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

By Jack Beale-Burchell

O As a group we were tasked with creating the
opening five minutes of a television documentary,
after thorough planning we settled on the topic of
the social networking giant, Twitter. The
documentary itself used very fast paced opening
shots and straight cuts, similar to that of ‘Supersize
Me’ to give the viewer’s something for their attention
to be focused on, this is a convention of many
current affairs television documentaries. The
opening sequence also took influence from a series
of documentaries on BBC 3 presented by Cherry
Healey on a numerous amount of current affairs
and lifestyles in Britain at the moment. We used a
voiceover as a guiding narrative in the opening few
shots in order to give the basic background
information on twitter, similar to that of Richard
Bacon’s exploration into the world of ‘Cyber
Bullying’ then followed it by having an on screen
narrator and presenter to guide the audience
through our linear style documentary, similar to
Reggie Yates’ documentary series on the effects of
drugs shown on BBC 3.

O We chose to follow these common conventions as
we wanted it to fit in with the style of documentaries
being shown at the moment. As we had chosen
BBC 3 as a platform to air our documentary, we
concluded that it should look and feel like the
documentaries that are being shown on BBC 3 in
recent years. So from research we found that they
have a fairly relaxed and informal style of narrative,
with both a voiceover narrative and a presenter, so
in order to make our documentary we followed
these conventions.
O We also used a mixture of ‘Expert Interviews’ and
‘Vox Pops’ which is very reminiscent of BBC 3
documentaries. In our case we used an interview
from Solihull Police and smaller responses from the
general public in order to give an exploratory theme
to the documentary.
O The editing we used, such as title overlays we
made fit in with ‘Twitter’ itself. The overlays were all
translucent blue with white text over the top. This
style has a look and feel similar to Twitter’s own
website, and the overlays used in BBC 3 television
documentaries.

O Overall I was very happy with the way the
documentary came out; I believe that it followed
documentary codes and conventions very closely
and this has led to the development of conventions.
I believe that the documentary has stayed true to
BBC 3’s ‘House Style’ and has tightly developed
the conventions of television documentaries, which
I think has given it an overall professional look and
feel. I am very pleased with the outcome but to
name a few areas on which it could have improved,
I think the quality of the audio recordings could
have been improved, as sometimes noise and wind
is very audible and can somewhat mask the words
that are being said, also some of the shot framing,
for example the interview with the police could
have been framed better.

O Alongside the documentary there were two
ancillary tasks which included a double paged
article on the documentary itself, and a radio
trailer used to promote the documentary.

O When looking at the double paged article, we
researched into existing publication which would
have reviewed a documentary such as this, and we
decided to settle on ‘Radio Times’ as it seemed like
an appropriate platform on which we could promote
and advertise our documentary on. In order to make it
realistic we followed the ‘House Style’ after looking at
many of their double paged articles and deciding on
what the main stay features were. This continued and
developed the conventions of the double paged
article, the only part of it that could be seen as
challenging it would be that the article is set on a light
blue background, instead of white, which is the
predominant mainstay feature for radio times’ articles.

O When looking at the radio trail we decided that it
should feature on BBC radio channels as the
documentary itself was going to be shown on
BBC 3. We decided that it should feature on the
bigger music channels such as BBC radio 1,
BBC radio 1xtra, and should be played during
radio DJ’s slots, for example Jo Wiley and Zane
Lowe. Using this information as a guideline we
believed that it would reach the largest possible
audience within our target audience.
O With BBC radio adverts for their own
programmes, there is no such ‘House Style’
which allowed for artistic license when creating
the trailer. The trailer itself had to appeal to a
modern audience, but also had to be in keeping
with the programme it was being aired during.
So we took the approach of using a modern
lounge music crossed with trance style track
behind the vocal parts which included
information about when the documentary would
be on and which channel, but also included
vocal extracts from the documentary itself.

O I believe that the two ancillary tasks support the
documentary very well and the three together all
follow codes and conventions of television
documentaries and the way that they are
promoted. In all I believe that the documentary
and the way it has been promoted to be very
professional and I am extremely pleased with
this outcome as also the feedback will support
my judgement.

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Media question 1

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