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Transcript of Rebecca Mendil Evaluation
8/7/2019 Rebecca Mendil Evaluation
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/rebecca-mendil-evaluation 1/12
Media Evaluation – Becki Mendil
1
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media
products?
For my media product, I have worked within a group to produce a documentary. We chose to base it on
Cosmetic Procedures and to broadcast it on BBC3, a channel which we felt would be most appropriate to show
the documentary, with an interested audience.
Before we started making our media product, we watched a variety of documentaries of which we picked out
the main conventions, such as; actuality, exposition, montage, voiceover, interviews, archival footage and
reconstructions. When making our own documentary, we tried to include as many as possible within the
assigned five minutes.
Initial screen shot
When making the first screen shot, we thought about the exposition, wanting to make the viewers first
impression a positive one, leading them to watch the rest of the documentary. After watching ‘An Inconvenient
Truth’, a documentary about global warming, which started with a calm and picturesque sho t of nature, it
inspired us to start with looking at natural beauty such as the environment rather than man-made beauty, in
humans which is being altered using cosmetic surgery.
Screen shot from “An Inconvenient Truth”.
We thought that using such juxtaposing images would interest and entice our potential audience and
encourage them to keep watching. To do this, we then took a camera outside and retrieved a vertical pan shot
of the sun with a tree in the foreground. Here you can see my comparison between the two shots.
Screen shot from our documentary.
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Media Evaluation – Becki Mendil
2
Interviews
The next convention we looked at as a group
was ‘Interviews’. All documentaries include
interviews, giving the viewers as much
information as possible as well as portraying
different opinions on the subject. This allowspeople to talk on screen about the content of
the documentary and to answer questions
prompted by the filmmaker.
For our own documentary about Cosmetic
Procedures, we wanted to include at least two
expert interviews. The benefit of having
experts is it lets the audience believe they are
hearing a correct answer from a reliable
source, someone who is in a high position in a
relevant profession.
After carrying out some research and sending
letters to the right people, we successfully
interviewed a media expert and a dental
practitioner.
Positioning shots
When interviewing our experts, we had to think about the
positioning of our shot, a very important factor when
showing an interview on screen. It is ideal to have the
interviewee on one side, looking into the shot, as well as
positioning their eye line within the top third.
We also had to consider what was shown in the
background of the shot to make a good
composition. This is when we decided to sit our
media expert, Mike Hatton, in front of a computer
screen with an article about cosmetic surgery on, to
portray his profession.
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Media Evaluation – Becki Mendil
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On Location
For our interview with Dr. McCullough, a dental practitioner, we travelled to her surgery and chose to film in
her work room, wanting to show the dental chair in the background. However, the room was very small and
the only way we could fit, was to have Dr. McCullough sitting in front of the window. This was not ideal, as the
sun was shining through the window, constantly changing the lighting within the interview. This would be one
thing I would change if we were given the chance to start over from the beginning.
Light level 1.
Light level 2.
Editing
When we were in the editing stage, we also added headings and titles in for the expert interviews, for when
they first appear on screen. This is to tell the viewers who they are, what profession they are in and reassure
them it is someone with a high level of knowledge answering the questions. This is a convention that is used is
all documentaries providing the audience with the correct information.
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Vox Pops
Our second type of interview which is a widely used convention within documentari es is known as ‘vox pops’.
These are interviews with the general public, often taken out in the streets, where people are stopped to
answer a few simple questions. For example, they were used within the documentary ‘Supersize Me’; a feature
film directed by Morgan Spurlock, to find out how often people will eat a McDonalds within one month.
Screen shot from “Super Size Me”.
This is something we wanted to include, so as a group we took to the streets of Solihull town centre, to ask the
public about their opinions and knowledge on the different cosmetic procedures. I think the vox pops were
very successful and provided us with a good source of information.
Screen shot from our documentary.
Montage
The next convention of a documentary we looked at
was making a montage, a series of edits put
together. For our documentary, we decided to
make a montage of images relating to cosmetic
procedures, showing the variety of popular
surgeries in the UK. These include tummy tuck,
breast enlargements and liposuction, all of which
provoke different opinions.
Screen shot from our documentary.
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Montages are often used as a visual aid for the
audience. Images that relate to the spoken voiceover
and help the viewers understand what is being said.
For example, there is a montage used in the opening
of ‘Supersize Me’ showing a variety of pictures of
unhealthy meals; burgers, fries etc.
We decided to use the idea as I thought images can
portray a message or information better and stronger
than words.
Screen shot from “Super Size Me”.
Screen shot
Another common technique used in documentaries is a screen shot of the computer, showing someone doing
research on the chosen topic. This also portrays a sense of realism, as the results on the internet would be real
and not made for the purpose of the show.
As you can see, for our documentary, we filmed a snippet of someone using the Google search engine to look
for information about cosmetic surgery.
Reconstruction
Reconstruction is also a useful tool, especially when used in the right context. It creates a sense of realism and
enables past events to be acted out for the benefit of the audience watching. We could not include this in our
documentary as it was not possible, however the closest we could get was taking a picture of someone with
lines drawn on their face, as if they were about to go under the knife.
We felt this was practical to show as we have
aimed our documentary at an audience aged
around 15-40, about a broad subject area.
In conclusion, I think we have used a strong
number of documentary conventions. However, I
feel some of them could be improved with extra
time, such as the positioning of the expertinterview and the computer visual shots.
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Media Evaluation – Becki Mendil
6
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Looking at all three of my texts, I personally think they are of a good standard but could be stronger. After the
main documentary task was complete, we started with the radio advert.
To make our radio clip, we took snippets from our documentary such as the vox pops. This was to let people
hear certain elements of the documentary and hopefully make them want to watch. However, out of the three,I think the radio clip could be improved the most as the sound levels are not as professional as I would like
them to be. However, I think the content of the radio trailer is very suitable and includes the necessary
information for those who wish to watch the documentary. We wanted to make sure that the date, time and
channel for when it was going to be broadcasting was made clear to the listeners.
The next product we made to promote our documentary was a double page article for a TV listings magazine.
To do this successfully, we had to consider the layout, the colour theme, the images and the content, knowing
that we were broadcasting our documentary on BBC Three, to a targeted audience aged between 15 and 40.
We started at looking at other articles in magazines
such as ‘TV Now’, a very popular television magazine.
We made the title big and bold, hopefully catchingattention especially being called, ‘Bums, Boobs and
sorting out your Moobs’, matching other
documentaries shown on BBC Three. The layout we
have made simple but effective, clear but informative,
including snippets from the article being brought to the
reader’s attention using a bigger font size. We have
used the pink and blue colours to show that the subject
of the documentary isn’t taken too seriously as well as
attracting a younger and female audience.
The main image we have used is, briefly seen within the documentary, showing someone with the surgery linesdrawn on their face about to go under the knife. We could not retrieve our own photograph of someone who is
having or has had plastic surgery so to try and keep the sense of realism; we have reconstructed a photograph.
I personally think the image works well and would grab your attention when turning the page. The smaller inset
images we have included are screen shots from the documentary to show the readers what kind of image to
expect. For example we have used a still image from the expert interview with the dentist. This would show the
audience that we are including professional views and gathering information from reliable and respectable
business positions.
Overall, I think that all three texts work together well and the radio trailer and magazine article do their job in
supporting the main product. They all follow the same style but explore in their own ways to mention the
subject of cosmetic surgery.
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Media Evaluation – Becki Mendil
7
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Once our documentary was complete, we carried out a detailed audience feedback session. We wrote a
questionnaire which was handed out before all three of our texts were shown and collected them at the end.
The feedback we received is as follows;
Feedback
Our first question was ‘On a scale of 1-10, how
enjoyable did you find watching our
documentary?’ They then had to circle the
number of which they felt from 1 being ‘not
very much’ to 10 being ‘very much’.
Here you can see that 50% of the group rated
their enjoyment 8 out of 10. I am pleased with
this result as the enjoyment factor also
depends on the subject of the documentary. Ithink this shows it was a good topic to develop
into.
The second question we asked was ‘How
informative did you find the documentary?’
We found that it was split 50/50 between very
informative and average.
I am proud of this result as we only had five
minutes to fill, however I personally felt we
could have put in a lot more research in terms
of facts and statistics, rather than people’sopinions.
Next, we asked our sample of people ‘How
much do you feel you can relate to the topic of
the documentary?’
This was also given on a scale of 1-10. As you
can see form the bar graph below, we got a
mix of results. This didn’t surprise me though,
as cosmetic surgery does not interest or affect
everyone, more so for males, which we did
have, answer our questionnaire.
Our fourth question was ‘Do you think that our sound
levels were consistent?’
The results show 9 people said ‘Yes’ and 1 person said
‘No’. Here, I was happy with what the audience had
answered with, although there could be a few areas
which could be fine tuned with extra time but I would
agree the sound levels were quite even.
01
2345
678
910
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Enjoyment Rating
Number of
Respondants
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
VeryInformative
Average Notinformative
Number of
Respondants
01234
56789
10
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Relate Level
Number of
Respondants
Do you think the sound levels were
consistant?
Yes
No
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Media Evaluation – Becki Mendil
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‘What is your overall opinion of the lighting
throughout the documentary?’
This was the following question, of which 40% said
good, 60% said Okay and no-one answered poor.These set of answers do not surprise me in any way,
in fact I would have to agree with the majority. I think
the lighting was good in parts but especially fell down
within the dentist interview.
Question number six was, ‘Overall, how effective did you find the visuals?’ The results tell me that they were
quite effective ranging between 7 and 9. I am very pleased with this as I was expecting the audience to rank
them lower. I felt we could have assigned a longer period of time to film visuals.
The next question we asked was ‘Did you think that the expert interviews we included were appropriate?’
100% of the audience thought they were appropriate for our documentary. Obviously, it could not be betterthan getting 100%, but I would have loved to interview someone who is involved with cosmetic surgery, such
as the surgeons or consultants. However, our contacts were limited and I think we did well to interview who
we did.
The eighth question we put to the audience was ‘On a scale of 1 -10, how successful do you think the editing
was in terms of its quality throughout the documentary?’ Again the answers were all between 7 and 9 which I
am very pleased with, knowing that it was the first documentary we have made and the first time using all the
different media technologies.
‘Do you think that our documentary is appropriate to be shown on BBC Three?’ was our next question. This
also got 100% saying ‘yes’ which tells us we have chosen the right subject to discuss as well as aiming it at the
correct audience. I was hoping for these results as we have specifically aimed our piece at the viewers of BBC
Three.
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Media Evaluation – Becki Mendil
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The final question we asked for the main task was ‘After watching our documentary would you stand for or
against Cosmetic Surgery or neither?’ The results show that 60% of the audience would be against. Hopefully
some of these were due to our documentary but personally, I feel that we did not argue enough in either
option.
Radio Trailer
Our first question about the radio advert was ‘If you heard our radio advert, would you feel like you would
want to watch our documentary?’ 90% of our audience said they would, which is very encouraging. I am fairly
surprised with this result as I was not as confident in the radio trailer.
The second question was ‘Do you think that our voiceover provides you with enough information to know what
the documentary includes?’ Here we have received the same results, with 90% says there is enough
information. I think I would agree with the audience for this question, as I am confident in the material we used
for the radio clip; both the vox pops and the voiceover.
The last question we asked was ‘On a scale of 1 -10,how consistent do you think the sound levels are
throughout the advert?’ The results we obtained vary
between 7 and 10, which I am very pleased with.
However, I feel the sound levels could have been
better especially when listening to the difference
when the vox pops finish and the “studio” voiceover
was introduced.
0123456789
10
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Scale for Consistancy of Sound Levels
Number of
Respondants
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Media Evaluation – Becki Mendil
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Magazine Article
The first question regarding the article for the TV listing magazine was ‘If you read our magazine article would
you feel like you would want to watch our documentary?’ The results are very good showing another 90%
would watch it after reading. I am pleased with this result as I think the article says everything it needs to about
our documentary on cosmetic procedures.
‘Do you think that the colours and the images we used were appropriate for our documentary as well as BBC
Three?’ This was our second question of which we also got a great reply. Another 9 people said yes and 1
person said no. Personally, I think the images work well but the colours should be less bright making it appeal
to a wider range of readers.
The final question we asked within the questionnaire was ‘On a scale of 1-10, how successful do you think our
magazine article was in terms of the layout looking professional?’ From looking at the results, there is a
complete mix showing the layout does not appeal to everyone. I think we could of done more research in terms
of TV listing magazines to accommodate for more people.
In conclusion
I think the audience feedback was very helpful, giving us a chance to pinpoint certain areas that we could
improve to satisfy our potential audience. After gaining the feedback, I believe the documentary would
encourage ‘negotiated readings’. This is from a theory made by Stuart Hall when encoding and decoding
audience responses. Negotiated readings suggest that the audience agree with the text in part, but with the
nature of the subject it is anticipated that the audience will hold a range of views.
I also believe that our documentary would be watched by ‘active models’. This means that the audience is
active in interpreting the media content and not as vulnerable. From looking at the ‘Uses and Gratifications
theory’, made by Blumler and Katz in 1974, the documentary that we have created would be classified as
‘Surveillance’.
0
12
345
67
89
10
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Professionalism
Number of
Respondants
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Media Evaluation – Becki Mendil
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How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the production process, a large variety of media technologies were used to create all three of the
texts, the documentary, radio trailer and also the magazine article. As a group, we started work on the
documentary, choosing to base it on Cosmetic Procedures.
After filming in and out of college, we had managed to obtain plenty of video footage and images that could
potentially be used within the documentary, using a digital camera along with a tripod, boom microphone and
headphones. This was the essential equipment to successfully retrieve our footage. We then uploaded this
onto an Apple Mac computer which supplied us with all of the necessary software, such as ‘garage band’ and
‘final cut express’.
After selecting the useable film clips by marking them with ‘in’ and ‘out’ arrows, they
were moved into our new project. With these clips, we started to drag them in turn
onto the film line in where we could adjust them and add effects such as fade in and
out. The final cut software took some time to get used to and for us to know where
to find all of the different tools such as the ‘blade’ to trim our clips and ‘split’ to cut
our clips in half. By following our plan, all of the good clips were on our film line, butjust needed to be sorted into the right order in which it would flow best. This was
one of our hardest challenges as we did not want interviews one after the other. Too
many ‘talking heads’ can disengage the audience and make it ‘boring’. To avoid this,
we needed to fill in gaps using visual aids, video footage with could then later be
mixed in under our voiceover. For example, in Solihull, we filmed people just walking
past the camera for a few minutes, then, once imported into our project, we doubled
the speed, making them walk twice as fast. I thought this turned out well, a very
useful technique making an interesting image to engage the viewers.
We decided, as a group that were going
to create a montage of pictures relating
to our chosen subject. This was to helpinterest the viewers as I believe it is
easier to portray a message using images
rather than words. To do this, we had to
individually import the pictures, and to
save losing what we had done of the
documentary, we made the montage on
a separate film line. With each image, we
manually set the size and position so that
when more were added, they became
part of one piece. I really love the result
of it and found it to be very flexible.
After creating the majority of our film, we then had to record our voiceover. We did this by using exactly the
same equipment from when we went out filming. We decided to use a digital camera rather than a voice
recorder as it has the same if not better, sound levels for recording. We also found it was easier to control,
especially when we wanted to listen back to what we had already recorded. We knew that when this was going
to be imported onto the computer, it was going to be a film clip rather than just a voice recording as it was a
camera, so we decided to use this to our advantage. Whilst taping the voiceover, we held up a piece of paper in
front of the camera which told us which clip was being spoken. This saved us a lot of time in the long run as we
didn’t have to listen to the while clip to know where it went within our documentary. We just referred to our
paper image which was attached to the recording and slotted it straight into the assigned times. Once in place,
we then deleted the visual part of the clip so that it did not write over the top of the correct image.
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We also used another software package, called ‘garage
band’ to create our radio trailer as this was only to
make a sound clip rather than a full video with visuals.
This took some time to get used to after us ing ‘final cut
express’ as I felt the two programs are completely
different. However we imported our voiceover quicklyand added in our vox-pop interviews from the
documentary without too many problems. We then
added our background music on top and dragged it out
to last the whole snippet. However our trailer ended up
longer than we wanted it to be as there were several
time screens within the package. What we thought was
the time length of the clip was in fact the timing of
something else. By the time this was noticed, we had
run out of time to make any adjustments. Throughout the production process, we kept track of the work we were completing. This was done through a
blogging site, making it easy to keep in line with the other members of the group and to see what each otherhad done. The site was easily accessible and each post could be edited if needed to be improved. This is also
where we would write about our research and keep our plans.
In conclusion, I think we have successfully used a variety of technology. I felt the hardware equipment was the
easiest to use, such as the camera, although it did have its faults when filming our interviews. The lighting was
hard to adjust through the camera and has therefore been shown in our final product. The software was tough
to get used to in the beginning, but after making mistakes, we learnt how to navigate the programs.