In what ways does your media product use, develop or

challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The brief given at the beginning of the A2 course was to: create the
opening 5 minutes of a 1 hour documentary, alongside this we were
asked to create two ancillary texts, a double page spread for a TV
listings magazine and a radio trailer both to advertise the
documentary. In order to do this we had to research and look into
similar media products.
When carrying out research into documentaries and both ancillary
texts we researched background information. As part of this we
looked at narrative theories.
We looked at Claude Levi-Strauss and his theory of binary
oppositions. He looked at numerous myths and legends throughout
the world, from that he concluded that humans make sense of the
world, people and events by seeing and using binary oppositions, he
showed that culture is a system with underlying structures that are
common to all societies regardless of their differences. According to
Levi-Strauss, all people think of the world around them in terms of
binary opposites and therefore every culture can be understood in
these terms. Carrying on from this he found that narratives are
arranged around the conflict of binary oppositions and apply these
to their productions.
Claude Levi-Strauss along with Roland Barthes discovered that the
way the human mind understands certain words does not depend so
much on the meaning they directly contain, but more by our
understanding of the difference between the word and its opposite,
they then called this the binary opposite.
Examples of binary opposites include: Good vs Evil, Black vs White,
Peace vs War, Boy vs Girl, Protagonist vs antagonist, Ignorance vs
Wisdom.
After researching Clause Levi-Stauss and many other Narrative
Theorists such as Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov and Roland
Barthes we chose to follow Claude Levi-Strauss theory of binary
opposites. Our aim was to portray the good vs evils of social media
in terms of the impact that it is having on our generation.
We then looked at narrative structures, which is the way in which a
storyline or tread is put together.
Each media product, whether it is fictional or non fictional is
organized according to one of the following narrative structures:
open, closed, multi-strand, single-strand, linear, non-linear and
circular. The narrative structure that our documentary follows is an
open narrative structure as we portrayed both the positive and
negative effects that social media has on us and therefore our aim

was for the audience to make up their own mind based on what they
were shown in the documentary.
In our documentary our attempt to portray both positive and
negative effects and opinions of social media was done using
voxpops (voice of the population) and expert interviews however the
majority of the voxpops portrayed positive comments on social
media which didnt provide a balanced argument however the
expert interview with the college principle and the college councilor
did provide some of the possible negative effects of social media.
The use of experts provided an authoritative argument which
provides a stronger opinion, this may lead to the audience being
persuaded by their negative opinions therefore a more balanced
argument is given.
Since the beginning of the A2 media course I have watched many
different documentaries, such as Super Size me in order to see the
different conventions used in the different styles of documentaries.
Doing this research helped in the making of our documentary as we
were able to base decisions on the conventions that we were aware
of. Research into radio adverts and TV listings magazines was also
carried out so that we were able to do the same when producing
these two ancillary texts. The use of the camera and the shots used
was a main convention I picked up on whilst analyzing the
documentary. Including shots such as Close ups, Medium close ups,
Long shots and Establishing shots. The use of the tripod or
handheld camera were also conventions picked up on, using a hand
held camera makes the audience feel as though they are a part of
what is happening therefore we rarely used this in our documentary
as it wasnt packed with action that we felt the viewers needed to
feel a part of. Instead we mainly used a tripod, the use of a tripod is
in order to keep a steady shot and makes the documentary look
more professional, we used this for shots such as an establishing
shot of the college, where we also used the skill of panning the
camera right to show the college we also used the tripod for expert
interviews and voxpops allowing us to keep the shot steady.
For each of the expert
interviews we used a
caption was displayed
stating who the person
was, this small detail
immediately introduces
them to the audience.
We also consciously
followed this convention
in our double page
spread for the
documentary,
captioning the images.
Captions are used in
documentaries to
introduce the person
being interviewed so
this was a convention
we followed in order to

Captions
used in
the
interviews
in Super
Size Me.

Another convention followed in our documentary is the positioning

of the interviewee during their interview. We used rule of thirds to
set up the shot, the interviewee should be a third of the way in and
looking at the interviewer not at the camera.

Sound is important in documentaries, including background music,

a voiceover/presenter, non-diagetic and diagetic sound. In Super

Size Me a presenter is used in order to make the documentary feel

more personal as you feel you get to know him throughout and feel
as though you are part of what is happening. However we felt that
as our documentary was more informative we were just going to
have a voice over as a presenter was not necessary so we just had a
voiceover. Although this is challenging the conventions of Super
Size Me it is a convention that is widely followed in other
documentaries therefore we were still following conventions.
Background music is convention followed in documentaries. For
our documentary we had to choose a track that would be simple and
not overpowering so it didnt take the audiences attention away
from the voiceover or the other sound in the documentary.
Therefore we tried to stay with a simple yet upbeat track for our
documentary so that it didnt make it seem boring however due to
the issues of copyright finding a suitable track wasnt easy. I think
that the track we chose works well but a better one could have been
used as we only chose it because it seemed the most fitting rather
than because it was one that we really liked. To improve this we
could have recorded a simple yet fitting background track for our
documentary or done more research to find another one.
Facts and statistics are heavily displayed in the first 5 minutes of
a documentary as this is where the topic is first introduced so the
beginning of the documentary needs to be informative, this is a
convention also used in Super Size Me, so it is a convention we have
followed in our documentary, using the voiceover.

Facts and statistics

displayed in the
opening 5 minutes
of Super Size Me

Facts and statistics

displayed in the
opening 5 minutes of
our documentary.

Effects and transitions are used throughout the documentary

Super Size Me; they work effectively in leading one scene into
another. We did this in our documentary using transitions between
clips in order for it to flow and look more professional. We also
changed the speed in the clip of our title speeding it up so that the
title is typed faster, the idea behind this was so that the title was
typed out in time with the voice over however, due to the issues
with timings throughout the documentary we were not able to add
that into the voice over, despite this I think that this still worked
effectively as the audience are able to read the title as it is typed
out.

Magazine Article
This is the double page spread we produced as an ancillary text as
part of our coursework.

Before producing the double page spread we looked at and analyzed

various TV listing magazines, including Radio Times, in order to get
an idea of the conventions used and how effectively they could be
followed, challenged or developed. As our topic wasnt a very
serious topic we were able to make our double page spread more
colourful and include more images in order to attract our fairly
young target audience.

Magazine articles for

documentaries feature a
fair few images, which
tend to be stills from the
documentary itself
introducing people
involved. For our double
page spread we used
stills of all three experts
allowing readers to be
aware of who is going to
be involved in the
documentary and what
to expect from them.
Following conventions
further we used
captions with the
images explaining who
the person is and why
theyre part of the
documentary.
The Masthead is the title of the page that is always used in
magazine articles and it is a convention that we subconsciously
followed as it is needed to introduce the article. Often the headline
is the name of the documentary/ television program featured on the
double page spread however we chose not to use our documentary
title as our masthead as we felt as if it was being over used and we
wanted something else to grab the attention of the readers which is
why we chose to use the word epidemic, I think it was used
effectively as it insinuates that social media is taking over and this
is the effect we wanted our masthead to have.

A pull quote is used

in a magazine article
to draw the attention
of the reader giving
them a snippet of
information from the
text; we used a
statistic on the
usage of social
Articles are always laid out columns which
is why we used the format of 4 columns in
our double page spread.

The date, time

channel and the
name of the program is
often located here in an
article. As we liked the
way it was laid out and
easily spotted we used
this in our
documentaries double
page spread.

A drop cap is always used

in a magazine article to
open the text therefore we
followed conventions by
including this in our
double page spread.
Radio Trailer
Before making our radio trailer we listened to real ones in order to
get an idea of the conventions involved.
We used clips of voxpops to begin the radio trailer, manipulating one
so the word everyday repeats itself a few times in order to grab the
attention of the listener before the voiceover begins explaining what
the radio trailer is about. The background music that we used was
the same music used for the documentary, following conventions to
keep a constant flow throughout.
The time, date, channel and name of the program is a simple
convention that has to be used as it is necessary for the listener to
be able to watch the program therefore it was naturally followed.
Most radio trailers are between 20 and 40 seconds long; anything
less than this doesnt provide enough time for enough information
to be given and anything more than this may go on too long and

begin to get boring so listeners may stop listening or switch off

therefore we kept ours in the middle at about 30 seconds.
I think that overall we stuck to the main conventions throughout all
of our projects following them accordingly. We didnt challenge
conventions as we never felt a need too as we were happy following
basic conventions as a basis while creating our documentary and I
believe our documentary, double page spread and radio trailer look
professional throughout.