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".
