The documentary examines how the color red is used in various art forms such as film, photography, art, costume design, and makeup. It uses interviews, cutaways, and graphics to explore this single topic, similar to the documentary "Supersonic" which focuses solely on the band Oasis. Various techniques are employed to make the documentary engaging and informative for viewers, such as framing interviews following the rule of thirds, using relevant cutaways during discussions, and choosing an opening song that relates to the theme of red. The documentary aims to showcase how professionals in different art fields utilize the color in their work.

1. In what way does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

2. Our documentary is a mixed documentary, consisting of interviews,
cutaways, archive footage and voice overs. professional documentaries
such as “Supersize me” are also a mixed documentary as it is self
reflexive, interviews and fully narrated.
Documentaries vary in many ways based on the
information and content they provide. Themes that run
throughout in our documentary are: how red is used in
Photography, Film, Art, Make Up and Design. Our
documentary is single stranded as we are looking at
the use of red in numerous forms of art and what red
represents in each. This is similar to professional
documentary I have looked at which is “Supersonic” as
it focus on Oasis and doesn’t expand into anything
else.

3.  Our documentary is single stranded as we only
focus on how the colour red is used in various art
forms such as film, costume, photography, art
and make up. Our documentary is linear and we
have an opened narrative as we want our
audience to have their own connotations of the
colour red and how they use it, our documentary
provides them information about how it is used
in numerous art forms and maybe our audience
will become inspired to create their own
meaning.

4.  The graphics in our documentary that are mainly used to
introduce the interviewees are similar to professional
documentaries that i have analysed such as “Skate world:
England” and “Supersize me”. As we have followed the codes and
conventions and placed the graphics in the bottom corner of the
screen depending on the framing of our interviewee. We chose to
use a simple bold font and set the colour to white, we decided to
do this as it makes it easy on the eye for the audience and also
draws them into the interviewees name and occupation. We didn't
use any other graphics as we didn't want to distract our audience
from the interviewee. For the font colour we tried red as it will
relate to our title of the documentary and the topic but once we
changed it to red it didn't look very effective and distracting so
we decided to keep it nice and simple by using white.

6.  The mise-en-scene of our documentary follows the codes and
conventions as it relates to the interviewee’s occupation and
relates to the topic of our documentary which is red which is
always seen in professional documentaries. Using this to relate to
the occupation such as the code of attire and background makes
the information that they are giving reliable and creates a
relationship with the audience. This is seen in a professional
documentary I analysed “The Beatles: Eight Days A Week” as when
Paul McCartney is being interviewed there’s a guitar in the
background relating to his role within the band. This is seen in
our documentary during the interview with Jacy (Costume
Designer) she has a red dress that she made in the background
and is also sitting on a red couch. This shows her relevance to the
overall topic of red and also with the use of the example dress in
the background shows her knowledge of design which is the area
she is giving information on.

8.  Our use of cutaways follow the codes and conventions of
documentaries as they make the documentary look very
professional, they can be used to hide jump cuts and give a
visual representation of what is being said within the
documentary. This helps the audience to understand what is
being said and makes it easier for them to link it back to
the topic. An example seen in our documentary is during
Michael Lacey (Artist)interview he goes on to talk about
Andy Warhol we were able to film a cutaway in the TATE art
gallery in Liverpool of a Red lit image of Andy Warhol’s face,
which links in perfectly with what he says and the overall
topic of red, reinforcing it with the audience and trying to
keep them an active viewer.


10.  For our interviews in our documentary the framing and positioning of
the interviewee conforms the codes and conventions, as we have
followed the rule of thirds this is where the interview is placed in the
left or right side of the shot, we used a mid shot and made sure that
the interviewee was looking diagonal across the shot and at the
interviewer not at the camera, this is seen in “The Beatles: Eight Days
A Week” when Paul McCartney is looking across the shot at the
interviewer and never looks at the camera.

11.  To make our documentary look interesting and
grab the audience's attention, we used various
camera shots such as zooms, panning and tilts. All
these shots are seen in professional documentaries
in “The Beatles: Eight Days A Week” the camera
zooms into tickets that people had, and archive
footage of pictures of them playing live.

12.  The song we used for our opening sequence was
Arctic Monkeys cover of “Red Right Hand”. We
decided to go with this song as it is quite a lively
song and we wanted the song to grab the
audience's attention straight away. We also
decided to use this song as it relates to the
overall topic of our documentary as it's about
red. We timed the song really well within the
opening so that when the audience see the title
“Red” the song sings “Red right hand”. This is
done in professional documentaries such as
“Supersonic” as for the title sequence they had
“Supersonic” playing.