CODES AND CONVENTIONS OF MY DOCUMENTARY

Question 1

Research

At the start of coursework we watched 3 documentaries as a class and researched 2 of our own. We listed down all the codes and conventions that each documentary possessed so that we could become familiar with the codes and conventions when creating our media product. We looked at ‘The Music Biz’, ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’ and ‘That Thing: Lara Croft’. Then in my own time I looked at ‘Married to the Job’ and ‘24 hours in A&E’. All of these documentaries have a single narrative structure which reflects the documentaries we have made.

Sound

For our documentary we used a voiceover, we decided to pick a male to do our voiceover to relate to the saying that dog’s are mans best friend. We also thought that the voiceover should be clear, standard English and easy to understand, I think we achieved this. The voiceover kept an unbiased opinion throughout the documentary, the voiceover helped the point of the documentary which was to understand how dogs have affected our lives, to keep an unbiased opinion we used facts that we found out during our secondary research. During our title sequence we used the song “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley; we used this as it related well to our documentary as well as the music is well known, catchy and dramatic.

Interviews

We created a mixed documentary, which we asked lots of different people to participate in interviews so our documentary was varied. For our documentary we used lots of different camera shots, we used a medium close up/close up for our interviews so the audience could clearly see the interviewee. We added white graphics in the corners of the interview introducing the interviewee to the audience which follows codes and conventions, the graphics are clear and easy to read.

Interviews (continued)

We followed the rule of thirds for our interviews. When we researched the codes and conventions we noticed that no matter what camera shot was used, the interviewee’s eyes are always a third down the screen.

Another code and convention is that the interviewee’s are on

the left or right hand of the screen.

Interviews (continued)

We made sure during our interviews that the direction of the interviewee’s eye line is always directly across the frame and at the interviewer. In the left image below shows an example. The interviewee is looking towards the right where-as on the left, the interviewee is looking to the right at the interviewer.

Mise-en-scene

Mise-en-scene is an important code and convention. The mise-en-scene represents what the interview is about and should always display something relevant. For our documentary we used dog toys, dogs and photographs for our mise-en-scene.

Cutaways

Cutaways are another important code and convention, they hide jump cuts so that the interview runs smoothly. We varied our shot type and subjects as we wanted to display a variety of cutaways to keep the audience interested as well as make the cutaways reflect what the interviewee is saying.

Editing

Mostly our editing consisted of conventionally used straight cuts, this made the documentary run smoothly as the cuts were so fast that the audience rarely ever notices the cut which makes the documentary more professional and runs much more easily than adding any other cut. However we did use a fade out at the end of the 5 minutes and at the end of the title sequence.

Editing (continued)

When editing our interviews we also edited some of our interviews. We found that we initially had too much space in the background so we enlarged the frame.

AfterBefore

Archive Footage

We included some archive footage that related to what our interviewee was saying. We used archive footage when the interviewee mentioned something that we had no footage of. For example, the groomer mentioned breeding Cavalier King Charles Spaniel’s so we included archive footage of some puppies.