- In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our documentary 'Teaching Teens' was influenced by the fly on the wall documentary Educating Essex, we watched some episodes to find a series of still filler shots such as shots of display boards within the school, the school field and rain. We incorporated this within our documentary by including still shots such as pencils,paper and rain which helped to split scenes. The use of non diagetic sound of music is used quite often in educating especially at the beginning of each episode, we decided to do this also by creating our own theme tune on FL Studio which was played at the introduction and at the end just before the adverts. Other forms of non diagetic sound that we included was a clock ticking, and the sound of rain to make it more effective. We included diagetic sound of the school bell on top of this which was also done in Educating Essex, during this shot we included the hash tag '#TeachingTeens' Educating Essex also included this, it helps to get viewers more involved as social networking sites like twitter are a big part of peoples lives today in 2012.
We included interviews in our documentary to enable the characters being filmed to speak directly about events, it allows viewers to find out more information about what is going on, this is also the case in Educating Essex as i saw more and more interviews i felt like i got to know each person in more depth. We used mid shots to film each interview to show emotion. In Educating Essex they also included text at the bottom stating the individuals name, we also did this, however we decided to include the individuals occupation eg English teacher, year 11 student etc. We thought this would be good to include as it shows and reminds the audience of who each person is.
We used many simple editing techniques such as jump cuts which are also incorporated in Educating Essex this makes the documentary seem more realistic and not staged however we also used some techniques such as cross blur so the jump from one scene to another did not look too fast. The name Educating Essex uses alliteration we also decided to incorporate this into our name as it is catchy and memorable.
Overall Teaching Teens very much uses and develops the forms and conventions of the real media product Educating Essex.
- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
When making my poster i considered including many people from the series in the image, i then decided that having two of the main pupils involved in the series would be more effective as it shows the audience what characters are focused on within the main product; as the title of the documentary is Teaching Teens i decided it was best to include two teenage pupils rather than teachers. The way Shannon Stewart is standing wearing a hooded jumper with her hands in her pocket and the way Bradley Coe is scruffily dressed suggests to the audience that these students are likely to break the rules which may entice them to watch the main product to see how they do this. I decided to set the image in front of the school lockers which makes it obvious to potential viewers that Teaching Teens is filmed within a school. I made sure that the title Teaching Teens was big, to enable it to stand out, i also made the text black over a white background and did the same with the time and date of the documentary in order to make it eye catching, so people will be aware what the main product is called and when to watch it on television, i was inspired to do this from research i previously did on channel 4 advertisements. I added the channel 4 sign in a bold red colour to make it clear what channel the documentary will be shown on. I used Picaso in order to edit the dominant image, i decided to darken the edge of the photo in order to make people focus on Brad and Shannon straight away, i also believe the darkness make its seem as though Brad and Shannon are bad students.
I believe my poster is an effective combination with our main product as it advertises it well, it is simple but stands out which would help increase viewings.
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When creating my double page spread i decided to use a large image of Brad as he is the main pupil within the documentary. I believe this is important so people are aware who they are reading about when reading the spread, i also included screen shots from teaching teens to enable readers to see what the documentary was like in action, i thought that this may entice them to watch it to see what was happening, for example the image of Brad and Mr Kernan clearly shows that they are having an argument which would make readers want to watch it to fulfill their curiosity. I made the title large in order to make it eye catching, the black text against white background also helps to do this. The font i chose was a 'school' one which resembles hand writing, i thought this fitted in well as it suggests to readers that the documentary is set in a school before actually reading the main text, the background being an open book also contributes to this. In the main text i explain what Teaching Teens is and where it is based, i introduce Brad straight away and explain the situation briefly; i believe this is more effective than giving too much away, if people are already aware of everything that will happen they will not be encouraged to watch the programme. At the end of the main text i also make a statement about hove parks disciplinary system and mention Shannon and Alex, i believed it was important to do this as Shannon Stewart is another main pupil focused on in Teaching Teens and she is included in my advertisement poster so mentioning her was important in order for the poster and double page to work well together. I included a quote from Brad's interview "Its not my fault my family can't afford anything." This may make readers see another side to Brad, make them feel sorry for him before watching the documentary and maybe understand what some deprived children go through at school and how it affects their behavior. I also included another quote which is said by the voice over at the beginning of the programme "School, you either love it or hate it." I think this could lead to readers to question why and encourage them to watch it or it could act as a slogan unique to Teaching Teens.
I added the date and time at the bottom of the page as i did with the title i made the text black over a white background this catches the eye so after people have read the main text they will see it straight away and be fully aware when to tune in, the channel 4 logo at the top makes it clear what channel Teaching Teens is on too.
Over all i believe that my double page spread works well with our main product as it encourages people to watch it and gives a clear but brief explanation of what Teaching Teens is about and what they have to expect.
- What have you learned from your audience feedback?
To begin with we gave out 20 questionnaire 10 to females and 10 to males as we wanted to get fair feedback from both sexes. We asked various questions to see what kind of documentaries they preferred, fly on the wall documentaries seemed to be the most popular with both men and women. They mainly associated documentaries with channel 4 which motivated us to put ours on channel 4 too. Many people claimed they liked Educating Essex, this was good as we anticipated Teaching Teens to be very similar, we also found that many people would be interested in watching a documentary based in a secondary school although this was mostly by females. Overall a majority of our feedback was in favor of Teaching Teens so we were sure that making this our final media product was a good choice.
After this we showed our media class our final product and we seemed to get mainly positive feedback however we were told that our voice over did not sound professional and the sound was not perfectly clear. I believe this was because i personally did the voice over and we had not prepared a suitable person to do so before hand; if we were to do it again i believe using an adult, possibly someone who talks to people formally regularly such as a receptionist would make the documentary sound more like a genuine channel 4 programme. The quality of sound was not perfect regarding the voice over as we recorded the audio using the Apple Mac microphone located on the computer, the room the computers were situated in were very noisy as the schools main printers were located there, from this i have learnt that we should have recorded the audio using a genuine recording device such as a digital voice recorder as these are portable therefore would enable us to go to a more quiet appropriate place rather than being in a noisy room.
We then uploaded Teaching Teens onto YouTube. We gained 95 views and 13 'likes.' In order to ensure people would view our documentary on YouTube we used two social networking sites Twitter and Facebook to post the link to make it easily accessible to everyone we knew. We received some positive feedback on the social networking sites that you can see in the images on the right.
The feedback we got from YouTube was mainly positive with one person saying we has good camera work and another claiming that the hashtag that we had included made it look like a genuine documentary which we were very happy about. The last person to comment believed we had done a good job but gave us one criticism. They commented on the camera quality, we were disappointed with this. If we were to film it again i would suggest that we filmed interviews closer instead of cropping them on iMovie as this made the quality even worse, we also could attempt to find a setting with better lighting to solve this problem. However in my opinion in order to get the best results we would need a new up to date video camera, the one we was provided with did not give a good picture and made some images seem grainy in particular lightings.
- How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
When constructing our main product we needed to be able to communicate efficiently in order to arrange times to meet and film. We did this by using technologies such as smart phones which enabled us to download suitable applications in order to have group conversations, we chose to to use the application Whatsapp. We also used social networking sites such as Twitter to contact eachother. This enabled us to keep in touch with our actor Bradley Coe aswell.
In order to film our documentary we were given one video recorder between the group, we also used a 12 mega pixel digital camera in order to take still images. We had the use of iMovie on an Apple Mac which helped us a lot as the software enabled us to upload our individual clips onto the computer and to cut them as we wished. It also allowed us to import our own music that we had made using the technology of FL studio. The software was fairly easy to use and provided us with some great transitions such as fade to black cross blur etc it also provided us with non diagetic sounds that we added in, such as the sound of rain. We were able to change specific sounds in clips for example making one clip slightly quieter in order to hear the soundtrack or we could fade sounds into upcoming clips to prevent sound being heard where not wanted.
I believe all the media technologies i used were vital to make my ancillary tasks realistic and to create our documentary to the best it could have been with all the appropriate editing and sounds.
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