In what way does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In our film we decided to follow a generally simple, conventional format to keep the interview flowing and to keep viewers engaged. As a group we decided that our film should not b one long continuous prose in an interview “back an forth” format, therefore we concluded that the best method to avoid this monotonic style was to use features such as cut away scenes, and also the extensive use of voiceovers, to keep the interview progressing, but keeping the information and subject clear. We took on board examples from other documentaries featuring interviews such as: Louis Theroux, Interviews. Below is a link to illustrate the point.

How effective is the combination of your main product ancillary texts?

We felt our ancillary products, our poster and radio spot, should depict a band we a certain degree of fame yet it is more that of infamy than a legitimate fame, we also wanted to portray a distinct story arc that could be followed from the opening titles of a “Jam session” to the closing of the film wherein you learn that stories of the band splitting up an “tabloid infamy” which we felt could draw viewers in through portraying the band as rough and uncultured.

Our radio advert has been described as our weakest effort within the project due to Josh and Liam losing focus as they felt we had finished our project and we could move on. Nevertheless our effort was a commendable one and we all agreed it was the best we could do for such short notice. I personally suggested the dialogue and theme for the advert, I drew heavily on the advert used by the ministry of defence and there recruiting drives as I felt this style was concise yet engaging and also gave vital information in a short period of time. Below is a link to the MOD advert as an example.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Although our audience feedback was rough and slightly less accurate than we had hoped for most was positive with few criticisms, comments from peers were extremely positive as was feedback on YouTube and through word of mouth within our group at college. Tutors also felt it was a strong effort. We learnt that perhaps our organisation techniques regarding the collection of audience feedback could have been better as we felt that some reviews could have been kind words between friends yet the time scale we had really limited our opportunity to show our film to a wider span of people to gauge a genuine reaction to the film.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The technology used within our project was the key point to our success as we all felt we got to grips with the technology really well and used this fact to our advantage. Throughout the project our repeated use of the technology provided helped improve our film vastly. Below are some of the items we used

Zoom Recorded: We used this extensively within the planning stages and also within our ancillary product as this was the item we used to record our radio advert. It gave a clear and good quality of sound and did not disappoint us with its results.

Sony HVR - HD1000U – This is the camera we used to film our project, as I took charge of the camera work I had to get to grips with the functions and working of it as it was much more technically advanced than the cameras we used in our AS year, yet I felt that I got some really good use from the product and that it gave a fantastic quality of picture and was extremely versatile when it needed to be.

Blogger – The website blogger was the key part of our project; it bound everything together and served the purpose of eliminating easily lost or ruined paper work. We could also monitor each other progress and give constructive criticism where needed as it is easily editable, I felt as a group we really got to grips with blogger and utilized it well.

Garage Band – I think we all found garage band a slightly daunting piece of technology at first, it was a complicated program, but given the time scale we had and the experience with the program we managed to present an, if not fantastic, acceptable radio advert we felt was strong.

Final-cut Pro – Was our main program that we used to edit our film as a group we all contributed ideas to the editing process but I felt Liam really learnt how to use the program well and he really managed to give a good effort in the editing even on such a complicated piece of software.

In what ways does media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our documentary follows a very conventional format. I know this because I researched and watched a lot of music documentaries so I had an idea of how to set the documentary. Since our documentary is based on an interview with a band, we based basically our entire documentary on the interview and worked around this adding other smaller interviews and a section on the bands first gig. To do this I had to work hard on editing the film to get the continuity right. It was easy to keep continuity during filming as most of our filming was done on the same day so this made it easy as we did not need to change clothing or anything. When editing the footage we did it in a way which most documentaries do, when the interviewer was asking the question we had the camera on him and when the band replied we had their reaction, we used this technique because it is very conventional in this style of documentary. We used a lot of techniques to make our documentary look legitimate such as cross cutting which is used in a lot of documentaries and is a nice feature. Another very conventional technique we used was voiceover which was used in all the documentaries I watched which included ‘newsnight: with Pete Doherty’. The voiceover helps make the documentary flow and give the audience more in depth information. We used the voiceover a lot in our documentary, we used it to give information about who was in the film, locations and used all round information about the band. We also used text on the screen to introduce people and locations. A very conventional method used in lots of documentaries so it saves time explaining who or where it is to the audience. We also tried to give our documentary a vintage feel, and make it a bit rough looking to give it a more aged and intimate feeling. We based our interview on ‘Newsnight: with Peter Doherty’ which has a very similar layout to ours. We used the same type of shots and tried to get the same type of intimate feeling to the documentary. We tried to give our documentary the same type of feeling by using similar shots and camera angles.


How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary tasks?
I think our poster which myself and Liam designed, Liam did the final design but we both had the same idea. The idea we were both going for was an aged type of feel. We found some old Polaroid images on the internet and edited our pictures into the Polaroid which gave it an aged feeling. We then made it look as if it were pinned to a pin board which was a very nice touch. I think that this poster shows the style we were aiming for. We had to show what channel it was going to be aired on and what time and we did this by adding logos and also purple tape which made it look like similar posters from channel 4.

I think this would be more successful in promoting our film rather than the radio interview. This is because during the editing process Jacob who was in our group rarely turned up and this gave Liam and myself a lot bigger work load and so made it a lot harder to do everything. The radio advert was rushed and so doesn’t sound as good as we had wished but since I had most input I tried my hardest to get it sounding good in the time we had left. We used dialogue from our documentary in our radio trailer. I ended our radio trailer with the day and time of our documentary and then cut the music and said ‘only on 4’ which gives information about the channel and this is also what channel 4 do on most of the documentaries.


I looked at a lot of film posters to get ideas. I realised that the style of most documentary posters were very simple and so we tried to recreate this simplicity in our poster. This poster is simple and just gets straight to the point and just gives the relevant information and just reviews of the film

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We struggled with audience feedback from the very beginning. We did a questionnaire which our fellow students filled out this, this is because they were the age of our target audience. Jacob did the questionnaire but did not get any results and as time went on they were not getting done, so I had to go around and do this myself even though it was not my task. From this feedback I found a lot of information about what channel people thought our documentary should be on and what type of documentaries people watch. Our target audience was people aged between 16-25 and so it was easy to make the documentary as we fall into this age range and so we found it easier to make. We didn’t get as much audience feedback on our film as I would have liked. This is because since it was basically Liam and myself doing all the work we struggled with time, but we did ask some of our friends to watch our film and ask them what they thought. Most of them liked the film and said that it was very well planned and liked the fact that there was actual footage of the band playing and giving lots of personal information about the band, where they grew up and asking them personal questions. They also said that we maybe should have had more camera angles and close ups but all round they enjoyed the film.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During this project we used a lot of technology, from the first day when we used the camcorders up until the last when we were using the internet and macs’.
We used the camera HDV1000 camera which were a lot better and bigger than the cameras we used in our AS project. They were a lot easier to use and we got a lot better picture from these than we did in the first year
When we had finished filming our project we transferred it to the iMac in which we used the programme ‘Final Cut’. Final cut was very easy to use compared to iMovie. We used final cut to edit our film together and we also cut up audio clips of the band performing and merged this onto the start up sequence

We used a Zoom recorder to record our voiceover and we did this specifically for our radio trailer also
We used garage band to make our radio trailer. We imported some of our voiceovers and added them to the radio trailer. We added sounds and effects to our radio trailer using garage band to make it sound better

. I used blogger to update all of our work and keep a log on everything we have been doing. This was probably the most important thing we used as it has saved a lot of time, and it is a lot easier than writing all of our work out and it also cannot be lost as easily as written work can be.

We used youtube to upload our film and our radio trailer so that we could upload it to blogger and also so that people can watch our film. I also used youtube to research documentaries.

our radio interview

Our Final Film

Here is our completed project which we have hosted on youtube.

The Rise of: The Wild Horses

Critically Evaluating my Final Video Production: Liam Augur

In what way does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I think our media product follows quite strict conventional forms in terms of the typical documentary format. For example, lots of media products we looked at in research stages include parallel editing/cross cutting, we have used this conventional technique to illustrate what is being mentioned by the actors in the documentary, it also works to make the scene more interesting; to variate the shots. A good example of this technique is about 2:56 minutes into our film, and likewise about 8:16 into the documentary Who The F is Pete Doherty a similar ideas is used.

We have also taken on board conventions from wider genres of documentary such as: a separately recorded voiceover used as a narrating voice, frequent use of dissolve style effects on short footage key to the documentary and lots of editing in text to introduce characters (like below).

Taken from the BBC documentary "The Last of The Hitlers" (2006)

How effective is the combination of your main product ancillary texts?

In our documentary and ancillary texts (poster and radio advert) we tried to get across the image of a rough, notorious band in the midst of their fame. The documentary follows them in almost generic and slightly "fly on the wall" manner, which we all agreed was the best way to showcase our project. We have tried to theme everything around the idea of an almost dirty and maybe even nostalgic band, and I think this is easily reflected in the genre of music the band play.

I think the two ancillary texts would be very successful in helping selling our production, more so the poster if any. Everybody i have shown our poster to, was very impressed and i myself, was very proud of the final outcome. It it simple, eye-catching, relevant and only the key information is display, which makes it ideal for an advert. I think our radio advert was the weakest out of the two tasks, mainly down to the fact that we were running out of time and it was slightly rushed. Nevertheless, it turned out alright, Josh had the most input on this task and he did really well.

Here is our finished poster, which we took inspiration from many things, but we still had to keep in mind the fact it was shown on channel 4, and their advert all follow similar themes like the dispatches poster below. I made sure the channel 4 logo was large and a focus point on the advert like many of the real posters. I used very little text, just the bare essential, which is key in channel 4 advertising. A web address is usually visible on the more recent adverts, and i have also applied this idea. The hard part was making it look genuine, because obviously we could not use the proper advertising templates for channel 4 because of copyright.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I think even from the beginning, in the planning stages, there were aspects of audience feedback we could have improved. A audience questionnaire and interpreting the results was one of the initial jobs we assigned to Jacob, but he never turned up to lesson which meant this process was delayed and myself and Josh had the job he didn't do. This delay also meant the results weren't as accurate as they could be. This audience questionnaire was crucial to obtain information our production depended on such as: the audiences preferred channel, preferred genre of documentary and other background information.

We aired our film on youtube in order to gain audience feedback, which was pretty poor and rather a last minute decision. The overall reaction we got from the film was positive, whether that be friends being polite or actually genuine was a different matter. We should have showed our film to an audience of strangers and then given them a questionnaire to complete, this way the feedback would have been accurate. On the other hand though, the film isn't set to a private profile on youtube so potentially anybody could view it, therefore the real feedback could be in months to come. General comments we got were that film was a good concept and brilliant idea but lacked variation and could do with more footage.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Technology played a major role in every single aspect of this project, it was unavoidable but nearly always worked to our advantage. Here is the equipment we used:

Zoom Recorder - This was used in the post-production stage, when the editing was sufficient enough to add a voice over to.

Sony HVR - HD1000U - This is the video camera we used to film our project on during the production stages. The new piece of technology was hard to use at first, as it was more advanced than the camera we used at AS, but Jacob Gill in our group knew best how to set it up and use it without any problems. I would have liked to experiment with different cameras and techniques before we started this years project but i know this wasn't possible due to the financial limit our college has. It would have been nice to film some of our project with old camera, as i think this would put a nice independent edge on things.

Blogger - This was a vital piece of technology throughout all stages of our project. Using a internet blog meant nothing was lost, everything to some extend was organised and most of all it was easy to control each members contribution to the project. When it came to such tasks as planning and evaluating, all our progress was logged on this one webpage; therefore we could easily assess what we had done and plan what we needed to. We used the blog like a diary because it was so accessible and i think it proved very useful in this project.

Garage Band - We used this programme to create our radio advert, which was one half of our ancillary tasks. Out of the two i found this the hardest, it was interesting and i enjoyed it but we were quite behind schedule and we all found the programme quite complicated. It didn't seem to have anything we really wanted to included in our advert and we found cutting and converting sound clips from our film a very long-winded process.

Final-cut Pro - Is the software we used to editing our video footage, this again like the new camera, was more advanced than the software we used at AS level, but after we learn how to use it properly it gave us a better outcome than we would have acheived with "imovie".

Questionnaire Results double click each picture to see larger (starts at bottom)

Script for Radio Advert: Liam Augur & Jacob Gill

The Rise of...The Wild Horses

MUSIC:	Clips of music from the documentary up to and after dialogue (approx 10 secs each, fade in/out)
ANNCR:	The Highs. The Lows. The Women. The Drugs. The Music. The Lifestyle. The Rise and Fall of the Wild Horses. Tuesday at 9 only on 4.
SFX:	None