1. How Did You Use
Media Technologies in
the Construction and
Research, Planning
and Evaluation Stages?
2. Research
To research the depth of the genre which is documentary, we each decided to use a
range of platforms such as Netflix, YouTube and television channels such as BBC3
(which is now online), to watch a range of documentaries like Catfish, Making a
Murderer and Reggie Yates Extreme Britain, and take notes on the codes and
conventions used within them.
We also used the website IMDb when looking into different documentary directors
which we felt we could take inspiration from on our own.
For every aspect of our documentary, we did some kind of research into it to make
sure we were being accurate, like when we were choosing a date and channel to
broadcast the programme, and what kind of documentaries use a voice-over as we
did not want to include one if it were not necessary to do so.
I also created a survey on surveymonkey.com, which allowed for us to get a
potential target audience, and get initial feedback whilst we were in the planning/
research stage of what type of audience like documentaries which are semi-
autobiographical, which was extremely useful when actually carrying out the final
product.
3. Planning
When planning our documentary and ancillary texts, we looked into which
editing software to use, where we concluded with IMovie, as well as which music
to use which resulted in MGMT – KIDS; how to create a magazine spread
(LucidPress), a newspaper advert (Publisher) and finally the radio advert, which
ended up being created on SoundCloud. We did our initial planning of this, so
that we were somewhat prepared and had some idea as to what to do before we
started creating these products.
Our planning included looking into a number of magazines/newspapers, as well
as ones that could be created online, and also watching videos on YouTube of
other people's documentaries to see what their finished documentary looked like
with what editing software they chose to use. This was very helpful because
after comparing, we found what we thought would be the best for our product
as there were many different templates and styles we could have used that best
suited it.
Researching into the ancillary tasks, I listened to different radio adverts on
YouTube, read different gossip magazines such as OK! Magazine, and researched
into different social media platforms, and what type of posts would be written
on those pages.
4. Construction of the Documentary
For the construction of our products, we filmed on a Canon EOS 700D as well as
gathering a few other shots on an iPhone 6 - this was so we could gather shots
that we had not necessarily planned, and therefore made it so we could easily
access the phone to get improvised shots.
As previously stated, the editing was done on an iMac after much research and
planning into what type of software to use, concluding with IMovie. The
construction of the main product took a while and included a lot of media
technologies, such as YouTube - for gathering the background music, extracts of
Charlotte Crosby’s interview on This Morning and although we planned out how
long we wanted to spend on editing, we kept adding to it and changing styles to
make it better and therefore the time we took editing did go on longer.
We also used the BLUE Snowball Microphone to record the voice overs which
allowed for crisp sound quality, which is something we had never used before, but
were extremely pleased with
5. Evaluation
Within the evaluation stage, we used technologies such as Twitter, Facebook
and YouTube which allow the audience to share, favourite, like and comment
on the link - which was what people did with our product, making it very
simple to gather instant feedback. However I did also manage to gather
feedback from iMessage on iPhone and Facebook messenger also which again
aided with instant feedback, which helped towards the evaluation of our
products.
With each of these stages of researching, planning etc. we were able to
document it all onto this site www.blogger.co.uk, which is a very helpful way
to chronologically view the work we have done, through both the use of text
and imagery.
