Evaluation: Question 1

1. In what ways did your product use forms and conventions of real media products?

In our documentary as our aim was to emulate and create a genuine documentary we followed every convention we could rather than challenging them. In our radio trailer and print advert we also adhered to conventions.

Framing & Interviews

It took us a few tries (as described) but we got the framing to match those used in real interviews. For our IT Expert interview we placed Jules on the right hand side of the screen while we placed the radio presenter John on the left side. Examples for comparisions are displayed below with links. The convention of interviewee placement allows for either side and we did it to add variety to our camera shots.

Jules:

http://www.videojug.com/interview/the-interview-questions#how-do-i-handle-the-question-what-are-your-greatest-strengths

John:










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

Cutaways

We captured many cutaways, some were placed in interviews while others were used with the voiceover. Editing them in was a time consuming process but well worth it as they improved the documentary. Placing them in interviews prevented jump cuts and made the interview more interesting to watch. We edited all questions out of interviews to make it appear as one single speech rather than an interview/Q&A style as this is a convention of documentaries.

An example of a cutaway to illustrate how technology has changed communication , they are together but both are unspeaking - immersed in different technology.

Voxpops

We began filming voxpops early in our documetary filming but we had problems with framing. We did film some but we decided they wern't necessary in our first five minutes and did not include any in the final edit.

Graphics

We made use of graphics in our documentary to explain who the person we were interviewing was and their relevance to the subject. We placed a slow transition after each so they would slowly fade rather than abruptly vanish from the screen to make it look more like a professional documentary.

-- Graphics on screen

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/ededdneddythemisedventures/video/6130868/ed-edd-n-eddy-the-mis-edventures-developer-interview

Voiceover

For our voiceover we used a woman as we felt this would be more relevent with our tpoic of internet saftety- finding a suitable male voice would of been harder. The voice is of a woman in her twenties with no distinct regional accent but not in receieved pronunciation this makes the tone overall fairly informal but still serious.

Music & Archive Material

YouTube was a main source for our source material, we also filmed many short clips and pans of Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and other social networking site pages. We used Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" as our main title song and documentary title, this links them. Other music we used includes Lily Allen's "Smile" (her most recognisable song) with accompanying music video clip. We went to Youtube for news footage and some social networking sites clips. We have sent an email to the record companies to ask for permission to use the copyright protected music.

Lily Allen "Smile" Music Video

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xg06k_lily-allen-smile_music