Advanced Portfolio Evaluation

1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge codes and conventions of real media conventions?
Our brief was to create a 5 minute introduction to a 30 minute or hour long documentary. In our documentary our voice over spoke directly to the viewer, this was necessary as we wanted to encourage the audience to act and speak out if they knew of someone being bullied or were being bullied themselves. When doing such a serious documentary you have to be careful not to make it look like you support bullying so you have to really find evidence to back up your reasons for condemning something. In my group we all had ideas about the topic of bullying and how we could create a documentary about such a sensitive subject. We started off the process by creating a mind map of ideas for the documentary and our general knowledge of bullying. After brainstorming and coming up with ideas for our documentary and discussing what type of bullying problems we would discuss in our documentary. To help give us ideas on how to make our documentary look and how it should be presented we watched the documentary Super Size Me. This gave us an idea of the type of camera angles we needed to use when interviewing and gave us an idea of how a documentary should look and how to find a balance between vox pops and expert interviews. It also gave us an idea of how to do our voice over and how to present it. To get an idea of what people wanted to see in documentaries we created a questionnaire. This was a big help as we were able to ask people in our class and other people outside of college that fit the target audience of the channel we said our documentary would broadcast on. Because of the topic and the style of the documentary we decided that it would be best to choose BBC 3 to have our documentary on, there target audience is the 16-34 age group.

This is what our questionnaire looked like:

Please could you take a few minutes to complete our questionnaire?

Have you ever been bullied? (Please tick) Yes [ ] No [ ] If yes please state when/how ________________________

Can you name 3 forms of bullying? 1. 2. 3.

Whose opinion on bullying would you value more? (Please tick two) Support worker [ ] Sociology teacher [ ] Academic Coach [ ] Psychology teacher [ ] Principle of a school/ college [ ]

How long would you be able to concentrate on an expert interview for? (Please tick) Under 10 seconds [ ] 11 20 seconds [ ] 21 30 seconds [ ] 31 40 seconds [ ] 41 + seconds [ ]

would you prefer to hear (please tick one) A narrator/ presenter [ ] A voice over [ ]

during the expert interview would you prefer (please tick one) Ambient sound (natural noises) [ ] Diegetic sound (music) [ ]

during the vox pops (public/random people) interviews would you prefer (Please tick one) Ambient sound (natural noises) [ ] Diegetic sound (music) [ ]

which one of these would you like to see the most of in our documentary? (Please tick two) Graphics [ ] Titles [ ] Interviews [ ] Statistics [ ] Footage [ ] Animations [ ] Music [ ]

What type of camera shots would you prefer for interviews Hand held [ ] Steady camera (based on a tripod) [ ]

What area of bullying are you most aware of? (Please tick two) Cyber bullying [ ] Bullying in the work place [ ] Sexual harassment [ ] Suicide and self harm [ ] Propaganda/stereotypes [ ]

Thank you for taking the time to complete this questionnaire.

When filming our documentary we had to consider the typical conventions of a documentary e.g. how interviews are filmed and what type of questions might be asked and what type of people we needed to interview for expert opinion. Small space above the head.

Medium Close Up Occupying just over half of the screen. Small space above the head.

Medium Close Up

Occupying just over half of the screen.

As you can see we tried to replicate the way professional interviews are done with the way we positioned the camera and the direction we had the person being interviewed look. One of the hardest tasks was getting the sound levels right for the documentary as we had to make sure they were consistent throughout the documentary. Because we did most of the sound levels with headphones they sounded different when played out loud so we had to do sound editing through the speakers rather than headphones as the speakers were more accurate and gave us a consistent sound.

As you can see we had to make sure the sound went well together, e.g. we had to make sure the music wasnt too loud so that you could here the voice over, but we didnt want the voice over too loud as well so we had to get it at the right level. From doing the levels on our documentary that helped us know what was appropriate for the radio trail. We also listened to real radio trails to see what ours needed to contain and too get an idea of what it needed too sound like.

This is what part of our radio trail looked like when we were editing it in garage band, as you can see we have a number of tracks. Just like a real radio trail we had a distinctive sound at the start of the trail and we incorporated clips from the documentary into the trail, I think this worked very well and gave a professional feel to it. We also ended the trail with a convention used by the BBC in which they advertise the fact you can catch up on there iplayer, we had this for our voice over and it was a nice touch to end the trail. The radio trail would have more than likely been on Radio 1 or Radio 1Xtra as that Stills from the covers are target documentary audiences age group.

A headline and a by-line containing information.

A Caption

A pull quote

A footer with the page number and name of the

This is the final version of our double page spread; it contains many conventions of a magazine spread. Like our radio trail our magazine follows most conventions. The only thing that goes against conventions is the fact our article isnt to text heavy which might be the case in a double page spread in a magazine. The magazine we would have had our double page spread n would have been the TV Times the reason for this was we felt in this magazine we would reach a large number of people who were in the age group we wanted to attract.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?
Personally I feel our three media products interconnect really well. Our radio trailer has clips from the documentary itself and the magazine article has still images from the documentary. The clips we used from the documentary for our radio trail were one with the principal and one from a vox pop I feel this was a good choice for the clips as it gives a real indication as to what the documentary will be about and what type of information it would contain. For our magazine article we took a still image from one of our expert interviews and an interview we did with students from the college. Once again I feel these pictures were the right choices as it makes it seem like the documentary had a balance between expert knowledge and also opinions from people who our viewing audience would be able to relate to.

We also made sure that our radio trail would be on an appropriate radio station. Our documentary

would have been shown on BBC three and there demographic is 1634 so it only made sense to make it so our radio trail would be broadcast on a radio station with a similar demographic so we chose BBC radio 1 and BBC radio 1Xtra, this also made sense as you would only hear a BBC show being advertised on a BBC radio station.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To collect our audience feedback we created a questionnaire for our classmates to fill in letting us know what they thought of our questionnaire and if it was any good.

We asked 20 people if they had been bullied before, over 50% of people said they had so we knew this would be a good subject to do as many people would be able to relate to it.

We also gave questionnaires to the 15 other people in our class so they could rate our media products and tell us what they thought. As you can see the feedback was quite positive as no one said any of our work was poor and for our documentary 13/15 said it was excellent which is really good. Overall we were very happy with the feedback we received as it was all mostly positive, which left us feeling very confident in what we had created.

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
When making our media products we used a wide range of technology and software to create the best products possible. We already knew how to use a lot of the technologies, but for some they were new to us so we had to learn how to use them. After a few lessons we had picked up the basics and every lesson got easier. One of the new things we used was blogger to document our progress and to upload any research or anything that related to our topic. I found it easy using blogger as I had used it before outside of college, if anything I just didnt post as much as I probably could have. The only issue with blogger is if you havent used it before it can be too complicated especially when dealing with HTML as someone new to the site would not know about changing the text box to compose or the HTML tab. For the documentary itself we used digital video recorders. They were good quality as all footage was of a high standard and the lighting adjustment settings on them were very useful.

This was my first time using these to record but it was quite straight forward and easy to use so there were no problems with the cameras. The only time there were problems were sometimes the tripods and microphones would play up and sometimes the headphones would play up but we always found a way around these problems. We had the most trouble with the microphones as some didnt pick up sound as well as others so that made doing the levels on final cut a little more difficult but nothing to hard that we couldnt solve. The equipment we used to get our documentary footage overall was very good though and was of a very high standard as it allowed us to produce a really good documentary in the end.

When editing and putting our documentary together we used final cut express, this programme was quite good the only issue is we had to use Apple Macs and being so used to a PC the switch to Apple Macs was difficult at times but we got used to how it worked and ended up working very well with the product. Uploading are footage to final cut was a very long process and not a very enjoyable job so I feel the programme could be made a lot simpler than what it is. When it came to making the double page spread any of us in the group were capable of using In design to create as we all know how to use it, but to save time we let Millie do the double page spread while we finished up the documentary and made the radio trail. In design can be a good programme at times but sometimes it can become a little bit annoying depending on what you want to do.

The radio trail was pretty straight forward to make as garage band is a simple programme to use and because we did our entire radio trail recording in one sitting the levels were easy to adjust so we didnt have to spend a lot of time sorting out how it sounded.

So as you can see the levels were pretty consistent and flowed very well in our documentary.