Evaluation Question One

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

Certain products in the media world have codes and conventions that should be followed to make a successful media product. However these codes and conventions that should be followed to make a succesful media product. However these codes and conventions may be challenged or developed by the producer to make the best media product they can with their ability.
The most common codes and conventions featured in documentaries are music, cutaways, interviews and a clear standard English speaking voice over, these are the conventions we would base our documentary around. We thought these would give us a good bases to start forming our documentary.

(image 1- screen shot from textual anaylsis-text)

Our documentary is on graffiti as we decided to keep the basic form of documentaries we discussed what people we would like to interview. We decided to go for the obvious interviewees and a few unobvious choices such as a caretaker or an art manager. This is a developmental technique from the conventions of a real media product. We decided to keep our cutaways and voice over very contentional. Having cutaways that spesfically relate to the topic and of what is being said. Also decided to use a clear, standard english voice over with recieved pronounication as in our textual analysis we found this a dominate convention. The music for our documentary both develops and sticks to the conventions. We have two strings of music one is more formal introducing the documentary but an upbeat tune is also played to keep to the theme and the topic of the documentary. That of real media products music is very important in keeping the audience entertained.

(image 2 screen shot from textual analysis-interviewing)

Our documentary develops the codes and conventions further with extra pictures added in that are not classed as cutaways. We wanted to develop the conventions of a real media product as much as possible to make it stand out. Making our documentary stand out was the main basis for choosing our topic in the first place. Text is also used in the documentary to develop it. The text is not used in place of the voice over it is purly a visual aid to the voice over which hopefully adds some indviduality to the documentary. In real media products we found that moslty the only use of text is when the name of the person being interviewed is shown. Along with text our documentary icludes quotes from other people we have interviewed or spoken to. The voice over staes these quotes so they are not spoken by the orginal speaker as it makes it different from an interview.

(image 3-screen shot from textual analysis-interview and name)

Our documentary uses the codes and conventions and develops them much more than challenging them. We wanted to base our documentary as much as possible on codes and conventions so that the documentary could look like a real media product however we used a slightly different set up to make it as indivdual as possible. Also due to the way we protayed the topic and part of the music chosen it makes the documentary less formal than what may have been expected.
We tried to make our documentary as unqiue as possible form the way we its set out to the topic chosen nut we also didnt want to drift away from real media products as the aim of our coursework was to make our documentary as realistic as possible.