1. A2 Coursework Evaluation
James Colgan

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

3. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Documentary
Realism:
Our documentary follows the basic conventions that are found in professional documentaries. Our
documentary is a non-fiction piece of work based on a real life topic that effect people or that people know
about and have opinions on. We chose to topic of stereotyping because it is something that everyone is
effected by everyday whether they realise it or not and that gives people an opinion on it which would make it
more appealing to the audience. Our documentary also doesn’t have any staged parts which is a convention in
documentaries to make them more real as they are meant to be fully factual and not fake so there are no
forced or staged bits to it unless there are re-enactments ,which ours does not.

4. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Documentary
Voiceover:
Another convention our documentary follows is the voiceover. Conventionally in a documentary the voiceover
is the authoritative voice in the documentary, they make the audience think that they have specialist
knowledge on the subject or that they have the ‘right opinion’ that the audience should believe by the end of
it. In our documentary the voiceover gives you the information and the statistics, this makes the people
watching feel like the narrator had a specialist knowledge of the topic and what they say is backed up by the
things you see on the screen, for example when the documentary tells you about a website or article you can
see it on the screen to back it up, this also gives the documentary more legitimacy as the audience can see that
what the person is saying is true and is based on facts rather than their opinion alone. However the
documentary doesn’t use the voiceover to give people the ‘right opinion’ it is used to give people the facts and
then lets them decide on their opinion although it does slightly follow the convention as the facts lean more to
one side of the argument although it does give both sides. Although convention was challenged in that with
some statistics we chose not to use graphics to back up what we were trying to say because we felt it was
unnecessary for the fact.

5. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Documentary
Audience connections:
To include the audience in the documentary more the people making them conventionally use different
techniques to engage with the people watching. Something most documentaries do is to shoot things on
location rather than using a set and they use natural lighting, this is heavily shown in ‘Supersize Me’ as they
follow him around the streets and go to McDonalds with him and it is all natural and that is something the
people watching can associate with. We took inspiration from this and got footage in places people know like
parks and shopping centres. Another thing documentaries try to do is make them less professional in the way
they look because if they looked like other TV shows people wouldn’t relate to them as much and they look
fake, which is the opposite of what you want from a documentary. We found this in all of the documentaries
that we watched in the research for the documentary but we were most inspired by ‘Young Nazi and proud’
which followed a member of the BNP that looked like it could have been made by anyone with a camera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7hYxYZbqtQ
because people find themselves more interested in documentaries like that.

6. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Documentary
Archive Footage:
Archive footage is used to aid authenticity in places where the film maker cannot obtain the footage
themselves so they use things they have found. We did this with an interview in our documentary, this was
taken from a TV show entitled “What Would You Do?” on an episode specifically about stereotyping and how
what we see of a person changes how we react to the situation they are in, the interview was with a Yale
professor of psychology. This is used in documentaries to help legitimise the work as it backs up what is said in
the main documentary being made. We also did this for ‘The Stereotype Song’ which helps us demonstrate
that the topic of stereotyping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ABRlWybBqM

7. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Documentary
Vox Pops:
Documentaries use vox pops to get the thoughts of random people, people who the audience would connect
with, and non professional opinions. This is used to keep the audience watching or to show the contrast
between what is generally thought on the subject over what the professionals would ell you about the subject
which would make them think about their thoughts and make them think about their own view on the matter.
We were inspired by the vox pops in ‘Supersize Me’ because while watching them the people were giving
opposing views and seeing the different views from a range of people makes you think about your own views
and you connect more to the documentary. We got vox pops from a range of people from different Genders
and ethnicities. However we mainly got the views of white males so our representation of the teenage public
was not as varied or accurate as we would have liked it, if we could we would have liked more females or
people of ethnic minorities to balance out the representation of the documentary and make it more even.

8. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Documentary
Music:
A further convention that we followed was the use of music in the background of the documentary, this is used
to keep the audience interested and to make them feel how you want them to feel. We used music that we
made in garage band so we could make sure it fit what we wanted to put forward in the documentary; we
chose to make the documentary serious but also more positive showing a more positive side to teenagers
rather than how they are perceived by the general older population and so we made music to fit the positive
look of the documentary. We decided to have no part of the documentary that has no music because in the
documentaries we researched in the research and planning stage all used music the entire way through varying
it from loud to just in the background in every film, we tried to emulate this so you can hear the music and the
main part on the documentary without on distracting you from the other.

9. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Radio Trailer
Length
Radio trailers are conventionally short, however we challenged this by making ours a bit longer than a regular
trailer. Our trailer lasts for 1 minute 10 seconds, we did this so we could give people a better idea of the sort of
things they can expect to see in the documentary as shorter trailers are often more difficult to judge whether
you would watch them or not as a larger portion of it is telling you when it is on.

10. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Radio Trailer
Simple, basic information clear
A convention of a radio trailer is making sure that all the information is there is a clear and easy to understand
way. With this in mind we made our trailer simple so it is not over complicated or difficult to remember but
even though it was simple we conveyed the information necessary for them to make up their mind about
whether they want to watch it or not. We also made sure that in the trailer we made it clear when you can
watch the documentary with the day, channel and time it is on

11. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Radio Trailer
Clips from the documentary
We followed the convention that in radio advertisements for something on the TV of using audio files from the
from the show in the advert. We did this because every trailer we looked at used this to give the audience an
idea of what they will see. Describing the show would have worked to advertise it but having clips from the
show in the trailer gives the listeners a more accurate and impartial take on the documentary. It also keeps
people interested in the trailer because it gives you more than just one person talking at you it has the
advantage of changing what you hear and it allows you to put interesting parts of your documentary in or parts
that show off what your documentary is all about.

12. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Radio Trailer
Audience connection
As our target audience is the younger generation, we used social media to get them more interested in the
documentary by making it more than just watching a documentary. We created a twitter hashtag that they can
use to connect to people and follow the documentary using that hashtag, which makes teenagers and young
adults more interested because social media has become a big part of the youth culture of today. This has
become a growing convention with documentaries to incorporate social media as it has grown in popularity
because it is a way to reach a wider audience as websites like twitter attract millions of people to the site and
gets people talking to possibly thousands of people at a time.

13. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Magazine
Pull Quotes
Pull quotes are a convention used in magazine articles to give away some information or give context to the
pictures used in the magazine or even just make you interested in the documentary because what they said is
fitting and interesting/attention grabbing. Our was used to highlight the topic of the documentary and give
them an idea of what the expect in the documentary and make them more interesting by using quotes that
stand out and grab peoples interest through curiosity. We also highlighted phrases or words to emphasise the
quote and make it stand out to anyone who is just flicking through the magazine to make them stop and look at
the article even just for a little bit because then they are interested and will remember what they saw.

14. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Magazine
Documentary Images
The Images from the magazine are all from the documentary. We decided to follow this convention because it
gives the audience a more true representation of what to expect from the documentary. This convention was in
all of the different magazines we looked through and analysed in order to get ideas on how to make them,
usually this reason advertisers do this is because people recognise the people in the documentary and that
makes them want to watch it, although our documentary includes no one who would be generally recognised
we used images because, on their own or combined with the pull quotes, they give you an idea of what might
happen but they are not obvious so people will want to check out the documentary to find out what the
pictures were about.

15. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Magazine
Headings
Headings and sub-headings are used to grab the attention of the people and makes them want to read on
The heading of the article is the title of the show, this was done so right from the start people see the name of
the show it is to ingrain it into their minds because they see it big and it is different from anything else on the
page so it is memorable. The convention for headings is to either use the title of the show or to use something
about the topic that is a play on words for the topic it is about, we chose to use the title so people didn’t think
that the heading was the documentary’s name and not be able to find our documentary. The sub-heading
usually is there to tell you more about the article so even if you don’t read the rest of the article you have the
basic information on the topic of the article, we decided to challenge this because the simple and open ended
sub-heading on ours leaves them wanting to know what is in the article which means the person is more likely
to read the rest of the article.

16. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Magazine
Watching information
One of the first things you see on the page is when and where you can watch the documentary, then it is
mentioned in the middle and at the end of the article, this is to make it very clear to the people when they
should tune in for the documentary. As it is mentioned multiple times people are more likely to remember it
and which means even if they have no intention of watching it when they see it they will remember it and if
they have nothing else to do they are more likely to think about the documentary and watch it.

17. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Summary
Overall we tried to stick to the main codes and conventions of a TV documentary because they work well and
make a good documentary. When we did challenge the codes and conventions in the products they were not
very big changes to what you would normally get in a documentary, radio trailer or magazine advertisement
but they mostly worked with the graphics, sub-heading or length in/of our products and the changes overall
made our products slightly different but conventional in the places where it is important for making a good
product.

18. Question 2:
How effective is the combination of
your main product and ancillary texts?

19. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Audience
The target audience is heavily promoted in all of the products we made. In the documentary the majority of
the people on it are students, young people in the early stages of adulthood, this was our target audience
because these are the people we are talking to and trying to connect with in the documentary. They article also
mentions them because the main text is talking about the documentary and how we were trying to get the
views of young people on the topic, this means that the youth reading the article are connecting more to it and
are more likely to watch it because it is a topic everyone know about and has an opinion on and it connects to
them because it is about them, it also uses informal language because young people associate things that are
really formal and serious more to things adults would watch rather than something they would find interesting.
Finally the radio trailer has a young person doing the voiceover, reminds people that it is a documentary about
young people and is based in a college so everything is familiar to the youth of today. It also uses Twitter which
is the most used social networking site because it is simple and easy to use this also shows that we are
targeting the youth because they are the ones who use it the most and they are more likely to do something or
watch something if it can incorporate something they are used to and use on a regular basis. In these ways I
think the products work well together in grabbing the attention and targeting the audience we hope would
watch the documentary.

20. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Brand Identity
There are some links between the 3 products, for example the person in the magazine article is used in all of
the media products, he is the main picture in the magazine and he is also used multiple times in both the
trailer and the actual documentary. Another link is in the documentary and the trailer we used the same
voiceover so when people hear it in the documentary they link it to the trailer which gives them a feeling of
being in a group and togetherness. However there are not many links between the 3 products if we were to do
it again for the magazine and documentary we could god for a specific house style so colour scheme or font
type something that links them and gives it a feeling of being a brand because at the moment they are more
like 3 different products.

21. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Promotion of the documentary
The magazine does a good job of advertising the documentary, it uses quotes and images from the
documentary so the people know what they are going to get from the documentary. It also promotes that it is
about the youth and stereotyping which focuses it to being advertised for the youth mainly which is what we
wanted from it. However after the first mention of the date it only mentions the day of the documentary which
could confuse the date of the documentary as when the magazine was released the documentary would not be
on the Sunday of that week. The radio trailer also hit home about the students and focused mainly on them
which is the intention of the trailer as they are the target audience of the documentary, the only problem is
that it doesn’t mention the date that the documentary is on and just says the day, which makes it a little more
difficult to know when it is on. Although we did chose a good station for our audience because we were aiming
for young people we chose Capital FM which reaches just under 2’000’000 people over 15 and as it is a pop
station the majority of listeners will be younger so it means that near 2’000’000 people will be around our
target audience.

22. Question 3:
What have you learned from your
audience feedback?

23. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Sound
From our audience feedback we learnt that on the documentary the sound was generally good the level was
generally consistent throughout the whole thing, and it was clear and understandable. However there were
times where the volume was not the same as the rest, for example in main interviews the volume was quieter
than the rest of the footage and there was a lot of background noise in a couple of the vox pops. These
comments were expected, for the main interviews one of them had too much background noise for you to
focus on the talking as much and in trying to fix the problem the volume was greatly reduced and although
massively reduced the background noise was still slightly audible, so we made the decision to use the footage
that fit the best even though we couldn’t get it how we wanted. For the other interview we had slight technical
problems with the microphone which we didn’t realise to start with, this was our own fault and if we could do
it again we would make sure we check the equipment multiple times so we can be 100% sure there is nothing
that would mess up. The vox pops were filmed in a noisy environment and although we did want a little bit of
background noise in a couple of them we misjudged the volume of the person compared to the background
noise With the radio trailer we found that the music was a little too loud which meant that they found it
difficult to hear what was under it and the volume varied in different parts but the majority of it was clear and
they knew what was being put across in the trailer. Also the music in both were appropriate and are good for
the youth as it is interesting. The trailer lasted a bit too long though.

24. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Visuals
When it came to the visuals the feedback told us that the camera angle and framing in the documentary was
good it worked well and didn’t look amateurish, it was in focus at the appropriate times and overall looked
carefully done. The environments were generally good but some there was not much variety they would have
liked to see more variety and the background of Nicks interview was very plain although Julie's looked more
like a professional office and was better for the interview. The lighting in it was good the screen was always
clear and you could always see what is on there properly. Also the timing was generally okay but some of the
clips lasted a bit too long, for example the shots of the websites. The visuals in the magazine were good, the
pictures were interesting and the highlighting of key parts of the pull quotes was good and made it more
aesthetically pleasing. It was good at advertising the show to the youth, who were the intended target
audience, and was clear on when and where they could watch the documentary as it was mentioned multiple
times. However it may have been a bit over simple altogether and could do with some more colour or another
picture somewhere. The editing in the left page picture is good looks like it would in a real magazine.

25. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Overall
There was not much to link the 3 pieces together the person on the left of the magazine is in everything and in
the trailer/documentary multiple times but it didn’t feel like it was a group of 3 things it was closer to 3
separate items on the same topic. They suggested that in the documentary and the magazine they could have
used similar colours or fonts in it to make them link more. The documentary and the trailer went together well
because of the use of the clips from the documentary in the radio trailer and having the same voiceover person
doing both of them and music that would work well together as they were a similar style and tempo.
Needed better representation most of the people were white males and there were only 2 women and 3 ethnic
minorities out of all the people in the documentary.
Summary
We got a lot of useful feedback from the audience, and if we were to do it again we would take what they said
into account when we were making them again. We would test the equipment multiple times to be certain we
have done all we can to avoid mistakes. We would add more colour into the documentary and the magazine
and have similar colours and fonts in both. We would edit the sound levels in it better to make sure everything
is clear and understandable in everything. We would also try and vary the people we interviewed more to have
a better representation of the general public that we aim to connect to.

26. Question 4:
How did you use media technologies
in the construction and research,
planning and evaluation stages?

27. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Blog
The blog was a very important part in the all stages of the process from research & planning to the evaluation.
For the research and planning stage the blog was a good way to communicate to the other team members, it
allowed us to see what the other people had done and what was still to be done. It also allowed us to access
the work we needed at anytime we needed it because you can access it from anywhere you can get the
internet. It then gave us a place to present all the work that we had done in a place where we knew it wouldn’t
get lost or be deleted. During the creation process it allowed us to see what we had done in the previous stage,
for example, we had saved the script for the voiceover for both the documentary and the trailer, otherwise it
would have been in a book or someone’s save files and could be difficult to find but because we saved it on
blogger it was ready to go whenever we needed it. For the evaluation it was the very helpful because we saved
all the screen shots that we needed on there and it allowed us to access the pictures from college and home
so we could do it anywhere which was a big advantage. Then it gave us a place to put the evaluation where
they are clear and safe and easy for anyone to access.

28. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Internet
The internet was the most helpful during the research and planning stage of the course. The internet gave us
things that otherwise would have taken a long time and been a lot more difficult. We got all of our statistics,
facts and the project website from the internet, without the internet it would have been much more difficult
and possibly less accurate because although books have people who look out for mistakes and inaccuracies in it
things do get missed and books take a long time to be published and distributed which means they are starting
to be outdated as soon as they become available whereas although the internet can be edited by anyone we
checked our sources with other reputable websites and because it is instant to upload and update the
information is up to date most of the time. It also allowed us to access newspaper articles from the past which
would manually have been impossible because the newspapers are no longer available and would have taken
too much time to look through at every article to hopefully find one on our topic. We could also access other
documentaries online, we found general documentaries for the codes and conventions on YouTube and Netflix,
the ones that we used the most, the ones on our topics or aimed at our target audience were all found on
YouTube and would have otherwise been unavailable to us. We also used Facebook and Twitter to keep in
contact with each other it allowed us to discuss the work and plan on what we still had to do and who would
do those things rather than having to wait until we saw each other in person which only happened during the
media lessons.

29. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Final Cut Express
We used final cut express for all of the editing of both the documentary and the trailer. In final cut we were
able to change the sound levels throughout both products (done via the pen tool on the tool bar) and synch
the sound to the video so that everything was clear and understandable for the audience and listeners and
make the voice and visuals match (done by sliding the audio to the correct place on the timeline). Another
thing we used final cut for was to add the text into the video so we could give information or the name/job
title of the people we interviewed. It was also used to transition through the documentary this makes it flow
better and make it easier for people to watch the video because it is not all straight cuts from one shot to the
other. Final cut was the best way to edit the documentary and the radio trailer because it is easy to get the clips
on to the programme and it was easy to use and simple to work with. One other thing we used it for was to
remove background noise from some of the clips if we thought that it was too distracting for the audience to
pay attention to what is being said in the main footage, but it also allowed us to cut away from the main
footage to background footage that we thought fit in with what was being said. Finally we used it because it
was easy to export the finished products when we needed to.

30. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Garage Band
We used garage band to make the music it was a useful tool to make music because of all of the variety of
different things you can get on there so you can make music for anything, we chose to make it because we had
an idea about the music that we wanted and the other options available to us were not as good as the idea of
making the music we thought would work the best. When the music was done it was easy to export it from the
programme and put it into the documentary.

31. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
InDesign
InDesign was the main tool used for the magazine. We used to create the final piece. It was used to put in and
move the pictures to exactly where we wanted them, change the title of the article to make it more interesting
and more aesthetically pleasing and we highlighted the key parts of the pull quotes to emphasise the point and
catch the audiences eyes. The main text was originally done in a word document for the spell and grammar
check before we put it into InDesign and the photograph of the left page was edited in Photoshop then
transferred over.

32. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Photoshop
Photoshop was used for the editing of the picture on the left hand page. To make it fit better on the page and
to make it fit in more so it looks like it belongs on the page, we edited out the background so we just had the
person. This was done with the lasso tool to go around the outline of the picture and delete what we didn’t
want on the picture.

33. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
PowerPoint/Word
PowerPoint was used for the evaluation because it makes everything compact and easy to get through and
takes you through step by step unlike if it was done on a word document where it will be more like a block of
big information. Word documents were used in the planning stage and the creative stage. In the planning stage
we used it for the scripts of both the documentary and the trailer because it was the easiest way to write the
scripts out properly and make sure the grammar of it was correct because of the inbuilt spelling and grammar
check function. We also used it in the creative stage for the magazine to write the main article for similar
reasons to why we used it for the script, it was a quick and easy way to check the spelling and grammar of the
text before we put it into the final magazine article

34. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
SlideShare
SlideShare was used just for the uploading of the evaluation on to the blog because it is easy to use and fast
and allows you to embed the slideshow into the blog to make it easier for all involved and it is in a safe and
easy to find place.