Evaluation

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

My media product ‘Download Killed the Music Star’ uses the forms and conventions typical documentary products in many ways. I used my analysis of real media products to identify the conventions so as a group we could replicate them and conform to documentary standards.

We used many different generic conventions throughout  one of the most important is the application of the rule of thirds during our interviews. This is a typical feature of all interviews in the media, we framed a mid shot of our subject, eg. Richard Caddock, in the top left corner. This is important for the mise-en-scene of the shot making it appealing to the viewer, this features in all of our A-roll interviews. In addition we had the ability, through Adobe Premiere Pro, to add a musical themed graphic that I designed as a name plate to display the names of the people we interviewed. We designed the banner to signify the business and money of record sales through the use of the records sitting on the bed of money, we also linked in the views of the artist by incorporating music notes and a guitar.

An important feature of all documentaries is the use of Archive footage, it is a chance for the makers to include external information and footage to to reinforce or appose the point they are trying to deliver to the audience. we got footage of Torrent downloading and of an interview with the founder of Pirate Bay, this footage allowed us to get external information about illegal downloads which we couldn't have captured ourselves .

Another way we conformed to the conventions was the frequent use of B-roll footage, both including and excluding the people we interviewed, this footage is relevant to the narration and to the answers given by our interviewees. We were lucky to be able to film in recording studios, along side live music events and even a shoot for a music video, this gave us a variety of shots to use many different techniques found in multiple media texts we have analysed. We used many atmospheric techniques such as focus pulls to create an artistic   effect to the B-roll footage which helps to appeal to the audience. In total we filmed about 3 times more B-roll than A-roll allowing us to edit lots of montages piecing together different angles and shots.

Our documentary also included a narrator, a generic feature of media texts that allows the makers to put forward their information to the viewer without constantly having the interview footage addressing the audience. Having said this we did not include a lot of narration, this is one of the ways we developed the conventions of documentaries. instead of conforming and having a narrator guide the whole documentary we only used it very slightly, we wanted our piece to be driven by the interviewees and the information they put across.

We developed the use of conventions during some of our B-roll footage, typically all footage in documentaries are filmed using a tripod, very plain and to the point. We took this and developed it ourselves by using a lot more edgy shots. We used live footage from gigs then we went to and created an artist montage by using lots of different angles, unsteady shots and tried to recreate the feeling of being in a crowd.



2. How effective is the combination of your media product and ancillary texts?




3. What have you hearnt for you Audience feedback?

I used Facebook to interact with a large audience to gain my Audience Feedback. Our documentary seems to have been effective with only positive feedback and we have been told that we have successfully informed them of the effect of illegal downloads. People have also commented on the professional appearance of the product which tells us that we where doing a good job on the way for making a high quality product.

From this feed back I have noticed that our decision to interview people actually involved in the music industry made a big difference allowing the viewers to get this inside information. These personal views allowed for a more accurate, honest and believable retelling of the true effect of illegal downloading which has been seen from the feedback saying has interesting it was for these opinions to be voiced.

I have also learnt that the topic of illegal downloading is not one that is extremely common, this allowed our documentary to fit into this missing criteria. Our documentary has been shown to inform and educate people of the increasing problems of illegal downloading making our documentary in successful in what we set out to do.

4. How did I use different media technologies in the construction,research, planning and evaluation stages?

Within Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 we used many different effects and techniques to achieve the final product. For example, during the interview with Kieran we captured Sam's reflection in the monitor so to get rid of this we created a boundary, so that we only effected the monitor, then increased the contrast till the reflection was gone. An effect we used a lot was the automation of opacity, we used this to seamlessly change between scenes and create artistic montages of B-roll footage. We used this because fast paced cuts would be inappropriate for our documentary and we wanted the view to be able to relax and enjoy it without it being hard on the eyes. We used transitions to make our name plate slide in, we simply imported the image the added the text as another layer then added the same transition to both, making time adjustments so they came on at different times then just used the opacity automation to make them fade out together.

Along with visual effects, we also had to do a lot of work with the sound. for most of our interviews we used a clip microphone, but this only recorded in mono, to solve this problem we had to use an effect called 'Fill Left' this filled the audio into both sides of the stereo field so it sounded balanced and equal. We also had to alter a lot of the levels as different interviewees spoke at different volumes and when we filmed the interview with LL and Pearl, we used a boom microphone so the level was different but already in stereo. Between scenes we also automated the volume of the music  to increase and decrease to bridge the gap between audio.