The document summarizes how the student's media project followed conventions of real documentaries. It produced a 5 minute opening to a TV documentary on cuts to the UK's Education Maintenance Allowance. It used voiceovers, archival footage, interviews, and cutaways like real documentaries. It aimed to simplify complex topics, included opinions of students and experts, and focused on aesthetics and storytelling like the poetic mode of documentaries. Background music and appropriate visuals/settings were used to make the documentary look professional. The project scored highly and demonstrated understanding of documentary conventions.

1. 1) In what ways does your media project use, develop and challenge
codes and conventions of real media products?
From the onset of our media coursework project, each member of our group
consisting of Jess, Jacob put in their own interesting ideas and their individual
knowledge of documentary conventions to the project and we all had equal roles. In
our documentary we hoped to show many forms and conventions possible.
This unit counted as 50% of our final mark and we would
have to produce the opening five minutes of a TV
documentary, which was the main task which worth 40
marks, a radio trailer for the documentary which was part of
the ancillary task worth 10 marks and finally a magazine
double page spread advertisement for our documentary
work 10 marks. At the same time we have to complete a blog
as we worked on the main task and ancillary tasks and this
was on the production of out work which would then be
submitted as evidence of research and planning.
Documentary 40 Marks
Radio 10 marks
Magazine 10 marks
We looked at many different documentaries
before deciding what we wanted to base our
documentary on. We also watched these
documentaries to give us an idea of what
conventions are found in a documentary. We
watched documentaries including ‘Supersize
me’ ‘Airline’ and in my own time I watched
‘One born every minute’ and finally
‘Panorama’. We decided what we wanted our
documentary to be based on by creating a
spider diagram and we then picked out the
subject which we all wanted to base it on and
this was EMA and why the Government decided to cut the scheme.

2. When we decided what we wanted to base our the cuts of Education Maintenance
allowance we then created several story boards of our ideas for our documentary
and what we would like to see in our documentary. This helped us as it gave us an
idea and structure of what to film. We drew images of what we would like to see in
our documentary and then wrote about what would be happening on screen and
what the voice over would be saying. We also estimated how long we thought the
shot would last. This helped us a lot as it gave us a structure to stick by.
My media product follows conventions of a real media product in many different
ways. Firstly, the opening of the documentary starts off with a voice over acting as a
dramatic news report expressing how bad the governments decision to cut the
Education Maintenance Allowance is and how the cuts have caused students to take
to the streets in anger which signs and banners protesting about the governments
decision. Typically, documentaries use archival footage in order to
show events relating to the subject so therefore on screen in our
documentary there are newspapers with dramatic headlines being
thrown onto the floor creating a pile of newspapers. This is an
extremely dramatic opening and this can be found in other
documentaries such as ‘Panorama’. Panorama is a BBC Television
current affairs documentary programme, which was first broadcast in 1953, and is
the longest-running public affairs television programme in the world and is shown on
BBC at 8:30. My documentary is similar to Panorama as they both deal with factual
issues that have often been in the media and they both follow the reflexive mode.
They both simplify a more complex subject for example our documentary is aimed at
students and parents who often wouldn’t be familiar with the terminology used and

3. so we explained issues and dealt with it in a more simplistic way this is also shown in
Panorama.
We also stuck to conventions with having vox pops throughout the documentary.
Many real documentaries include these to give an understanding of what everyday
people think about a certain topic. Similarly, our vox pops gave us an insight to
student’s opinions and thoughts on the Governments decision to cut the Education
Maintenance Allowance. The vox pops used were of students in college – aged 16 to
18. We decided to develop these opinions and speak to a professional – college EMA
advisor Julie Maitland, who gave full knowledge on why the government have cut
EMA. We chose to have multiple expert interviews as this went with our formal
theme and the serious nature of our chosen topic. We used Mike Hatton a media
teacher and finally Richard Gough, an Economist. They gave their professional
opinion on the effects the governments decision will have on teenagers.
This is a quote taken from the interview with
Julie Maitland
Expert Interview with Julie Maitland
With our professional interview, we felt we had to keep the whole theme of this part
quite formal and so we used a tripod for the interview and made sure we kept within
the typical convention of shot framing with the rule of thirds – having eye level in the
top third and her positioning in the middle not directly looking into the camera. We
also used an appropriate background and setting. Julie Maitland was filmed in a
classroom with a poster relating to EMA. We kept with appropriate backgrounds
with the vox pops too as we set these up in the corridor of the college where the
background was of a picture a random painting placed in the college.
Appropriate Background-
The title of our documentary
Expert Interview with Richard Gough- Economist

4. Small space above head
Medium Close up
Relevant mise-en-scene
Although these two interviews have their differences for example the setting they’re in, the general
presentation is very similar, and hopefully our expert interviews and vox pops have a comparable
impression of professionalism about them.
We also used conventions of real media products in terms of sound. We debated
whether to use visual narrators or voiceover but went with voiceover as we felt this
would make our documentary look better and have a more professional feel and it
could also be very time consuming and might not look as professional as we wanted
it to be. We also used background music as most documentaries do, we searched the
internet for different sites to use for our music, and we also thought about creating
our own music on ‘Garage Band’ but after some thought, we decided not to do this
as it might have been very amateur but changed it for the vox pops and expert
interviews were on, but adjusting the sound levels making it quieter to highlight the
importance of the interviews.
Here you can see that we changed the sound levels making the music quieter for the vox pops and
expert interviews.
This is a close up of how we
changed the sound levels

5. During Julie Maitlands interview towards the end of our doucmentary we included a
cutway as she says “We will see a reduction of students in college”
we use a shot of an empty canteem and this again is common practice and makes
our interview more visually stimulating than they would have been had we just show
the interview.
Another example of editing techniques that we used is the fading transitions. We
notices through our analysis that fades-through-black were often used at dramatic
or provoking points in documentaries, so they were then featured after vox pops.
We also made good use of cutaways, they are very simple but I feel this was very
effective. We mainly used cutaways after establishing shots especially when we were
introducing Solihull 6th Form. They were used when moving quickly from one clip to
another for a rapid effect. We also made use of dissolves, in which the next clip is
smooth and blended into the previous. These are used in most documentaries.

6. We also added in a title to introduce the expert interviews as this is a convention
that is seen in many documentaries. We did have some trouble creating the titles as
it was very hard to place them in the correct area without them covering the
interviewees face.
Our documentary follows many of Bill Nichols’ (2001) conceptual schemes of
documentary modes. Firstly, our documentary aims to be aesthetically pleasing and
so following the Poetic Mode in terms of photogenic. EMA is a subject that due to
the nature of it can be difficult to make the documentary on this subject
aesthetically pleasing however we managed this by making full use out of the ‘Art
Block’ in the college as some of the art work featured money on it, for example there
was a hand made dress full of money, so therefore we
filmed this to feature in our documentary. We also
made good use of the canteen area as we placed the
camera onto the floor to film people walking, we then
sped this up and placed this in our documentary and
this is an example of actuality which makes the
documentary seem more relatable.
However, we also included the rhetoric aspect of the
Expositional Mode by including statistics designed to
shock and therefore to show how badly the
This is how we sped the
footage up on ‘Final Cut
Express’

7. Governments decision has affected teenagers. We had done some research on how
the cuts have affected teenagers and we found some shocking facts which we put
into our documentary. We discovered that some students are taking part in medical
experiments and prostitution in order to fund their education. We also added in
some facts and statistics. We went to see Julie Maitland to find out some facts and
figures on EMA. Our aim was to find out how many students from Solihull Sixth Form
received EMA in 2011 and how many students now receive it in 2010. We found out
the information which we needed. This was that 1100 students received it in 2010
and now in 2011 only 431 receives it as now the only people who get EMA are the
students who got £30 last year.
Our media product has a slight downfall compared to real media products in regard
to the sound levels, the music worked well but the voiceover was sometimes too
quiet. This was not as noticeable on the computers, but once we had burned the
documentary onto a disk and played it on a larger screen with louder speakers, I feel
the voice over is way too quiet and the music is slightly too loud.
We also had to bear media conventions in mind when creating our ancillary tasks,
the radio trailer and a double page spread. Before even starting, we looked at
professional examples of these so we had a thorough idea of what conventions ours
should include. On the media homepage there were examples of radio trailers which
we could listen to and this gave us an idea of what it had to include. We also looked
at previous students work for the double page spread; this also helped us as it gave
us an idea of what worked well and what didn’t work so well. We also looked at
some professional double page articles to give us some guidance of what a
professional article should have.
This is the ‘Moodle’ page
where we could listen to
previous students work.

8. Following conventions, we included a voiceover that was the same as that in the
documentary to keep continuity. We also included shortened versions of the vox
pops and professional interview to give an idea of what to expect in the
documentary, so therefore we picked out the most important or shocking things said
in the interviews. We also used background music to help grab the listeners’
attention and started with a quick, upbeat piece of music, reflecting the start of our
documentary. At the start of the radio trailer. We introduced the radio by playing
distorted music then we recorded a group member saying “Radio 1” This stuck to the
conventions of a professional radio trailer.
We planned out what time our
documentary would start and what channel
it would be on; we wrote all of this down so
we could add it to our radio trailer.
We created our radio trailer on using Garage Band. The downside to our trailer was
the sound levels were inconsistent which we tried to combat by re-recording the
voiceover however this did not seem to improve the sound quality so we changed
the sound levels in Garage band and this seemed to improve things slightly.
Vox Pops and Expert Interviews Approximately 40 seconds long
We chose to have our radio trailer under Radio 1, but our documentary would be on
BB3, we had made a mistake here as radio 1 would not be advertising anything for
Several
different tracks
Adjusting sound levels
The back ground music Same voice used in the documentary

9. We also added effects to the voice over to make it more professional. We did this by
clicking onto the file and on the side bar, these options appeared. We used the
‘Female Voice’ for the voice over explaining what to expect in the documentary, then
we used ‘Megaphone’ for introducing ‘Radio 1’
These are the two effects which
we used in our radio trailer
We used fast paced music as this would attract our target audience of students. We
had a range of different music to choose from and these were found here:

10. The final version of our magazine contained the following conventions:
Headline and Byline Main image relating to
the subject
A stand first
in larger
print,
including a
drop cap
Smaller images
relating to the
subject
Columns separating the text
Pull Quote Page Number
Much like our radio trailer, our article follows most of the
conventions specified by other products of a similar nature.
We added a drop shadow onto the main image to make it
more professional and the images below show exactly how
to do this

11. Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and
ancillary tasks?
I feel that our three media products interconnect rather well with each other. We
created a synergy between all three products, again to familiarise the audience with
our products but also to achieve a greater effect than one of the products alone.
The radio trailer features the same voice as used in the documentary and includes
significant extracts that the viewer would instantly recognise If they were to watch
both the radio trailer and the documentary and also read the article. The listing
article features the poster which was used in the expert interview with Julie
Maitland.
The radio trailer includes extracts from the documentary. We have used clips of the
expert interviews and picked out the main thing that they say which were most
effective. We used a quote from Julie Maitland which is “I think it will have a
significant effect on teenagers” This is found in the documentary, the double page
spread and the radio trailer. We also have quotes from Mike Hatton as he says ‘I
think it will have a social impact on teenagers” this is also in the radio trailer.
This is the double page article
and as you can see there is a
picture of students in a canteen
holding up a poster saying don’t
cut EMA. The boy who has been
circled features in the
documentary as he is part of the
vox pops. This links the double
page spread and the
documentary well.
Double page
article

12. The documentary is probably our most successful piece, as it features a variety of
editing types and plenty of information, facts and statistics. Therefore this is
practically something to cater for any type of viewer. The radio trailer is similar in
many respects. In the brief time that it plays, it contains an attention-capturing
example of fast editing and an interesting description to the documentary. This is
very brief but the double page spread has a large amount of text to break down the
documentary but also go into detail about what to expect to see in the documentary.
Overall, I think our ancillary tasks combine with our documentary quite successfully.
They look and sound as if they belong together and are clear and effective when
promoting the programme. The radio trailer is exciting, interesting and audibly
pleasing and the double page spread is eye catching and interesting a full of facts
and figures.
Question 3: what have you learnt from your audience
feedback?
To collect our audience feedback, we created a simple questionnaire, asking our
classmates to rate our products overall, and also on how interesting and suitable
they were. We handed this out to 15 people and from our results we were able to
discover if our media task was successful or not.

13. First question: On a scale of 1-10 how interesting is our documentary?
1 being poor and 10 being excellent (Circle your answer)
On a scale of 1-10 how imformative is our
documentary?
10
9
8
Amount of people
7
6
5 Series2
4
3
2
1
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Score
This is a graph to show the amount of people who thought our documentary was
informative. Although we added a few facts and statistics, only one person thought
our documentary was extremely informative, so therefore they scored this a ten.
Most people scored our documentary a seven for being informative so this shows
that our documentary is informative but there could be improvements made such as
adding more information in. Although we added in a few statistics about the
amount of students who used to receive EMA I now feel that there should have been
more.
Second Question: Did the first minute of our documentary grab your attention?
Did the first minute grab your attention?
no
options
Series1
yes
0 2 4 6 8 10
score
This graph shows the results of the question which was ‘Did the first minute grab
your attention?’ Six people said no, and I was quite surprised at this result as I felt
the opening of our documentary is very dramatic due to the YouTube footage of the

14. riots due to the Governments decision to make the cuts. I also felt that the opening
of our documentary which the newspapers falling to the ground was also very
effective. Due to these results I feel that if we were to create this documentary
again, I would have had the first minute speed up as due to the results, it is clear that
the opening was not as effective as It should have been. I would have made the
footage with the newspapers shorter and quicker to keep the interest off the
audience.
Do you think the sound levels are consistent in the documentary?
Do you think the sound levels are consistant?
yes
no
I was extremely happy with this result; every person whom we asked said that our
sound levels were consistent. I was every happy with this result as we spent quite a
long time changing the sound levels to make sure that nothing was too loud and over
powering and nothing was too quiet. We had some troubles with expert interviews
as they seemed to be a lot louder than all of the other audio files. We spent a long
time making them quieter and luckily this worked well. We also had some trouble
with the music as it was very loud so we turned this down. We watched the
documentary over and over again ensuring that the sound levels were perfect so I
am very pleased with this result.
Do you think our radio trailer advertises our documentary well?
Do you think our radio trailer advertises our
documentary well?
16
14
12
amount of people
10
8 Series1
6
4
2
0
yes no
score

15. I am also very happy with this result, 15 out of 15 people felt that our radio trailer
advertised the documentary well. We took parts of the expert interviews which we
felt were the most dramatic and had them in the radio trailer. We also created a
voice over of what to expect in the documentary, we included that time and channel
which it would be on so therefore I feel this results are fair results which I am happy
with. Another question which we asked was ‘would listening to our radio trailer
make you want to watch the documentary?’ our results were great as every person
we handed a questionnaire to said that they would watch our documentary. We kept
an upbeat backing music and dramatic interesting cuts of our documentary to gain
interest off the audience.
Do you think our double page article appeals to our target audience which are
students and parents?
Target Audience:
The age range which we will be targeting is the 16 to 19 year olds. This is because this is the age you were
intituled to a money incentive before the Education Maintenance Allowance was cut. Also, we will be
targeting to parents, whatever ages. This is because parents have also been affected by the recent cuts
and they need to be informed on why the cuts have been made. Parents who earn less than £20,000 and
single parents will be mainly targeted as these are the people who will be affected the most.
This documentary will target both male and females and students who are still in Education. Teenagers
tend to watch soaps, dramas and comedies instead of sitting down and watching a documentary. This is
why we need to make sure our documentary focuses on teenagers and parents at all time and we need to
ensure that our documentary is interesting and will gain the attention off teenagers.

16. All of the questionnaires given
back thought that our double
page spread appealed to our
audience of teenagers and
parents. I think this was due to
the large amount of text which
would stereotypically appeal to
the parents. I think that the font
which we used is perfect for an
audience of teenagers as it is a
stencil style font giving it a
college/school feel to it. The
image which we used was taken
in the canteen with students from
the college so automatically this
would appeal to an audience of
16-19 year old students. I am
happy with this result.
Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction
research, planning and evaluation stages?
When producing our media products, we inevitably used a wide range of technology
and software both familiar and unfamiliar, but we also used technology during our
initial research. We analysed several documentaries during the research and
planning stages by looking through newspaper articles, browsing newspaper
websites, radio trailers and to do so we required a standard classroom and home
technologies such as televisions and windows PC. We used the computers for
internet research into our topic and also to watch documentaries. We also used the
internet to post our research onto a blog using Blogger.com.

17. YouTube was extremely helpful for me as it helped me to research in depth my
subject for my documentary which was EMA. I watched many different clips such as
teenage riots which would give me an insight on how much the government’s
decision has affected teenagers. I also watched
news reports on government meetings and this
helped me to have an in-depth understanding on
why the government decided to make the cuts and
cause all this controversy. We then uploaded all
out research onto Blogger.com. Blogger.com
helped me to organise my work and enabled me to
share what research i had done. Although
Blogger.com was a useful website, it did have
some negative points about it. Blogger allowed
you to upload images but if you wanted to upload
several images this would be very time consuming
as it only allows you to upload one image at a
time. Also, there are size options on the images,
this is small, medium and large, but i felt these
were very limited options as sometimes the image would be too large but then the
small and medium option were too small. Also, sometimes blogger.com would not
allow you to upload YouTube clips and it was extremely time consuming trying to
find ways of uploading the clips. I feel this was not the best website
to use and there are other websites such as Tumblr.com which
would be easier to use as Tumblr allows you to upload larger files
including audio and videos.
We also used a scanner to upload our research and planning onto
our blog. We used this to create digital versions of our paper based
Scanner
work. This enabled us to contently analyse documentaries on
paper, knowing we can easily convert them on to an online format
via the scanner. The scanner was very simple to use and it wasn’t
time consuming. I feel this specific technology was extremely useful
during the research and planning stage.
Camera
Once we began production, we were given a camera which i was not
familiar with. This camera had new technology on it using hard disks in
place of a tape deck. This was useful as it meant uploading our footage
would be easier and less time consuming, the camera itself was
extremely light which meant it was easy for us to carry it around
especially when recording in hand held. We did have some troubles
with the camera as previously i had only dealt with stills not recordings.
Half way through the recording weeks we were given a different
camera, which we were not familiar with. This meant that when we
were recording our vox pops we had difficulty finding where to plug the
microphone and the earphones into. This resulting in wasting a whole lesson as we
spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to plug the microphone in. We also had

18. some trouble trying to sort the focus of the camera out and this resulted in having an
expert interview out of focus as we did not know how to deal with the focus of the
camera. The cameras were trip-pod mountable meaning we could ensure that those
shots that needed to be still were level. They also had ports for headphones and
microphones meaning we could record and monitor the audio that we needed too,
which was extremely important during interviews.
The process was made easier through our choice of
microphone. We used a directional mic, so that we
could choose the focus of our recording, we did this
especially during our expert interviews and also when
we recorded the voice over. The microphone helped to
highlight what was meant to be heard and it reduced
some of the unnecessary background noise. The
microphone needed very little preparation. It was as
little as plugging the microphone in and start recording
which saved us a lot of time and made the process easy Interview with Julie Maitland-Out of
for us. focus
Microphone
Most of the work took place on an Apple Imac. I was not familiar with using an apple
imac computer; i have always been used to working on a basic simple computer. So
this was quite challenging for me. To edit our product we used final cut express.
What is Final Cut Express?
Final cut express is software which has been re built from the ground up to offer
unprecedented speed and superior quality through every part of the post production
work flow. It allows you to import files, organise them and edit the files. You can also
add effects to the files such as speeding them up or slowing them down. The
software was new to me but i familiarised myself with the program and i found the
layout became quite easy to work with. Underneath is the final cut work space, and
my documentary.

19. The viewer allows the previewing
and trimming of video before its
The browser contains and added to the timeline
organises raw files (video,
audio, titles etc) The canvas displays video as
it appears in the timeline
The toolbar houses options
for clipping, moving, and
otherwise manipulating
This is where the logging
clips
and transfer takes place
These monitor the sound
This is a timeline on how levels
long our documentary is
This is all our audio files where we
can turn the volume up or down

20. The first step we took when starting post production
was to log and transfer our clips, during which we
selected and named our clips. We sorted out our
clips by going through all our footage and getting rid
of the footage that we didn’t need and keeping the
footage that we thought would work well.
Once the footage had been selected, organised and
watched over and over it appeared in the browser
and was available to use anywhere in our sequence.
This is our footage which had been
logged and transferred
This is our log and transfer sheet
We then worked from our storyboard,
we placed our clips onto the timeline in
format which we could change is we
wanted to. The involved all the opening
sequence, we did this by dragging the
file onto the timeline and the audio and
the footage would then be on the
timeline ready to edit. Final Cut Express allowed us to edit our footage by making the
footage faster or slower, this was easily done and it made a huge impact on our
footage, it made our documentary look more professional and it also would help to
keep the interest of the audience. This was noticeable during the footage of Solihull
6th Form students as they’re walking around college in which they are portrayed as
being in a rush, it was also used to sped up the opening of our documentary where
the newspapers fell into a pile. We also used this to speed up introducing the name
of our documentary which was ‘EMA-Stealing from teens?’. We placed money onto a
text book and one by one the money was taken off to reveal the title of our
Documentary.
This is the title of our documentary
which we speed up.
This is the tool which we used to
speed up our footage

21. We were also able to create a cutaways and this was during Julie
Maitland’s interview. As she was talking she mentioned that
there have been a huge reduction in the amount of teenagers
coming to college and as she said this, we produced a cutaway of
an empty canteen area. We feel this was very professional and
worked very well as it emphasised the reduction of teenagers
coming to college.
This image shows the cut away during Julie
Maitland’s interview
When it came to producing our Radio trailer we used Garage Band, i was
familiar with this software and it is fairly simple to use.
Track volume settings
Tracks contain chunks Combining smaller
automatically raise or
of audio from segments can create a
lower a tracks volume
different sources new fuller clip
at a set point
This is where we
added an effect onto
a normal audio file This controls the
Here you can change the volume for the entire
volume of one specific piece
audio file either making it
louder or quieter

22. Garage band is what might be described as a prosumer program as it is an accessible,
home computer product that has a plentiful amount of professional features.
We were able to choose from a range of different backing tracks by using this tool:
We picked:
We were then able to change the way the audio sounded to make it more serious to
go with the theme of our documentary which was the
cutting of EMA. We did this by first of all clicking onto
the file which is shown below...
After clicking onto the audio file, in the corner these options
appeared we then chose what effect we wanted. We chose
to use the megaphone as this added a dramatic effect which
went with our theme.
Here is the list of all the different
effects

23. When designing our listing magazine article, we chose to use Adobe In Design
Another feature of In Design we found useful was the effects panel, from here we
could greatly enhance the visual impact of our layout and images with minimal
effort. The most noticeable examples of such enhancement are the shadows created
by the main image.