Evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The main production uses the conventions of real media texts such as narrative as we have used a voiceover throughout the documentary to tell the story of the girl. The introduction starts slowly and shows the young teenage girl at college, it shows how she has a normal day and then it progresses into her dancing. Images that are used throughout the documentary are of the girl dancing and walking through college. The lighting varies throughout the documentary; it goes from light to dark in many stages. There are three actors, the main teenage girl, her friend and her dance partner. All three actors are dressed casually at first but when footage is played from the dance competition, the two dancers are shown in a different light. Both are looking smart and well dressed.
The first subsidiary task uses the conventions of real media texts by using the correct content. On the double page spread there includes a heading, image and text. The text is basically a short description about what the documentary is going to be about and gives you a small insight as to what you will be watching. However it does not give away too much detail. The layout is simple, the image is placed on the left and all of the text is kept to the right. Colours that are used are red and black, the heading is red and the text is black. The main image is to the left and shows the main girl who is featured in the documentary.
My secondary subsidiary task uses the conventions of real existing media texts by using a large photo to capture the attention of readers this also creates a micro narrative of the story of the documentary in the newspaper amongst other stories. There is also sometimes a block of colour to make the writing stand out but with the image that we used i didn't think it would be a good choice as it would cover up some of the image and take the attention away from the image. We have also used an image which we have turned black and white but left the colour of the dresses red so that it draws attention to the dress and what the documentary is about, Dancing. We used a colour which we picked from the dress for the title as well so that there are clear links shown between the title and the image otherwise they would look independent.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The texts all combine because they are all about the documentary and they all have the same description of the documentary also the opinion from the girls point of view who is being featured in the documentary. The similarities that the main product and ancillary texts have are they have very similar type face's which is used, the colour scheme which is being followed through throughout the different texts because the dresses which the girl is wearing are all red so there was an obvious colour scheme to go with. The images are all the same style, where the girl is always in her dance dress and you rarely see her in her everyday clothes. The differences between the texts are the layout, there isn't 2 of the outcomes which have the same structure because they are different in themselves and we didn't want it to be to similar. The texts help us understand the others because of what they say, for instance the magazine double page spread helps us understand the newspaper advert otherwise the advert would look just like a picture of 2 dance girls and a tv channel logo i n the corner.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our target audience is mainly for both males and females, it has not been aimed at either sex intentionally because both sex can watch and benefit from the documentary. I have also had a look on the interent to see the statistics of which sex watches documentaries more, and males watch more documentaries more than females. I feel with my choice of documentary it will appeal more to females as it is about dancing. The strongest element in our project is the documentary because it the main one and it shows what it is all about. The weakest out come is the advert because there isn't a lot of information on the advert, where as on the newspaper there is the story and more information about the documentary. If people could change our documentary they would add more to our documentary and they would work on it some more so that it looks more professional, they could do this by working on some of the camera angles and the way we have interviewed the girl. People have given us the feedback so that if our documentary was to be viewed on the tv they said that they would see it on channel 4 at about 8 o'clock on a week day. Another person gave us their opinion of when they would read the advert in a newspaper and they said that they would read our advert in one of the best selling newspapers such as 'The Sun' or 'The Mirror'.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The Hardware which i used that was new to me was the cameras to film the dancing and the opening sequence as we had to correct the focus and the resolution, also the tripod to make it stand up straight. The software which i used to make our products were advanced technologies on the Macs such as Final Cut Express, i used this to put all the clips of the videoing together to make the documentary. Also we used InDesign to make the double page spread and PhotoShop to create the newspaper advert. Other Programmes which i used such as Youtube to upload and promote our documentary we also used facebook to share the video. If our friends keep sharing the video and their friends share then we should get a lot of views on the video.Blogger has also helped a lot with our coursework as we can keep checking we have what we need and we can see everything that we already have easily other than trying to go in to different folders on our desktops and documents.
