Evaluation one

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

My media documentary follows and challenges one or two of the codes and conventions of other documentaries. I tried to follow all the conventions but I and my group felt like we needed to challenge some of them in order to make the documentary look better.
With the voiceover it is more likely to be a male voiceover which is exactly what we got. They also are kept the same throughout the whole of the documentary which is also what we have done.







In this documentary the voiceover is a male just like in our documentary. They are both around the same age group aswell. I think that they are all mostly like this because males are said to have more clearer voices and can be more entertaining than females thought by the audience.

For our title sequence there isn’t really a code of conventions as they are all different. Some are just simply the words of the title but ours is doing the action but we fast forwarded it so that it could be fast moved and look more effective.

Again voxpops don’t really have a codes and conventions as they range from different ages and can be any sex so I didn’t matter who we got and how we did it. They are more likely to be filmed with the interviewee on the side of the camera but they can differ and we have got some where they are on the side and in the middle. Voxpops are supposed to show all of the body whereas on ours on one or two they cut the head off. It is meant to be a middle shot which they are. So we challenged and followed some of the codes and conventions on voxpops.



Cutaways and the music don’t really have something to follow as everyone’s are different. They just need to be clear, attractive and entertaining to grab the attention of the viewers.






Interviews have quite a lot of codes and conventions such as the interviewee must be stood to one side of the camera, they must not look at the camera, there isnt to be any light coming from behind the interviewee.

As you can see we followed the codes and convections as much as we could except the few things that couldn’t be changed such as the lighting in the background in one of them and not as much background for another interview. We did repeat one interview twice though so that we could get it better.

Evaluation two

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

Evaluation three

Question three: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We shown our documentary, print and radio advert to a class of around 13 people of the ages around 16-18. The results were quite accurate as these ages are around the age of our target audience. After they had seen our productions they were asked to give feedback on what they thought about each individual product. These are the results of what they thought about it which were noted down on the questionnaire they were given. I also asked others by video to get their opinion in more detail.

1. Do you think our programme suits our target audience of adults 18+?

More people said that they thought our documentary does suit our target audience which is aged 18 and over. There was only one maybe and nobody said they didn’t think it did meaning that our documentary has followed its plan and is attracting the right target audience that we planned on. It shows we have made the documentary with the right aspects. I have learnt that i should have done more research on my age group to find out more about their likes and dislikes.


2. Would this five minute extract encourage you to watch the full programme and why?

There were 12 people out of the 13 saying that they would carry on watching the documentary and just the one person that disagreed though they never stated why they thought this. I this 12 is good because it shows that more people in the class agreed that it was a good documentary. Also the people we observed were around the age of 16 to 18 meaning that maybe the person that didn’t want to carry on watching was because it wasn’t suited to their age group so they lost interest. There were reasons given such as

-Informative (2 people)
-Interesting (9 people)
-Attractive (1 person)

3. On a scale of one to five how appropriate is documentary for Channel Four and why?

Rate 1: 0

Rate 2: 0

Rate 3: 2

Rate 4: 6

Rate 5: 6

People rated our documentary more 4 and 5 on how appropriate the documentary was for channel 4. There was no one that rated it 1 and 2 and a few said 3. I think this is positive because it shows more people thought it was appropriate than not thinking it was making it right that we have followed the codes and conventions properly of documentaries that are shown on channel 4 professionally.





4. In your opinion do the camera shots and the music suit the style and genre of the programme?

Everyone that watched our documentary said that the camera shots and the music suit the style and genre of the programme. This is positive because it shows that the way we have shot it and got music was good and the audience gave a good reaction. I have learnt that the camera shots and music were good choices and that it went well with the topic.

5. On a scale one to five how would you rate our documentary in terms of the following?

Entertaining

Rate 1: 0

Rate 2: 1

Rate 3: 3

Rate 4: 7

Rate 5: 2

Informative

Rate 1: 0

Rate 2: 0

Rate 3: 3

Rate 4: 4

Rate 5: 6

We asked them to rate our documentary on whether they thought it was entertaining and informative. For entertaining the answers ranged which were not positive but not negative so were in the middle as the answers ranged from a rating of 2 and 5. More people rated 4 which is positive because it shows that at least more people enjoyed it than people not enjoying it. Negatively though the second popular answer was the rating of 3 meaning it was just in the middle and as this is around our target audience it shows that maybe they were getting the same entertainment as people of 18 and over would get. For informative the results were more different than entertaining. They were more positive as the two popular answers was a rating of 4 and 5 and none less than 3 meaning that more people thought it was informative. Overall people agreed that it was more informative than entertaining which is quite positive because that’s what documentaries are meant to do but also negative because if people don’t find it entertaining then are less likely to watch it meaning they won’t get the informative part out of it. I have learnt to get more research and think more about whether I would be entertained by it then focusing too much on the information. The presentation is more important to people of my target audience.

6. Do you think the camerawork and editing used made our extract look professional?

Everyone also said that the camerawork and editing used made our extract look professional. This is positive because it shows that the way we have shot it and edited the whole thing was made to make it look professional has been shown and it can look like the real documentaries on TV which was the aim.

7. How do you feel the documentary compares to other professionally made documentaries?

When we asked this question we got different results and opinions. The most popular answer was that they thought are documentary was similar to professional ones made. As we had to follow the codes and conventions of a documentary to try and make it look real this is a positive response. We got all positive responses and no negative ones which show that everyone agreed too.

Kathryn, 18

"I think that the documentary is full of interviews, extra bits to show what they are talking about and it also has alot of useful information which is what other documentaries do really."

8. What are the strengths and weaknesses of our documentary?

When we asked for the strengths and weaknesses of our documentary we got a whole different range of opinions. We got positive and negative results but mainly positive. This shows that there was more of a better outcome than a rubbish one. The negative feedback such as the Voxpops being rubbish were due to technical and weather faults and time. This means it wasn’t fully our fault meaning that they were only issues that we had no full control over but it has taught me to look into these issues and make better solutions.



9. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the radio trailer and print advert?

We then asked for the strengths and weaknesses of our print and radio advert. We got no negative feedback on this question which is positive because it shows that nobody had any bad things and liked them meaning we completed the aim.



10. Do you think the sound bites and voice over in our radio trailer advertised our documentary to its full potential?


For this question we received 12 “yes” and 1 “no”. This is good because it shown that sound bites and voiceover in the radio advertised our documentary to its full potential. I have learnt to put more detail into the sound and research other voiceovers properly so I can get the right words and voice.


Danielle, 23

"I do think that the soundbites and voiceover in your radio was advertising your documentary dead well cause it gave all the details of whats in the documentary and has actual footage. It shows what they should look to in the programme before they watch it."

11. Do you think the newspaper advert effectively advertises our programme and why?


They gave reasons such as
- Suits programme
- Clear image
- Eyecatching
- Relates to audience
- Image connotes what its about

For this question again we received 12 “yes” and 1 “no”. This is also good because it shown that the newspaper advert effectively advertises our programme. We also got reasons why which were all positive. These were good because we did have control over these issues and we got it right. Once again i think more research would have been needed to see the other newspaper adverts but I think that it was quite professional and looked most like the professional ones.

We have posted our documentary on Youtube:

I have learnt from these results that people enjoyed the music but had problems with the talking of the voiceover. I also learnt that people like the images as they are catchy which has been said on the questionnaire too. We got 2 likes and no dislikes meaning that noone really disliked it.

Evaluation four

Question four
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
This is everything that I used from equipment to computer programs.

This is what they were all used for:







All these were very important to the research, planning and evaluating stages. They were important to the research stage because without the internet and YouTube I wouldn’t be able to find out all the information that I needed for my documentary to plan the voiceovers and cutaways such as the Michael Carroll story or Paris Hilton’s life.


At first we checked our Ipods and phones too see if we had any songs that resembled to greed. We found one which was High school musicals "I want it all" but this song was not used in the dpcumentary as once we added it to our documentary it didnt really fit in with the topic that well. We then used the internet to research songs that we could put in our documentary. Though the internet gave us some songs that weren’t actually relevant there was some that we could use and that we actually used such as the Liberty x song "Greed" which is at the beginning of the documentary.

We also needed to research about the interviews. We used the internet to research what bankers do so that we could understand more about what they do and then it would be easier to plan the questions we would ask. We did the same with the grandparent as we researched what was so different in their generation to now. The dad interview didn’t require much research because we knew all the different things we were going to ask except for some details on how much everything is for children and the income of most people. For the teenage interview no research was needed because its our generation so we know more about it which made it easier to come up with questions.

Without all this information it would be harder to do the documentary because we wouldn’t have the knowledge so it couldn’t be informative or useful because it would be what we know on the subject and our information could be wrong which is not what documentaries do as they are supposed to give the facts of a subject.

For the planning part we used quite a lot of the different equipment and programs as we had to plan what we were going to do. This involved creating questionnaires to see what the target audience liked so we could add the opinions in to make the documentary better and to use in our voiceover. To do this we also got some voice recordings of peoples answers so we needed to use a voice recorder to get these results.

The stills camera and my mobile phone were needed for the capturing cutaways for the documentary and for proof of how we did certain things such as the title sequence.


The internet as well being used for the research was good to get some cutaways that we couldn’t ourselves get.




The video camera was used to film all the footage for most of our documentary. We needed a microphone too whilst we were doing the interviews and voxpops so that the camera could pick up everyone’s voice clearly, loudly and so it was understandable.







Whilst we were filming and taking photos we also needed a tripod to make sure the camera didn’t move and wasn’t fidgety and so we got accurate and still images.

The program that we used to create our Print advert was Adobe Photoshop. It was useful because we had used it before so we knew what we were doing and it has a lot of effects that could be used.



To do our voiceovers we used the Radio reording studio. This was good because it was professional and had different things that we could change to make it better.



Using Adobe premiere 1.5 was good for when we editing because we got to find out how to do the different effects such as transitions, fast forwarding, making the sound of each different when some parts were louder than others and change in the actual image.





We brightened up one of the voxpops as it was dark and not seen as well as it is now.

As we had to create the documentary on this program is good because it is really effective and has a lot of different things it can do that made the documentary even better and professional including making time more managing.

Target audience feedback

For feedback we asked a number of students of the ages of 16 to 18 to watch our documentary. We asked this age group because our target audience was 18 and above but we thought we would see how younger ones would see it too as they are more like eighteen year olds. We gave them a questionnaire to fill out whilst they were watching it so they can comment and we could see what they thought.

This is the questionnaire that we gave people:

Here are the results:

1. Do you think our programme suits our target audience of adults 18+?
Yes-111111111111
Maybe-1

2. Would this five minute extract encourage you to watch the full programme and why?
Yes-111111111111
No-1

-Informative
-Interesting
-Attractive

3. On a scale of one to five how appropriate is our documentary for Channel Four and why?

1- 0
2- 0
3- 11
4- 111111
5- 111111

4. In your opinion do the camera shots and the music suit the style and genre of the programme?

Yes-1111111111111

5. On a scale one to five how would you rate our documentary in terms of the following?

Entertaining

1- 0
2- 1
3- 111
4- 1111111
5- 11

Informative

1- 0
2- 0
3- 111
4- 1111
5- 111111

6. Do you think the camerawork and editing used made our extract look professional?

Yes-1111111111111

7. How do you feel the documentary compares to other professionally made documentaries?

Detailed- 11
Similar- 11111111
Archive material is good-11
Codes and conventions followed-1

8. What are the strengths and weaknesses of our documentary?

Camera work good-111
Music good-1111
Editing good-1
Needs more editing-1
Interesting-1
Good interviews-1111
Voxpops sound rubbish-11
Cutaways good-1
Footage good-1

9. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the radio trailer and print advert?

Good image-11111
Clear voice-11
Easy to listen to-1
Sounds interesting-111
Informative-11
Looks professional-1
Good clips-1

10. Do you think the sound bites and voice over in our radio trailer advertised our documentary to its full potential?

Yes-111111111111
No-1

11. Do you think the newspaper advert effectively advertises our programme and why?

Yes-111111111111
No-1

-Suits programme
-Clear image

-Eyecatching
-Relates to audience
-Image connotes what it's about

These are the students that watched our documentary and gave feedback.

I also asked some others their opinions:





I then uploaded the video to Youtube to see what others thought: