Final documentary, Radio advert and Print advert.

Evaluation.

Evaluation question 1.
In the production of our media product, we wanted to conform to all forms and conventions of a real life documentary. This was extremely important to us to follow the codes and convention therefore we could produce a documentary to the best of our ability and to look professional and show the same aspects a real life one would. From this there was only one convention in which we challenged. We decided, instead of starting our documentary with a voice over introduction, we used our owning scene of Janet tutorial of making a cup of tea. This jumped into the documentary with a light hearted and comical start to the documentary which we felt would work best to catch our audience’s attention straight away and from our audience feedback it was worth taking this risk as bar one person, everyone wanted to see more of her and loved the start of our product.
One of the media conventions we followed was using the voice over. Our voice over was chosen specifically to fit in with our target audience and was used as a narrative throughout our documentary so the audience knew what was happening.
In graphics, we used tittles for when our interviewees were first introduced. This gave their name and relation to tea for why we chose them for the documentary for example our interview from Lancashire tearoom’s’. We also kept to tradition having the titles shown at the bottom of the screen so as not to take away any attention from the person being interviewed. This follows the conventions and from my research for example the image below from Gok wan’s clips shows the clear representation of graphics kept simple and at the bottom of the screen with his name and position but not detracting from what’s happening in the scene.

We used a variety of voxpops as well as interviews. This gave the documentary more depth as there was a lot more opinion and it was useful to use when producing montages for our opening titles with the voxpops of ‘favourite brands’ and ‘where does tea come from’.
We developed the convention of using actual footage seen in other documentaries, with hand held camera scenes with the public to see their opinions to appeal to the audience for example of Gok Wan’s ‘fashion fix’. We felt that it would look good in our documentary to have a variety of people telling us their opinions about tea, and off guard footage would look natural and realte to the audience as ‘one of the public’. We also used archive footage to show fact to back up our theories of how tea is drunk as we used a clip from Emmerdale and Coronation Street.
This image from gok wan’s : how to look good naked series one episode 8 , shows Dorothy walking in the streets and of Gok wan with the public. From these ‘snippits’ from the episode it makes the audience relate to the person and even wonder if they were there that day etc.


This reflects to our documentary with voxpops from the public we have people the audience can relate to as well as real opinions.



















For our interviews we followed the convention of eyes line and spacing by making sure our they were always eye line ¾ up the screen and that they are to one side of the camera by a third and eye line is kept 3 quarters up the screen. Also we made sure the lighting was positioned behind the camera to keep the balance on screen of the interviewee. And in addition we used different background like the collage of tea, a blue screen interview to use additional pictures behind as well as normal background like Christian in his kitchen as we felt it would show him more at ease in his natural environment to look more natural. We combined our interviews together for the old and young person. We chose to do this to show the difference in representation of the different views on teas but still to created a strong coherent narrative that was easy to follow with the assistance of cut-aways which were used throughout interviews to express tea. We cut between Christian and Annette with cut aways of how they make tea.

This image shows how the eyeline is correctly 3/4 way down the screen lighting is keptbehind the camera and I think in this case the background to the interveiw has been blurred out because of its irrelevance to the documentary which is on dispatches, Britains secret slaves.

This image above shows our interveiw with an older person. We have kept eye line correctly 3/4 of the screen as well positioned on the right hand side not in the center. Also we developed a mise-en-scene with the theme of the tea cups we made a background to use for this interveiw as a wall art effect behind her which relates back to the topic of tea.




Evaluation question 2.

Here is the link for my evaluation question 2.
http://www.slideshare.net/megdavies


Question 3.

Here is a link incase to my footage uploaded to youtube.com of my audience feedback.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0n6_Q5D4h0



I was able to obtain filmed footage of people veiwing my film to give me audience feedback with Beth Stuch and Jenny Mannion looking over my work and giving my insightful and experienced feedback on my documentary with what was good and also be imporved on my work.
Beth found my documentary most interesting and thought my use of positioning and creativity made the documentary really different and effective to make me people want to veiw past five minutes. For exampl she talks about my interview with a constructed mise-en-scene with a montage of tea visualisations behind as she is being interveiwed. As well as this she looked at the framing of my work and noticed that it fit in with the codes and conventions to keep them on eye line and to the side complete with alternate graphics. She enjoyed my work with Janet and thought it made a good opening theme relating to tea but upbeat with the contracting classical music to make it more light hearted.
Jenny looked over my documentary and then talked about my radio advert and pringt advert and showed the link of codes and conventions of my print advert as it was simple,to the point and gave simple text to explain the time and date which would be clear for information for the audience.


I also devised a questionnaire for people to fill in after watching our documentary to give me objective feedback of my final piece. This directly gave us clear feedback to show us where we and strived as well as failed in our documentary. The feedback also gives us critism and guidelines as to where we can improve next time.
One question we asked was does the radio and print advert make you want to watch the documentary? Twelve out of fifteen answered that they did. From this, I know that my other ancillary pieces carried out the conventions successfully and served their purposes to attract and give the important information to my audience. It also shows the effectiveness of our topic to change tea into a fun subject for our audience to want to find out about tea and the people who said that they were not attracted to our print out and radio advert said it was down to the topic that they weren’t interested and not our work. Another question we asked was whether our audience were able to follow the documentary. We were given a lot of positive feedback from this with only one person disagreeing. I feel this has a lot to do with the risk we took to challenge the codes and conventions by using Janet’s tutorial about tea rather than a narrative structure. We chose to do this to start with alight hearted and comical opening for our documentary rather than keeping it serious which, I think people would be expecting. In hindsight, I think people might expect this with such a traditional documentary it would make them want to see what else we had in store when they saw Janet as she made it fun.
We were given some constructive critism when we asked does the pring advert stand out to you ? would it attract your attention. We received just over half responding yes. This made us realise that our print advert was probably our weakest link to our final piece. We wanted to keep to the codes and conventions keeping our font simple to make it clear and understanding as well as to stop it from detracting from the main image. In accordance with this we even mimicked the colours to give the font the same colour and the stripes out of the tea cosy to make it blend in more with the image. To improve this image I would suggest that we could have used a more alluring image, possibly a more dynamic approach of tea being poured or with a contrasting background and the white of the tea pot and background may have clashed slightly. However, as you can see from the image below, my first attempt to make our print out used shadowing techniques on the back ground and big fancy lettering as well as a blacked out background which although I think may have looked better, it did not fit with the codes and conventions of a print out and from comments from my peers that it was over complicated I felt keeping it simple and clear was more important for my target audience and the white background made the image a lot clearer.

From my filmed feedback, Jenny relates back to the print advert to the documentary and conforms how the print add does support all the codes and conventions for the print advert giving simple clear text with a simple image to stand out and the logo to sponser the documentary. I feel more time should have been spent on this for the print out.



Our audience felt that our graphics helped them understand the documentary showing that we were correct for using them in our documentary and although they were kept simple and not used often they were adequate not to distract from the documentary but keep viewers following for example when presented with an interviewee.
Another question we asked was whether they noticed the music in our documentary. Fourteen people said they did. This was conformation that our style of music worked well with our documentary and especially the risk we took when we wanted to involve music with tea as it was very western style and old fashioned we thought we might detract from the main image. This could be linked to the person who felt our music didn’t work which could have been avoided by keeping a constant music bed to our documentary with a comment about our music that it was distracting. Although we did try to use more instrumental music like in Janet’s piece, we could have tried to use more music like this for our music bed and kept it more constant rather than trying to use a wide variety of songs it may have made it more confusing. With my feedback From Beth, she also gave constructive critism for me that the non-digetic music was too loud over the documentary in parts. This would make it harder to follow Milk and two sugars and could hinder their understanding and focus on what’s going on. Next time I would use a more constant music bed and have a better balance with the music bed and the digetic noise from the actual documentary.
Number 6 of our questionnaire was how our documentary could be improved. This equipped us with many varied comments to help us improve our work and with much positive and negative feedback both useful to evaluate our documentary. There was a lot of positive feedback about the voice over we used hence showing it was the right choice for our target audience saying that she had a nice and lovely voice it would create the sense of ease and trust we hoped for to relate to our audience. Some critism we received was to hear more information about the origins of tea which we brought in slightly within the montages of the public. If more time was available we would have took the documentary to its birthplace as well as other cultures views on tea but we felt the questions we did show in the 5 minutes were most relevant and brought in the subject of origin which may have been confusing if we had started with heavier information. However, we could have used more facts in the voice over.A common request was to see more of Janet and we were unfortunate to be able to involve her anymore than she was. She was intended to run throughout our documentary showing the ‘perfect cup of tea’ and with her comical comments and alarming behaviour to bring a twist to the production. We couldn’t cut the parts we did use to fit more in as all her points were relevant and although we did add extra time slightly to fit more of her in we had to cut down a lot of her contributions to the product. WE did plan to use more footage of Janet as she was very good in the shots.



Question 4.

Here is a link to my question four.
http://prezi.com/yavwqqewb06g/q1/

question 4. on Prezi