The document discusses the media technologies used during the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages of a student documentary project. It describes how Blogger was used to organize and share research and planning materials online. Video cameras were used to film interviews, and Final Cut Express was the primary software for editing the documentary. Garage Band was utilized to create a radio trailer, and Adobe InDesign was employed to design a magazine article promoting the documentary. Overall, a variety of technologies were leveraged at different stages of the project to facilitate research, production and distribution of media content.

1. http://f02documentary09.blogspot.com/201
0/03/evaluation-matt-de-sousa_02.html
Hannah Precelton 6154

2. In what ways does your media product use develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media
products?
Our documentary follows many codes and conventions of real media products for
example, We used Vox pops from students within Solihull Sixth Form College, Solihull we
saw an exam of this when watching Super Size Me.
Another convention we used which we noted from The Morgan Spurlock documentary
was the fact that the voice over gives statistics

3. The

4. Occupying just
over half the frame
We made sure for our interviews that
there was relevant mise-en-scene
because it shows authenticity and it
makes the audience believe in what
they say because of their
surroundings
To add to the
interview set up.
We had a Skeleton
which adds to the Oona Stone is
Stop smoking connotation of a wearing a lab coat
website open Small space biology teacher
behind. above head
For both of our professional
interviews we made sure we
focused on shot composure
Mrs Breeze
is in NHS insuring the experts who were
Nurses being interviewed looked across
uniform the dead space and not directly at
the camera.

5. During our interviews, we included a selection of cutaways
in the form mainly of over the shoulder shots.
It made our interviews more visually stimulating than they
would have been had we only shown the subject talking
on the documentary topic.

6. conventional
Before our interviews, we included an establishing
shot. This is common practice as it strengthens the
spoken narrative. It’s something Grierson defined
under the expostional mode as “evidentiary editing” as
it gives support in visual format to the voiceover.

8. This is our final version of our double page spread.
A Caption with
connotations from
The title with emphasis on adjective words used
Stand first in larger print
Important detail about
Documentary
schedule
Drop Caps to emphasis the
start of the article
A Pull-Quote
Text in columns Picture Credit
Article Credit
Consistent
House style
Smaller Images
depicting parts of Footer with magazine name and issue date and page numbers
the interview

9. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We tried to follow a house style when making the combination of tasks in
order for the audience to be able to associate all three as being about one
product. We were aiming for a clear brand identity.
Therefore as planned to air our documentary on BBC 3, we felt it appropriate
to have our double page spread, TV listings in Radio Times because of the
association between the two. Although it is questionable that our desired
target audience would not themselves read this magazine, we said that they
would read their parents copy.

10. Pull Quote taken direct
from interviewee in
documentary
However with reflection on our magazine
article promoting our product the image
which we used in the final double page
spread does not actually feature within the
documentary however it is still relevant to
the topic of the documentary. This was
unfortunate for us, thus being that our first
choice of image would not place properly
in portrait format

11. To further this and to keep a house style we made the decision to use the same
music sound bed from within Garage band for both our documentary and our radio
trailer with the aim that it would contribute to the brand identity
Music from
Radio Trailer
Music from
documentary
Within our radio trailer there were sound bites from the documentary itself to continue
to establish a brand identity. This hopefully will also enable the audience to associate
the two products.
On reflection I feel this was a good decision because it appeared to work effectively

12. Issues may occur with how well the tasks appeal to their intended audiences.
The documentary is probably our best piece, as it has a range of editing techniques which have been
applied and interviews that present hard hitting information. Therefore, the documentary virtually has
something to cater for any type of viewer. The radio trailer is similar in many aspects. In the brief 30
seconds that it plays, it contains a montage of voiceover and documentary sound bites, this is example
of fast editing which we have used in order for the radio trailer to be attention grabbing. With regards to
the double page spread problems may arise when looking at the chosen magazine for our article to be
published in although it follows suit with us airing our documentary on BBC3, the Radio Times is not a
magazine frequently read by our target audience (teenagers). Therefore on reflection if we were to
repeat it’d be suggested we look for a more suitable magazine to aim directly at our target audience
Overall, I think our ancillary tasks combine with our documentary quite successfully. They look and
sound as if they have a brand identity, and are clear and effective when promoting the program this
can also be seen by the audience feed back results

13. What have you learnt from audience feedback?
To gather our audience feedback, we produced a simple questionnaire, asking fellow
students to rate our products overall, and also on how appropriate they were.
These are the results for our final product.
Overall Documentary Score
12
Amount of people
10
8
6
4
2
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Score out of ten
From the bar chart we can tell that our documentary was believed to be average
because 11 out of 23 people rated our documentary 7/10.
These results tell us that our documentary was not thought of as poor this is shown
by us not receiving anything below 4. On the other hand students believed if given
the chance there was still elements which we could improve upon as 10/10 was not
scored.

14. The following pie chart represents whether or not students thought
the ancillary tasks which we produced effectively promoted the
documentary. Overall unfortunately 39% of people we asked
believe that the radio trailer and double page spread failed to
effectively promote our documentary. However 61% believe that our
ancillary tasks did work successfully in promoting our documentary.
No
When asked if they thought our 3 tasks had a clear defined brand identity.
The pie chart on the left shows that 78% believe that our 3 products did but
22% of the 23 people we questioned disagreed.
From the verbal feedback we received it was noted that the documentary had good sound quality and
that the choice of music was appropriate as it was insistent which create tension. Furthermore we were
informed that our interviews were very informative and that the mise- en- scene and shot composure
were of high standard.
A point raised in the verbal feed back about our documentary was that there seemed to be an
inconsistence, with questions appearing on screen and the voice over asking the questions. In addition
with regards to the double page spread it was advised that if we had the chance to edit/ tweak our
tasks that the photograph of the cigarettes shouldn’t be the feature image. These are both points we
would take on board as improvements if we were to repeat this project. Unfortunately our questionnaire
lets us down because it didn’t clearly enable us to gain enough qualitative data with the audience’s
opinions. A question was asked about target audience however the exacts of target audience was not
specified.

15. How did you use media technologies in the construction and
research planning and evaluation stage?
During all stages of the production we used an assortment of technologies and
software, ones which we were both familiar and unfamiliar with. However in our initial
research into the project we also used a wide range of technology; this involved the
analysis of existing documentaries our primary internet research. Also throughout we
uploaded materials and proof of our work onto Blogger.com

16. Blogger.com allowed us to organise and share our research and planning with the rest
of the group, I feel that this medium was effective way in storing our work as it
didn’t involve needing a large quantity of paper evidence. Other than text and
images, there is little else Blogger offers in the way of features. However,
one technology that was ample and convenient for our research was a scanner,
this enabled us to generate digital versions of our the few pieces of paper-based
work which we had to produce in order to update our blog.
This internet site was incredibly useful as it enable us to access the work we had done from
any computer and I found it easy to deal with but it was a shame it didn’t enable us to
upload videos without embedding links from site like YouTube.
In our production phase, the video cameras which we used to create the documentary involved
fairly new unfamiliar technology. This was convenient as the uploading process was incredibly
simple. The convenience of the video cams was they were easy mountable on a tripod meaning
we were able ensure that our shots were still and level.
As the camera had ports for headphones and a microphone,
we were able to monitor the audio, this feature was
particularly important to us when conducting interviews as
we could monitor and attempt to reduce the background
noise.
The majority of our post-production took place on an Apple iMac Computer.
In order to edit and produce our documentary, we used Final Cut Express.
The software was new to the whole group, this means it took a little time for us
to familiarise ourselves with the program and how it functions.
Myself , I found it a little complicated at first because of the fact that the
programme was quite complex with it’s smaller feature on the other hand
the initial main idea of Final Cut was rather simple.

17. Log and Transfer was first step
for our clips, during which we
wanted to use. Once footage had
been selected and organised it
appeared in the Browser on the
left-hand side and we were able
to place the footage anywhere on
our time line.
We then added video transitions to the clips, by dragging them
from the viewer to the rough position on the timeline. We watched
the edit through a couple of times, and tweaked where needed.
They then appeared on the time line as grey rectangles

18. For our over the shoulder shots it
can be seen that we used a feature
which enabled us to alter the speed.
The reason we applied this feature
to our documentary was to use the
footage as a cutaway thus meaning
it didn’t need to be on screen very
long and we wanted to make sure
our audience got the information we
wanted to convey.
In our final editing stage we went to modify and
normalization and applied Normalization Gain
to all our clips. This feature of Final Cut allowed
us to ensure that we had a consistent sound
level across our documentary.
The smaller features within Final Cut were a tad complex to find however they
enabled us to fine tune our documentary

19. Track contains chunks of audio from different sources
( Sound bites from documentary and Voice over)
Dragging in sound clips and generally using Garage Band itself was an uncomplicated
process in my opinion and a good piece of simple software which aided our radio trailer
production
When designing our magazine article we used Adobe InDesign
Colour picker was used
from this software to insure
a consistency of colour with
box a pull-quote
InDesign works on the of Placing images
into frames in the document, so that they
are still linked to the original file. Although
we used this technology at AS I
myself, found it challenging as the software
isn’t self explanatory. Although the text is in
columns like you would see in a normal
double page spread it isn’t level and drastic
tweaking is needed. However the software
allows our double page spread to look
relatively like a everyday newspaper
spread