This document summarizes a student's documentary that challenges typical views on new media use in children's education. The student was influenced by documentaries on Channel 4 and BBC focusing on children's development, particularly a Panorama episode about video game addiction. Their documentary uses conventions of interactive documentaries by including interviews with children and teachers, handheld camera footage, subtitles, and titles to introduce questions. It challenges the negative perspective of the Panorama episode by highlighting the benefits of new media in education from first-hand accounts.

1. Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? By Chloe Perchard

2. Existing Documentary Influence When planning an idea for our documentary, I was interested by documentaries on Channel 4 and BBC, especially those about the development of young children. One documentary in particular made an impact to the decision of making our own media product, BBC1’s Panorama series featured an episode about video game addiction in children. The main focus was about the negative effects of video games and why parents should prevent their children from becoming involved with them. This sparked the idea of making a documentary about the benefits of new media in children’s education and to give parents a positive outlook to challenge the negative views on new media used by children.

3. Channel 4 ‘Supernanny’

4. BBC 1 ‘Panorama’

5. These are screen captures from the real media products that were not only influencial but they are also linked to our own media product.Both of these documentaries are about the development of children:Channel 4’s ‘Supernanny’ is a documentary series where troublesome children learn to develop better behaviour, disipline and relationships with their parents and siblings.At first the focus is of the negative of the child’s behaviour before Jo visits the household, then afterwards the focus becomes positive. BBC 1’s ‘Panorama’ is a documentary series that investigates a specific subject in each episode. In this particular episode, the issue of video game addiction amongst children is raised and the main focus is the negative effects of new media influence.

7. Observational - Location shooting, handheld cameras. Long shots dominate. Direct sound recording. No voiceover / interviews. Film makers hidden. (Eg: Listen To Britain, Something Great)

8. Participatory (interactive) - Filmmakers interact with the subject, interviews dominate. Use of archive material. Voiceover. (Eg:Brixton Beach, Supersize Me)

9. Reflexive– Dramatic techniques from fiction films for emotional response. Suggestive rather than factual. (Eg: Camoflauge, Man On Wire)

11. Our Documentary The media product we have produced uses forms and conventions of interactive / participatory documentary because: We (the filmmakers) are interacting with the children, interviews are dominant, there is a voiceover, a handheld camera was used for some of the footage and we used archive material.Direct sound was used but also we had non-diegetic background music to make the documentary more interesting and to keep the attention of the audience. The non-diegetic music was chosen to fit the mood of the scene it featured in.

12. The Interviews Our documentary mainly contained interviews because we needed the opinions and first-hand information from the children and teachers.When interviewing the children, we used the hand held camera at their level, to give them a friendly way of speaking to the camera – as if they were using their own webcam at home.This is more effective than other documentaries featuring children because they are normally filmed from above, which doesn’t have the same friendly interaction with the camera like the way the children did with us.

13. The use of Subtitling As our media product is a documentary, subtitling was used to show information about the interviewee and also we used titling of questions at the beginning of some scenes.The use of titling was due to not having a voiceover asking the questions, we originally intended on having the questions as a voiceover or narration from the footage but decided to go with the questions as titles instead.In the audience response, some said that they liked the use of the titles, however a few said that they would have preferred the questions to be spoken rather than written as they found them slightly distracting.

14. Challenging Other Media Products Our documentary challenges the real media products like the ‘Panorama’ episode because we are showing a positive outlook instead of the typical cynical view.The aim of our media product is to inform the audience of the benefits of new media use in education.By doing so we are challenging the opposing argument that new media use has only negative effects.

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