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

2. My media product which is a Five minute documentary does not
challenge or develop the forms and conventions, it uses the forms
and conventions as this is what works for the target audience. I have
used all forms and conventions in the documentary, the radio trailer
and the newspaper advert.
My documentary follows the forms and conventions of Documentary
Genre, and during the documentary there are interviews and these
interviews also follow forms and conventions, they follow the forms
and conventions of filming and editing interviews.

3. Our documentary follows the rule of including sound throughout. We
use a mixture of diegetic and non diegetic. The diegetic sound comes
from the interviews where the voice of the interviewee is what can be
heard at the time on the documentary, however for cutaways there is
also non diegetic sound but as cut away's are used during interviews
or in-between, the sound had to be muted so that the interviewee
could still be heard or so that the voice over could still be heard. We
also use non diegetic sound. This is the music bed we use in the
opening title sequence, this music bed also relates to milk as the
song itself is about milk.
● In the start of this BBC documentary about Africa it includes opening
titles and non diegetic sound to match.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/p010jc6r/
Similarly in my documentary the
opening titles are accompanied by a
music bed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrJUUJDFTdg

4. During a documentary there could include a person who is filmed who
tells the audience about the documentary, however some
documentaries just have a voice over where the speaker can't be seen.
This is called 'Voice of God'. We used voice of God in our documentary
to accompany our filming and cut aways.
During this BBC documentary
called Nature's wildest events
there is voice of God used
when showing footage.
When my documentary includes cut
aways such as milk vans there is a voice
over which is explaining why it is shown.

5. Almost all documentaries must have an exposition. This Is the main
reason for a documentary. This is where the documentary includes
conflict and makes the audience raise questions.
As our documentary is mainly about milk prices the conflict raised is
whether milk will become really expensive, whether it will become
cheap again or whether cattle farmers will carry on producing milk as
they do not earn enough money.

6. Mise en scene is also important for
documentaries as they have to be relevant to
the documentary topic. For example all of our
cut aways are of milk or relate to milk in some
way, we would not include cut aways of
mangos and lemons as that would be
irrelevant to the theme of the documentary.

7. The lighting in a documentary must not seem too unrealistic, for
example in a dark room with only a camera light. In our interviews we
did them all in day light so that the natural light from outside could
come in through the windows and also the lights inside the room
could light up the rest of the room so that nothing in the mise en
scene was blacked out or blurry.

8. Documentaries can also include archive footage if the footage could
not have been filmed by themselves usually in a documentary that is
historically themed, we included some archive footage throughout our
documentary.

9. Documentaries are factual therefore information included can
not be lies. All our information was truthful, with information
from websites and information we found out ourselves from
questionnaires we made. For example we asked 20 people
what their favourite milk was, the answer with the highest vote
was semi skimmed therefore in our documentary we stated that
semi skimmed was the most popular amongst the people in our
survey.

10. Documentaries include a variety of different camera work
including shots and angles. In order to make the
documentary look more interesting we ranged our cut
aways so that they where different.
Close up
Over the shoulder shot
Tracking shot

11. Documentaries include interviews and we have included four
interviews in our five minutes. Each interview has a different theme
that relates to milk. The interview does not include the questions
asked just the answers the interviewee gives also if there is any
moment in the interview where they look at the camera or the camera
is zooming, this is where a cut away is placed over. For all our
interviews we have also followed the codes and conventions of
filming interviews for example all our interviewees are framed either
right or left and looking towards the opposite direction and at the
interviewer not at the camera, they are filmed in a medium shot and
they have appropriate mise en scene.

12. Documentaries also include graphics. We
included graphics on our interviews. We did this
to introduce the interviewees onto the screen
so that the audience gets an insight of their job
and who they are.