A2 MEDIA STUDIES: COURSEWORK EVALUATION

EDUCATION: QUESTIONING THE QUALITY.

Jake Harborne.

QUESTIONS ONE AND TWO

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our documentary presents information based on factual topics, ours being the topic of education. This is a standard use of conventions of a documentary, along with this and many other conventions, we tried to make our documentary as professional as possible.

Bill Nicholls (2001) developed the theory of documentary modes, where seeks to distinguish particular traits and conventions of various documentary film styles. Nichols identifies six different documentary 'modes' in his schema: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative. Poetic mode stresses mood and tone more than displays of knowledge or acts of persuasion, while the expository mode address the viewer directly, with titles or voice overs. Our documentary uses the expository mode as we use a voice over to interact with viewers providing facts and opinions on our chosen topic. The participatory and performative modes are extremely similar as they both feature the narrator/ filmmaker being present within the documentary For example Supersize Me is an excellent example of this, as Morgan Spurlock appears in his own work to provide his opinions as he is also the subject of his documentary, showing how harmful fast foods can be.

Our documentary makes use of the expository mode as we used a voice over to advance our views on the education system and we collected footage to strengthen the narrative points. An example of this mode in our documentary can be seen with the line, “The National Union of Teachers is a trade union for school teachers in England that, like Alison, believes academies have a damaging impact on children and teachers” where we provide the opinion of one of our expert interviewees and develop upon it.

For the standard codes and conventions of television documentaries we looked at other existing documentaries, enabling us to research and plan what we would need to do. Documentaries we looked at include Supersize Me, Jamie’s Dream School and Educating Essex.

Documentary

Educating Essex Documentary

Supersize Me Documentary

Jamie’s Dream School Documentary

Our Documentary

We have used a voice over which is another standard convention as the film maker/ narrator can speak directly to the viewer, offering information, explanations and opinions. Our voice over is used to give information to our audience with facts and opinions on the topic of education. We have also used expert interviews to authenticate views expressed in the documentary with an example being Alison Spicer from Colemore infant school, in our documentary. To follow normal documentary conventions we kept the mise-en-scene relevant with the expert interview with Alison being in her office, Spurlock also used this convention as it featured an interview with a lawyer whose desk was covered with paper work and files.

Jamie’s dream school is another documentary that we looked at to get more understanding of the conventions of television documentaries. In this documentary vox pops are used to ask students about their feelings on GCSE’s and how many they achieved, some responses were “I’ve got no GCSE’s, it makes me feel stupid”. Vox pops are interviews with the general public, sharing their views on the discussed topic. As we based our topic on education we used Vox pops of college students to get their opinion across to an audience who are interested in the education system. We found Jamie’s dream school to be relevant to our documentary as they were on similar topic areas.

Another convention that we followed was the use of tripods when filming, this was to create steady shots and allows use to use skills such as panning and zooming. We used these techniques when filming establishing shots and when filming interviews.

Documentary

Vox pop in Jamie’s Dream SchoolsVox pop in our

documentary

Expert interview in our documentary

Here is a standard tripod similar to the one we used

when making our documentary

Documentary

Sound is a key factor in documentaries as it includes background music, voice over, diegetic and non diegetic music. In Educating Essex a voice over is used, like most documentaries, to provide extra additional information to the viewer such as the line “Steven Drew has been the schools deputy head for the past three years”. Voice overs are an excellent way in making the audience feel more connected to the documentary and we opted to do this for our project.

All of the documentaries that we looked at contained some form of backing music, however they used copyrighted songs as backing tracks such as ‘Fat bottomed girls’ by Queen in Supersize Me. We were not allowed to use copyrighted songs for our documentary so we used a programme called ‘Garage Bend’ on apple macs. This software provides simple beats and notes . We chose the track and had it repeated through the documentary. Looking back on our documentary we could have made the sound levels of the background music quieter so the voice over was more clear, we could also used more sounds from Garage Band.

Like Morgan Spurlock’s documentary ‘Supersize Me’ we have used graphics, montages of pictures, voice over, interviews with experts, Vox pops and found footage. Spurlock used the conventions of graphics and montage pictures, to appeal to the audience and to emphasise on points made in the documentary. This is shown when facts and figures are used, “60% of Americans are obese” with the visual element being shown on a map as a graphic. As a group we developed on this by using a montage of pictures appearing on the screen to link with the information being said in the voice over. We also used special effects in our documentary as we changed the speed of one of our clips of college students walking into college. To do this we had to change the speed time of the clip in final cut express .

Here is an example of one of our voice over clips used in our documentary which was

recorded with microphones and headphones and imported into final cut express.

Graphics seen in Supersize Me

Montage and special effects seen in our documentary

Garage band software

Double Page Spread

For our final double page spread, we decided to publish it in the magazine ‘What’s on TV’. To get an idea of the conventions for double page spreads we first looked at many different professional magazines. These ranged from ‘Radio times’, ‘TV Choice’, and ‘What's on TV’. Each of these products had very similar conventions but as our audience was for students and parents we decided that ‘What’s on TV’ would be the most appropriate for our double page spread.

We found out that most magazine articles feature more than one picture. These tend to be stills or shots from the documentary, illustrating what is being said in the article. We decided to provide images from our montage scene in the documentary along with a photograph of a student working. Captions are always used with images, to provide explanations for what is going on in the photo or who is involved.

Here are examples of the ranges of magazines we looked at and a standard article from

‘What’s on TV’.

To the right is our double page spread we created and the use of a caption.

Double Page Spread

The headline/ title of the page is called a masthead and is always used in magazines and even newspapers. We decided to have our masthead as a rhetorical question ‘Is it good enough?’, this links to our title of our documentary ‘Education: Questioning the Quality’ and makes the reader think more deeply about our double page spread and documentary.

At the beginning of the text in magazine articles, a drop cap is nearly always used and we decided to follow this convention as it makes our double page spread look more professional.

Articles are always written up in columns of about two or three, which is why we decided to write up our double page spreads article in columns talking about our television documentary.

The date, time, channel and name of the programme is often an important convention in a magazine and ours is no different as we featured it at the start of the article. I like the way we have done this as to make it look professional we made it identical to the ones featured in ‘What’s on TV’, which is the magazine that we are using to publish our double page spread.

An example of a drop cap that we used in our double page

spread.

Our version of the name of programme, date, time and

channel.

‘What’s on TV’ version of the name of programme, date,

time and channel.

Columns used in our double page spread.

Double Page SpreadHere is our final double page

spread.

Radio Trail

For our radio trail we first listened to a variety of different existing radio trails to get an idea of the common conventions for them. Many of these radio trails lasted between 30 and 40 seconds and we have kept to this standard convention by having our radio trail lasting between those two numbers giving us an ideal length of time for a radio trail.

We used the same voice over throughout the documentary and the radio trail so that the view recognises the person speaking to them, creating a connection to the audience. Being on the topic of education, our documentary was aimed at students and parents and to keep the student viewers from getting to bored we offered a wide range of music in the trail to keep them interested and to help pull in the listener and try to get them wanting to see the television documentary.

All radio trails feature the time, date and channel of the documentary and ours was no exception as we said at the end “Tune in this Thursday 8pm on Channel 4”. To help associate the radio trail with our documentary we also included a sound of a school bell ringing at the start of the trail, this sound also alerts the listener as it is something different and grabs their attention.

We also used clips from our own documentary within the radio trail with the use of our student Vox pops and the footage of David Cameron speaking about his views on academies. This is to help link the trailer to the documentary and the Vox pops provide the listener with other opinions about education from the questions that are asked in the radio trail.

Above is an image showing the variety of music that is

available to us to use in garage band.

Below is the audio of footage taken from our documentary

that we used in our radio trail.

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Along with our television documentary we also created a radio trail and a magazine double page spread. These two products went with our documentary in order to sell, promote and advertise the documentary to our target audience.

Our documentary was specifically aimed at teenagers and up to the age of middle-aged adults who have children. Our aim was to inform them of the problems with education and how todays education system operates. We also wanted to educating the target audience on how students felt about the current education system . The documentary is aimed at both males and females to make the audience broader. It’s also directed at the working class of people, who send their children to public schools. Our documentary is not targeted to a specific religion, race or disability.

Psychographic profiles define people’s lifestyles and characteristics, which was created by the advertising agency ‘Young and Rudical’, called the Cross Cultural Consumer Characterization. In our documentary we targeted mainly the mainstreamers and the succeeders. The mainstreamer’s are people, who like to live an ordinary life, no money issues and find their best possible futures. The succeeder is someone that wants to do well in life, by setting themselves goals they want to achieve throughout life. Like students, they aim to pass exams and move up in the world to become whatever they want to be. These would be a good choice for our documentary as it is designed to inform people of the problems, which would appeal to the mainstreamers. Furthermore, the problems raised in our documentary should also inspire the succeeders to make changes to the current education system.

Both the radio trail and magazine double page spread that we created feature clips from our documentary, which helps in the combination of our main task and ancillary tasks.

Radio Trail

When looking at radio trails we first listened to many different advertisement trailers, which would be similar to the one we had to create. Nearly all of these trailers featured some of the clips taken from the show/documentary, so in order to make ours more professional we did the same by using vox pops and found footage in our documentary. This would make the listener more interested in the documentary as they get an understanding of what our documentary will be like and what they can expect from it.

To make the radio trailer even more authentic we added background music which was common in all the radio trails that we looked at. We decided to use an up-beat so that it doesn’t come across as being boring and to make it more appealing to the younger ages of our target audience. We had to use the clips on GarageBand and compiled different beats to make a catchy tune which would fit in with our documentary while keeping our audience interested. We found that this would also be useful, to make the radio trail even more memorable so that it helps sell the documentary to our target audience. As our theme was one of education we also decided to add a school bell ringing at the beginning of our radio trail. This alerts the listener to our radio trail, while also linking to our topic choice and our documentary.

We found that BBC Radio 1 would be the best choice for our radio trailer to be hosted on. According to the RAJAR figures, BBC radio overall is the most listened to over all of its stations. By putting our radio trailer on Radio 1,this would mean it would also be played on all the other BBC stations and attract a more variety of people. As well as this, Radio 1 also reaches out to people all over the UK making it one of the most listened to radio stations. Radio 1 attracts loads of listeners from our target audience as the show features popular shows such as the top 40 singles in the UK, and if our radio trail was played on this show it would boost the number of potential listeners who would then go on to watch our documentary. BBC Radio 1 can be listened to anywhere as it is also digital, meaning people can listen to it on the internet or on catch up. Radio 1 is a great choice as it also means we attract our age group of the target audience as Radio 1’s listeners, on average, range from 16-32 years old, which would easily cover the age of which our documentary is aimed at as it covers students and adults that have children.

Double Page Spread

While creating our double page spread, we used a variety of different techniques in order to link our magazine article with our television documentary. We used images from our montage scene within the double page spread as in most professional magazines images are taken from the programme in order to illustrate what is being said in the article, while giving the reader a sneak peak at what is in the documentary and what it is about.

We decided to use ‘What’s on TV’ magazine as our publisher because it consisted bright colourful images and texts, which is more appealing to the audience as it stands out more from less vivid magazines such as the Radio Times. We found that the Radio Times to be dull and expensive, which would put our target audience off. Therefore we chose a cheaper more eye-catching magazine to feature our double page spread., meaning that we have a higher chance of reaching out to our target audience. Other than the formal appearance of the Radio times and its price, What’s on TV is also more popular with an overall readership of 3,529,000, making it the second most popular television magazine to TV Choice. We decided to use ‘What’s on TV’ as our publisher as we thought it offered a high quality TV listings without being too expensive or cheap.

What’s on TV also contains articles over many different channels, tending to be the main five channels (BBC1,BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and FIVE). As our documentary is going to be aired on Channel 4, we found that it was much more relevant to have our double page spread in this magazine.

Here is an example of one of the images we took from our documentary and put it into

our double page spread.

In order to create our main product and ancillary tasks, we

used Final Cut Express, GarageBand and InDesign.