Alex Panton A2 Media

A2 Media Studies: Coursework Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? I believe that the final product we produced resembles that of a real documentary, as we have followed many of the codes and conventions described in theorist Bill Nichols conceptual scheme of modes. As we produced the opening 5 minutes of a documentary piece, it was important to follow these conventions in order to create a realistic and professional end product. To begin with, we researched into a number of different documentaries, for example Supersize Me, in order to gain an understanding of what the professional products consist of and apply this to our documentary. Furthermore, we viewed documentaries relative to the issue of music piracy, such as Panorama: Are the net police coming for you? and Good Copy, Bad Copy, which helped us in recognizing the impact of piracy on the music industry and collect facts and statistics to support our argument. The majority of Nichols documentary mode conventions we followed belonged to the expositional mode, for example the use of factual information. The screenshot below portrays graphical text of statistics found during the initial research on music piracy in a large, bold font. The font style and white text is clearly visible in the clip for viewers and was introduced in the first 10 seconds of the documentary in order to grab the audiences attention and highlight the issue of illegal downloading. The importance of the information is emphasised as the narrator reads out each of the facts as they appear on screen. Following this convention allowed us to bring attention to the issue of music piracy and how it affects the industry, which was the primary aim of the documentary. A common feature in documentaries is the exposition, an opening montage of shots introducing the documentary to viewers. After the analysis of several documentaries, we decided to follow convention and create a fast paced exposition, immediately highlighting the theme of the documentary and attract viewers with an upbeat soundtrack and series of clips. Initially we were

Alex Panton A2 Media

unsure of what to include in the start of the opening montage, however we decided to capture images of CDs stacked up in a pile, slowly decreasing in numbers until there is one disc left. After collecting these images, we edited them in Final Cut to last duration of 0.6 seconds each, playing one after another. Although this was a small aspect of the montage, the CDs disappearing relates to the subject matter, symbolising the loss of sales and revenue in the music industry.

To continue the fast paced montage, we included a number of vox pops of the target audience (15 to 24 year olds) admitting they illegally obtain music. As we had portrayed an unbiased view on the issue, we felt it was important to include both sides of the argument in the exposition. Following this, the opposite side to the previous clip was depicted with short extracts of expert interviews, clearly stating that music piracy is an issue that needs addressing. Narration is a popular method in the expositional mode, which we felt was important to use in our product, as all of the documentaries we viewed featured a narrative voice of some kind, either in the form of a voice over or a presenter on screen. The narration acted as an aid in the explanation of the content and was put in place to introduce the documentary in the exposition. Further on, the narrative voice introduced the next set of footage to be shown, for example the interview with record label owner Lee Etherington, explaining who he is and what he was discussing in the clip. We decided to keep the voice over clips short at around 5 seconds per clip, so that we were able to include as much footage of expert interviews and vox pops as possible. Interviews are an essential aspect of documentaries, as they allow different opinions to be expressed. Included in our documentary are vox pops, derived from the Latin phrase vox populi, meaning voice for the people. Interviewing members of the public enabled us to portray the general opinion of music piracy, specifically among our target audience of 15 to 24 year olds. We also included expert interviews, as the experts are able to provide specific information on the topic due to their own studies and personal experiences. Our expert interviews consisted of Jayson Burns, a media expert, and Lee Etherington, an owner of a music store and founder of an independent record
2

Alex Panton A2 Media

label. These experts were able to describe the current state of the music industry, especially Lee, who was affected first hand by music piracy. Looking across dead space Mise-enscene Framing: Shot takes up half of frame

The image above shows how we followed the conventions of expert interviews in the documentary. We framed the shots in a similar way to that of professional documentaries, positioning the expert in half of the shot and looking across the dead space instead of directly at the camera. Furthermore, the mise-en-scene in our interviews were relevant to the expert, for example the record label owner Lee is filmed in front of a collection of records, in a similar way to how the waiter in the image above is filmed in a restaurant. However, it is apparent that the professional documentary has used a much closer shot, a medium close up, whereas we used a medium shot. Our shot has more space above the experts head, when a closer shot would have been more appropriate to clearly see the expert and appear more professional. The use of cutaway shots of images and other footage related to the content is what Nichols describes as evidentiary editing, a common convention of the expositional mode. The cutaways are typically used in expert interviews in order to illustrate, illuminate, evoke, or act in counterpoint to what is said. We added relevant images to the expert interviews during the editing stage, for example, we have included a music video of Scouting for Girls while media expert Jayson Burns describes how difficult it is for upcoming artists to find work. We used cutaway shots to keep the audience interested and give them a visual representation of what the expert is explaining, helping them with their understanding of what is being said.

Alex Panton A2 Media

Other footage we captured during the filming stage was establishing shots. Establishing shots are short clips opening a new section of the documentary, for example the image to the left is an establishing shot of Birmingham City Centre. We used this footage as a visual aid alongside the voice over, introducing the vox pops we had collected from the city centre. We decided to use a longshot looking down a busy street, as it appears more interesting for the audience and immediately catches their attention. During the planning stage, we looked into the conventions of the main product, the documentary, and the ancillary texts, the magazine article and radio trailer. Stand first Headline Grab quote

Smaller images Image caption

Page number, date and magazine name in footer

Main image

Alex Panton A2 Media

Above is a copy of our magazine article, which follows many of the conventions of those of a professional standard. As we produced the documentary for BBC3 and Radio Trailer for Radio 1, we thought it would be featured in the Radio Times, a magazine owned by the BBC. Therefore, we produced a considerable amount of text, as this would appeal to the educated readers of the Radio Times. However, our target audience are young people in the age range of 15 to 24, in social classes B C2. Upon reflection, the Radio Times is not the most suitable choice, as the majority of readers are high class and the majority of 15 to 24 year olds would read other TV listings magazines, such as TV choice. We researched into professional radio trailers and those produced by previous students, in order to gain an understanding of the conventions involved.

Extracts of interviews from the documentary

Backing track: Same music used in the documentary

Voice over advertising the programme

Above is a screenshot of the radio trailer produced in Garageband. We found that radio trailers we researched into included sound bites from their documentary. We followed this convention, and included short extracts from vox pops and expert interviews. We also included a voice over to advertise the time, date and channel of the documentary. We chose to use a different person to record for the voice over, as we felt it was conventional to use different voices in the different products. The main issue with the radio trailer is that the sound levels of the voice over are not level, as some points the sounds are louder than others. To improve this, we should have equalised the

Alex Panton A2 Media

audio, a feature which is available in Final Cut, in order to level out the sound clip. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Overall, I believe that our three products connect well, because they have a singular brand identity. All products are broadcast on the BBC, which we felt was a realistic choice, as the BBC would most likely advertise their products with their own media outlets. In addition to this, we used the same backing track in the radio trailer as the documentary. This creates a familiarity with the products, as viewers would be able to identify that the radio trailer and documentary are related by listening to the music. Furthermore, we decided to use the name of our documentary as the title for the magazine article. We felt that because the title was concise, it would attract readers in a magazine to read on to find out more about the topic. Using the same name also makes the product recognisable, as the audience could identify the connection between the documentary and article based on the title. Although there is a clear connection between all 3 products, there is an issue of the choice of media publisher. As stated before, the Radio Times, though related to the other products, was not the most appropriate choice for our magazine article, as the magazine is aimed at an older audience. As well as this, there is a large amount of text, which may deter readers of our target audience who would be looking for an article that attracts their attention immediately. However, we have used a number of images to give a visual aid to readers, which would interest them more than an article solely consisting of text. The radio features a number of extracts from the documentary, which promotes the main product well and would catch the attention of listeners. However, I believe the documentary was the best product produced, as we were able to portray a range of opinions on the issue and included views from the target audience, and people affected directly by music piracy, allowing viewers to develop their own view on the issue rather than portray a biased opinion. Even though there were faults with the ancillary texts, the products
6

Alex Panton A2 Media

work well as a whole, as the radio trailer and article promote the main product by featuring extracts from the documentary to interest the viewers. What have you learned from your audience feedback? For the first section of the audience feedback, we created a questionnaire for 26 members of our target audience to complete after viewing all 3 of our products.

The feedback we received was positive, as 100% questioned agreed that our documentary looked professional. Furthermore, 92% stated they would continue watching our documentary after having viewed the first 5 minutes. This was a great response, as we had managed to interest the majority of our target audience; despite the fact we found they rarely watch documentaries in our audience research. The positive feedback for the documentary was expected, as I believe that it was our strongest product. The radio trailer also received positive feedback, as 96% of the audience said they would watch the documentary after listening to the radio trailer. This feedback confirms that we were able to successfully attract our target audience with the short radio trailer. Surprisingly, 22 of the people questioned (85%) stated that the sound levels were appropriate for the radio trailer. I believed this to be one of our weakest areas and was surprised to see the majority of the audience giving us positive feedback on this aspect. However, there were
7

Alex Panton A2 Media

several comments suggesting that adjusting the voice over in the radio trailer would be an improvement.

Alex Panton A2 Media

I was also surprised at the feedback for the magazine article, as we found that the majority rated our magazine article either excellent or good. However, the magazine did receive the lowest ratings out of all of the products, which was expected because I believed it to be the weakest of the three. There were several improvements suggested by our target audience, which mainly focused on the magazine article. People suggested that we use less text in the article, include more images, use one, large image to dominate the second page and to use a more extensive colour scheme. The documentary received few criticisms, which included using more vox pops and shorter expert interviews. As another form of audience feedback, we held a focus group of our target audience to give feedback on our media products. We filmed this focus group, which is available on our blog http://g12documentary11.blogspot.com/ And also on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch? feature=player_embedded&v=BGKxhKi7HUU The feedback from the focus group was positive, the audience commented that the documentary looked professional, was edited well and featured good expert interviews and vox pops. However, the criticisms included that the expert interviews were too long, when key quotations could have been used. As well as this, the font size for the statistics in the opening montage was too small and could be improved with a larger size. The focus group also commented that the radio trailer was well produced; however a larger number of short vox pop extracts could have been used to improve the product. The focus group agreed the article looked professional and as a whole, all 3 products appeared to be at a professional standard. In order to improve the article, the focus group suggested reducing the amount of text to appeal to readers and use a number of smaller images. Overall, we found that the audience feedback was very positive, as the majority of the people questioned agreed our products appeared to be of a professional standard. Furthermore, they explained that the products were interesting and would attract them to continue watching the documentary. I agree with the improvements suggested in our audience feedback, especially for the radio trailer and magazine articles. If I had a chance to improve the
9

Alex Panton A2 Media

products, I would aim to make the magazine more appealing by using a more interesting colour scheme, less text and more images. I would also alter the sound levels on the radio trailer and include more interviews. For the documentary, I would definitely cut down on the expert interview clips, making them into more concise points in order to keep the audience interested. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? During this task, we used a variety of different hardware and software in order to create the products at a professional standard. For the research and planning stage, the majority of research took place using computers and the internet, allowing us to access a variety of material. The main technology we used during our research was the blog. Blogger.com enabled us to upload all of the research we had collected in a variety of multimedia formats, such as images, text and videos, helping us to provide visual content to our research findings. Another of the technologies we used was YouTube, a popular video sharing site, allowing us to find extracts or full documentary clips to analyse. We used YouTube as a source for documentary clips mainly because of the ability to access an embed code, which we copied and pasted into a blog post to embed the video. This allows anyone viewing the blog to simply press play on the video, whereas if we posted a link, viewers would have to click the URL and open the video in a new page.

Scribd is a document sharing website that we used during our research and planning as an alternative to using plain text in blog posts. The Scribd iPaper documents are similar in appearance to a PDF document, however unlike PDF documents, the Scribd format can be embedded on to a webpage. We used Scribd to upload word documents on to the blog, because the format is easier to view and navigate through than using a number of image files, and uses less space in posts in comparison to plain text. Scanners were an essential technology for our research and planning, as they created an image file of a paper based document. This meant we were able to upload hand written notes, for example storyboards and action planning sheets, directly on to the blog, saving time we would have spent typing up the information on the computer.

10

Alex Panton A2 Media

During the production stage, we used a number of different technologies, for example the Canon camcorder, which was used to capture the film footage. The camcorder has a number of functions available, such as the white balance function. From the functions menu on the camcorder, we were able to adjust the white balance from a number of pre-set controls. The majority of the time we used the pre-set auto-white balance, however in poorly lit environment, we manually adjusted the balance to ensure the picture was bright and clear. With ports available for headphones and microphones, we were easily able to connect other equipment to the camcorder for filming interviews and vox pops. The sound levels could be manually adjusted in the functions menu, which we often had to tweak to ensure we were able to pick up sound during an interview. Additional equipment used in the filming stage included a tripod, microphone and headset. The camcorder was designed to be mounted on a tripod, which was useful as we were able to quickly set up the equipment for filming. We used the tripod for all of our filming, because it allowed us to capture steady shots, whereas filming with the camcorder in hand would result in shaky footage. The external microphone was an extremely useful piece of equipment, which we found was much more efficient in recording sound than the built in microphones in the camcorder. The microphone worked well in conjunction with the headphones, as we were able to listen to the sound levels while filming to see if they were appropriate. The external microphone could be placed much closer to the person we were interviewing, and therefore record a much clearer sound. As well as this, the external microphone could be directed at the person on camera, eliminating a large amount of background noise. Although the external microphone had a number of benefits, the main drawback we found during post production was that the microphone at times moved into shot. This rendered some of our footage unusable, and resulted in a considerable amount of time being spent adjusting the framing of the clips, in an attempt to crop the microphone out of shot. We used Apple iMacs during the postproduction stage of this task, as they already had the necessary software installed to edit our main and ancillary tasks. The advantage of using an Apple computer is that it has a large amount of exclusive software available for creative design, such as Garageband and Final Cut, which are not available on other operating systems.

11

Collection of all of the files, including video, audio and images.

Window providing a preview of selected clips and is used to edit clips.

Alex Panton A2 Media

Window displaying all of the content on the timeline.

Timeline of the documentary

Audio content: The bottom half of the timeline represents the audio content of the clips and backing track

Visual content: The upper half of the timeline represents the visual content of the clips.

Sound level bar

Above is a screenshot of Final Cut Express, the software we used to edit the footage we collected to create the final product. To begin with, we used the Log and Transfer feature to sort all of the footage we collected during production. We did this to ensure we did not import any footage we did not want to use. After logging and transferring all of our footage, we were able to simply drag and drop it from the collection into the timeline.
12

Alex Panton A2 Media

Selected transition

Final Cut Express provided us with a number of transitions to use in the editing stage. To do this, we simply selected the Effects tab on the browser and opened the folder titled Video Transitions. After selecting a video transition to use, we simply dragged and dropped it on the timeline. For a number of our clips, we decided to use a Fade in Fade out Dissolve transition rather than a straight cut, to create a more professional edit. For example, we used this transition to fade in and fade out the text overlay with the information on the experts during their interviews. One weakness with this software is that the majority of transitions we found appeared unprofessional, which limited what we could use in our documentary.

Cutaway

Text overlay Fade in Fade out Dissolve

The main clip

13

Alex Panton A2 Media

In the opening montage, we edited the background footage of people walking around Birmingham city centre, while the statistics appeared on screen, by altering the speed of the clip. To speed up the clip, we went to Modify, Speed and changed the speed from 100% to 285.71%, creating a faster clip to keep up with the fast pace of the exposition.

The viewer window in Final Cut Express was useful to preview selected clips, as well as edit them. The screenshot below is one example of the editing we used on a text overlay, in this case the statistics from the opening montage (see fig.1). After deciding to have the different statistics appear on the screen, we had to edit their position to specific points. To do this, we edited the centre points (found on the Motion tab of the viewer window) to adjust the position of the text. Furthermore, we applied a black drop shadow on the white text, so that it would stand out against the background footage.

The specific centre points

Scale can be used to edit the size of the text

Drop shadow effects

14

Alex Panton A2 Media

As well as editing footage in Final Cut Express, we were able to adjust the audio content. This could be done easily by either means of adjusting the sound levels on the timeline, or by going to the Modify toolbar and highlighting Audio. We found that the majority, if not all, of the audio content of our footage needed to be adjusted, as the sound levels were either too loud or too quiet. To do this, we either raised or lowered the decibel levels and checked the sound level bar on the right of the timeline (pictured below), to ensure the sound levels peaked at the optimum volume of around -5 decibels.

Another form of post-production editing we used on our audio content was the normalisation gain. The normalisation gain is used for audio clips that have uneven sound levels, for example if a door slams in the background and creates a very loud noise. We applied the normalisation gain to clips that contained uneven sound levels, by normalising the audio to around -5 decibels. Pictured below is a screenshot of our radio trailer in Garageband, software available on Apple computers that allows users to record and produce music content. Although this is not professional software, the user friendly interface was useful for us to create the radio trailer and backing track, which was composed from synthesised recordings from the Garageband music library. We decided to create the music track for the documentary in the software, as we felt the unlicensed music that was provided did not fit in well with our products.
15

Alex Panton A2 Media

Different tracks containing different audio content

Short sound bites from the documentary

Looped backing track plays for the duration of the radio trailer

Volume settings for tracks can be altered to adjust louder sound bites and fade out the audio at the end

The images below are of an additional editing area in Garageband, found at the bottom of the screen. This allows more advanced editing options, such as importing soundtracks, which we used to create the backing track for our documentary and radio trailer. As well as this, we found we could zoom in to audio clips in this advanced editing menu, which made trimming audio segments more precise and accurate.

16

Alex Panton A2 Media

Options for modifying the size of the objects onscreen.

Further options including text wrap and special effects

The main toolbar provides the majority of tools, including select, rectangle and text tools.

Toolbar on the side provides a number of additional tools, such as inserting pages and layers.

Adobe InDesign is a software we are familiar with using from our AS coursework from the previous year. The fact we already know many of the tools and functions in this software package was an advantage, as we were able to apply skills learnt from previous work on this product. We decided on using this software, as we all agreed it created a professional look to our products from last year. As a part of the Adobe CS3 software package, InDesign shares a similar layout to Photoshop, for instance the InDesign FX tool includes options for drop shadow and other effects that are also available on Photoshop. We applied the drop shadow effect (accessible from the fx tool) to the headline and images, creating a shadowed effect which looks more interesting to readers than a simple box frame. InDesign makes use of rectangular frames, which are placed to insert content such as text and images for the article. Inserting an image is a very simple process in this
17

Alex Panton A2 Media

software, as we only had to navigate to the File option on the toolbar on screen and select place. Before inserting images, we designed the complete layout for the whole article, deciding where everything would be placed beforehand. Afterwards, we inserted images into frames and choose the fit to frame proportionally option from the right click menu. This tool resizes the image to fit the frame correctly, saving time adjusting image and frame sizes manually. Overall, I believe we made a good choice in software and hardware for our research, planning and evaluation stages, as we have managed to produce three media products at a professional standard. Final Cut Express and Adobe InDesign in particular are two software packages that enabled us to produce high standard products, due to the advanced tools and effects we were able to use in the post production stage. Although the software was extremely useful, the complexity at times was a disadvantage, as we would have to spend a considerable amount of time familiarising ourselves with the software. Garageband and the filming equipment (camcorder, external microphone and headset) on the other hand was very user friendly, allowing us to work on the production and post-production stages with greater ease than Final Cut and InDesign.

18