to the middle of the right side of the
advertisement.

6. Channel 4 Print Adverts
• Another common aspect of their print
advertisements was that the same text was
always used and it was within boxes. The text
being the title, which was the largest text, the
slogan or logo and then additional information
such as when it was being aired.

7. Channel 4 Print Adverts
• Finally, arguably the most important feature of
the print adverts used by Channel 4 is the image,
which is always the focal point of the
advertisement in order to draw attention to it
and make the documentary seem as interesting
as possible on the basis of just one image.

8. Documentary Radio Adverts
• Radio adverts are relatively uncommon for
documentaries, but when they are made they
usually try to be as similar as the documentary in
the sense of using the same music from the
documentary, snippets of the documentary to
interest the listener and the same voice over and
tag line.

9. Our Documentary
• Our documentary is about the fast food industry
and ours conforms to Channel 4’s by using
archive footage and stills of fast food restaurants
and the method that food was made when they
were first introduced, which is what
documentaries on Channel 4 do.

10. Our Documentary
• Also, Channel 4 documentaries and many others
use the rule of thirds when interviewing and
display a name bar, which we also did when
interviewing store managers and other
important employees of fast-food restaurants,
for instance Dave, the Subway Store Manager.

11. Our Documentary
• Finally, to further conform to the typical aspects
of documentaries that Channel 4 had set, we
used a voice over that had good pronunciation
and an authoritative sound and repeatedly used
Fast Food Song by the Fast Food Rockers because
it was related to our topic of documentary.

12. Our Print Advert
• As you can see, to conform to the conventions of print adverts
we displayed the logo of the television station it was being
shown on, Channel 4, on the right hand side of the image
towards the middle. We also used a similar font to that of
Channel 4 and used that to give information the title, slogan
and airing information. Finally we displayed this text within
plain white boxes on the top and bottom of the page so not to
disrupt the impact of the powerful image of the magnifying
glass on the burger as if it was investigating it.

13. Our Radio Advert
• To match the style of radio adverts of other
documentaries we used the same song from the
documentary (Fast Food Rockers – Fast Food
Song) and the same voice over to talk about the
documentary as well as say the slogan and state
the information regarding when it was going to
be aired and where.