Evaluation, Question 1

This is my evaluation with the 4 questions being headed at the start of each post and I do apologise for the images having to be at the bottom but them go in numerical order from top to bottom but this was the only way I could get the images onto the blog as I exhausted all other possible solutions

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

When making my media product; the documentary “The Public Drinking”, I discovered one of the most important elements was to use the element seen in most documentaries, impartialness. I found it increasingly necessary to incorporate this convention element into my documentary as, not only was it supposed to be created with the ethics of the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) but it is important when showing an argument to give both sides an equal say and to not try and influence the audiences opinion. I believe one of the key conventions that we utilised well was the somewhat obvious convention of interviews. I believe our interviews were well constructed with good questions put to the interviewees in order to give the audience an accurate view of both sides of the argument of whether the drinking ban is right or wrong. Some of our interviews were also framed well, in particular the interview with Justice Of The Peace (JP) Dennis Smith (see Figure 1) in which you can clearly see that there is a sufficient enough amount of head space so that the subject doesn’t look to large and imposing on the screen but not too much which would make him seem distant from the screen and the audience. Another convention which I think we incorporated well into the documentary was the use of graphics on the screen to inform the audience of what is going on. In Figure 1 you can see that we used graphics to inform the audience of who is speaking at the time and their job or why they are relevant to our documentary (see Figure 2). A third convention that I believe we used and developed was the use of the voiceover. It is the purpose of a voiceover to further the story onwards from what the interviewees and cutaways are saying and to inform the audience of what is going on and general information on the subject. I believe we implemented this convention well although there were some points within the documentary where the voiceover seemed jittery and somewhat unsure about what they were saying however we were unable to redo the voiceover due to other commitments the speaker had made. The final convention that I believe we applied to our documentary would be the cutaways. This particular convention is used within all documentaries so as the audience don’t get bored and are just seeing people sit there answering questions. Our cutaways are used to relate to the subject of the drinking ban and I believe that we used this convention to our advantage as in our post audience review where we asked audience member what they thought they noted that the cutaways was one of the elements they most enjoyed as they was “relevant to the topic” and they kept the audience engaged (see Figure 3).