A2 Whitney Griffiths

Evaluation

Q1. In what ways does your product use, develop or change and form the codes and conventions of real media products.

My documentary uses the codes and conventions of a professional documentary, by doing this it allows our documentary to look professional.

The video below will show you how we followed the codes and conventions of existing professional documentary.

Sound is used with a professional documentary as a …
• Voice over
• Music
• Non digenetic and digenetic

My documentary is Expository as it involves the ‘voice-of-god’ which is a voice over which is used to anchor the meaning of the video/images being shown. Documentaries are normally centred on a problem that needs to be solved.

These links are some examples of Expository documentaries.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw3WvLRUTjM

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=tYwPimYdCK8&feature=PlayList&p=4AAD43661A6740B3&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=31

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klmhNSu2ZbY

A voice over is also known as 'voice-of-god'. ‘voice-of-god’ always remains anonymous; they tell the story to the audience. An example of the ‘voice-of-god’ would be the voice throughout “Big Brother”, as you have never seen the person who talks to the audience watching the programme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tElw1UQ9Ww&feature=related

Music on a documentary is mostly digenetic as it is always on the opening titles and credits. Documentaries may sometimes use music which is placed over cutaways and information that is used within the documentary. We decided to use new shoes by paolo nutini, footloose soundtrack and elvis blue suede shoes. As we wanted to uses these soundtracks we had to make sure that we were aloud to have copy right, therefore we had to e.mail the record label.

The majority of documentaries follow a linear structure as it starts at a a beginning then follows through to the end. Our documentary follows a linear structure. This is also a concept of a documentary.

Q2 How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary tasks?

As a whole media package, the documentary, print advert and radio advert all interlink together. The video below will show how each of the products are linked. The video will also show how we plan to advertise our documentary. The Video below will show what print and radio advert we used for inspiration, as we needed to follow the codes and conventions of a real print and radio advert. Advertising the documentary will be hugely important as Channel 4 needs to guarantee it will gain viewers furthermore being able to sell advertising space during advert breaks as allowed them to generate revenue to fund for new programmes.

The video will also show what print papers and radio commercial channels which we plan to advertise our documentary on.

Airtime is a term used for radio trailer which is on commercial radios, the trailer tends to be mintage between the programmes available to be bought for advertising messages. These tend to be 30 seconds long but this can be anything from 5 to 120 seconds. Channel 4’s audience profile has a wide appeal, and airtime can be bought regionally. The benefits of using airtime is high awareness levels over short periods of time, or building awareness slowly, to specific audience or regional targeting and accountability, there's the simple fact of bringing your brand to life on a visually and aurally rich medium. What makes Channel 4's radio trailers different is their objective is to deliver the most effective advertising, and we are committed to maximum transparency in our trading approach to build strong and lasting partnerships based on mutual benefit.

As our radio trailer is scheduled on Channel 4, we had to advertise our radio documentary on commercial radio channels such as Heart radio, Smooth and Real as the majority of there listeners are aged between 18 and 40, which is the intended target audience for my documentary therefore by advertising on these station we hope their audience will be interested in our comfy, funky and essential, shoe documentary. The radio trailer is combined to the documentary as we decided to use the same voice over, this is so that the voice over can be easily reconcilable to the audience.

The code and conventions of a professional print advert is that print advert should be landscape. The reason for this is when buying advertising space in a newspaper or magazine the smaller the advert the cheaper it will be. Therefore the newspaper or magazine can have more adverts as the landscape size is easier to divide into smaller sections such as half page and quarter. This could also allow the print advert be advertised on other media sources such as billboards and posters.

The public service remit for Channel 4 is the provision of a broad range of high quality and diverse programming which, in particular is suppose to demonstrates innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programs. It has to appeal to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society. Channel 4 makes a significant contribution to meeting the need for the licensed public service channels to include programs of an educational nature and other programs of educative value. It is important for channel 4 that advertising increases viewings as it is unlike the BBC and doesn't get paid for by TV licenses therefore all money made is from advertising.

http://www.channel4sales.com/

Q3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Pen portiat

These are examples of a female and male who are in our target audience who wanted to watch our documentary.

Name: Deanne Folwer

Age: 20

Occupation: Hair dresser

Interests: Hair, make up and fashion.

" I would love to watch the rest of the documentary. I loved the opening titles when all the different shoes come on"

Name: Richard Clark

Age: 27

Occupation: Sales manager

Interest: Fashion and Soicalising

"I thought it was interesting becuase I didn't know about MBT shoes. I would like to watch the rest of the documentary becuase its not just for about womens shoes"

These are are the type pf people in which are our typical target audience as our documentary is targeted at females and males aged 18 - 40.

For our audience feed back we decided to hold a focus group in which the target audience could give their views on our product.

These are the questions asked...

Did you think the camera work was like a real documentary?

Was the quality of the sound even throughout?

Did you think the editing was affective for the audience?

Did you think all content was relevant towards the subject of shoes?

Would you like to watch the whole documentary?

What are the strengths of our production?

What are the weaknesses of our production?

Is channel 4 appropriate for the intended target audience?

How do you think it compares to professional products?

The video links below will show what they thought about our documentary, print and radio advert. The first clip shows there reactions as the documentary starts.

These videos are voice recordings in which we have conducted feedback from people who are in our target audience.

From all of the audience feedback which was constructed I learnt that we could have made the time earlier as people thought it would be better for 8pm or half 8 but as a group we thought 8pm would be too early for watershed but from our feedback it suggests that the content was suitable for the waterhed schelduling period. Furthermore Channel 4 only tend to schedule documentaries from the hour.

We also learnt that asking the public on their views (vox pops) made our documentary look more professional as it didn't look like we was just randomly filmed people, it showed that we had researched and planned what we wanted in our documentary. From the people that we asked they said that they liked the opening titles as it gave a fun and energetic feels to the documentary which went well with the choice of music (New Shoes by Paolo Nutini). The colours which we chose for the documentary worked well as it wasn't to girly so males wouldn't think it was just aimed at a females. We chose the colours blue, turquoise and purple as the colours are unisex and would be suitable for both genders.

The audience feedback from the radio trailer was positive as the majority of the target audience said that they wanted to watch the documentary from just hearing the trailer. The only thing i which the audience said could be changed within the trailer was the voice over at the end which says 'Comfy, Funky and Essential. Thursday. Channel 4. 9pm.' A it was abit quiet and that may be because we used the schools ice radio recording system and we used a different technology to record the rest so therefore the sound will be of a different quality but we did try and get it to match the rest of the trailer so it is continuous. The audience also thought that the radio trailer went well with the documentary as it used bits of the documentary which answered rhetorical questions with the theme tune of the documentary at the end so it will sticks in the audiences head.

The audience feedback came back that 100% of the people liked the print advert, especially that the main image of the shoe because it is made out of shoes. The target audience thought that the print advert looked like a professional channel 4 advert. We decided as a group to keep the images of the shoes black and white because it looked more professional.

Media Organisations conduct focus groups to see whether the product they have produced is going to be successful as a TV programme. Media Organisation so this to decided on what changes needed to be made for it to be more successful and if it is suitable for the target audience at the schelduled time. Focus groups are picked at random and sometimes money is offered to them for participating.

Q4. How do you use technology construction, research, planning and evaluation?

The technology within the media product played a major part as we needed technology to conduct, research and plan for the documentary.

The Internet was used to find out about different types of shoes and where each type of shoes was sold. We also used the internet to find research the history of the shoes shops in which we intended to interview. To keep a log of the whole process of the production we recorded a blog on blogger.com, this shows what we went through to conduct our documentary, radio and print advert.

We also could not have filmed our documentary without a video camera and tripod so this was the most vital bit of technology that we needed to ensure that we was able to produce a documentary which good steady shot. This was vital as it had to be used to take photographic evidence of us during the process of the whole production from asking people at Liverpool one asking the public to take part in our vox pops to conducting our audience feedback. This is a new technology in which we used to help produce participate towards the process of a documentary, as we used a mobile phone to take picture of shoes which were used as cutaways.

We also used a mobile phone to take pictures of some of our audience feedback. Sasha also used a mobile phone to record a convention between herself and a store manager of a shoe shop about arranging a interview. I used a Dictaphone to record the questions and answers to some of the audience feedback as it was easier than filming them as a video camera is a lot more complicated.. We also used the Dictaphone to record our voice over which was being used for the documentary and radio trailer, this allowed it to be easily transferred has you didn't need to capture it first. We also used the collages own radio studio as gave us a different quality of sound.

Adobe photoshop was used to create the print advert. This software was chosen because it allowed you to do more to a image, but also it has a better quality. Adobe audition was used to produce the radio trailer as it allowed you to edit the bits you wanted then mixed in it together to it sounded continuously. Adobe premier pro was used to edit and piece together the documentary, as it had it allowed us to be more creative when piecing and blending the documentary together. Windows movie maker is a software which allows you to make movies/short films quickly because it is quite simple to uses. I used this package for my evaluation as I need to show expression through a different source of media.

If I did not have access to all of these programmes I would have not be able to produce my product or be able to have an evaluation that has video clips and sound files. This shows how vital the technology has been in order to produce my documentary. This makes the documentary stand out as it catches audience. Interactive documentaries are not as common today as producers tend not to have a whole crew. Without the development in new technologies as the equiement has gone into smaller and lighter equipment making following someone less obvious that you are filming.