Is Beauty Worth Pain? Our Documentary

We were told at the start of the year that we were going to be making an opening scene to a documentary, we had the chance to be as creative or original as we wanted too. There were 4 of us in our group and we did find it hard to finalise a plan of action, however when we finally did, the rest all seemed to come together.

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

Question 1.

In what ways does your media production use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? on Prezi

Question 2. Evaluation - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

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

How do the advertisements fit in with our documentaries?

We made sure that within our poster advert and documentary we used the same font theme, we did this by using the website http://www.dafont.com/ and downloaded one type of theme which we found linked in with our documentary theme.

We then edited this genre into a light pink colour as we thought it was the most suitable for the topic of our documentary. We used this in both the documentary and poster so that it had a correlation between the both and we did this by editing it on Photoshop. After editing the genre colour we were then able to present it onto both of our poster and documentary. However, we used different genres of font in the title, so for the 'Worth Pain?' we used a different type of genre and used the colours that most suited it. This meant that it was different in both the advert and poster. Although, I feel that it shouldn’t have to be the same colour throughout as we found the same colours didn’t match both the poster and documentary so used the colours that we thought represented it better as its usually the font that is remembered and not the colour.

We also used the same type of font in the 'Beauty Fanatic' and two 'Surgery Patients' interviews so that they had the same relevance, it just gave a bit of information withiout again having to use the voice over to describe who the person was. This looked like this;

We also tried to peruse the same message throughout the different advertisements, this message was that "The media influences the public and makes them think differently of themselves." We made sure that the radio advert used clips of archive footage, narration and music so that it gave an insight of what our documentary was about. We also had to make sure that we didn’t use anything that wasn’t involved within our documentary as it would have been seen as 'false advertisement.’ Wee tried to make sure that our radio advert was choppy so that it used lots of short clips skipping from one another, making a more exciting theme and so that it left questions in the publics mind attracting them to watch it. In the poster we used a puppet as the main theme to try and give the message away to the public about different types of control. We also show the time of when we are showing our documentary on television which the narrator also mentions in the radio advert so that it linked together.

The music in our documentary all fit into the 'pop music genre' it had symbolic meaning so fell into the music codes and conventions. This music clearly links in with the meaning of our documentary as its lyrics linked in with the message throughout. Also this type of music is very popular to the audience we decided to use as we found out through research.

If I was to reflect on to the research of our three products I would say they all link into each other well with specific meaning, the theme worked throughout our project I think it was clear and the project followed the codes and conventions and fit in well with the genre.

We decided that we wanted our documentary to be shown on BBC3, this is because it is well known for documentaries to be shown, also according to Wikipedia BBC3's target audience includes those from 16-34, this is very similar to our target audience making it even more suitable for our documentary. We wanted our documentary 'Is Beauty worth Pain?' to finalise as a documentary series, which would have been shown every Tuesday at 9pm.

Question 3. Evaluation - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Question 3.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

There were many problems that we faced during the making of our documentary. We realised that after recording public interviews in town and after an interview with a surgery patient that the microphone we had used had ran out of batteries. This meant that we then had to go back to town and record them all again and record the surgery patient again, this was time consuming due to other arrangements. We made sure that when we next recorded we would use a boom mike; a boom mike is ‘A directional microphone which is mounted on a boom arm and positioned just out of camera frame, as shown on the right. The cable is wrapped once or twice around the boom arm.’

However, we then had difficulties getting the voice over right as the tape became distort making it unable to use, we then had problems with finding the correct persons voice to use as some sounded out of place and didn’t fit into the theme of our documentary, in the end we had filmed it 5 times! We found that the genre of font was hard to find, and place in the right position as we found ourselves altering it on a daily basis. We also found that the genre would fit in well with our poster, so we decided to use the same theme throughout as we thought it was the best way to illustrate our message.

After we had filmed the ‘Beauty Fanatic’ the only issue that we faced was the positioning of the camera as we knew we would be speeding her reactions up when she was putting make up on, so we had to make sure that the angle was correct so it didn’t jump to much when it came to edit. We also found that the interview ran smoothly, but if we were to change anything we would probably change the mise-en-scene of Jade’s interview first!

We all seemed to enjoy editing and found that we all did the same amount of work as each other, this worked well as we all had a good understanding of how to use Adobe Premier. Although, we did want to merge the first few sequences together, but due to the lack of programmes we were unable to do this.

 Audience feedback:



Question 4. Evaluation - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Question 4.