Marketing strategy
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Friday, 1 April 2011
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
A2 Evaluation for Advanced Production – Documentary
A2 Evaluation for Advanced Production – Documentary
A definition of documentary by Michael Rabiger says ‘ Documentary should act on our hearts, not just our minds; it exists to change how we feel about something’ with that definition, compared with our own definition which is, ‘A piece of media that is edited to show a ‘true*’ picture of the subject that is shown, which the viewer is left to conclude their own opinions on. The definition includes the word true, however because it’s edited the media only show what they want to be seen, so that truth can be twisted. Both definitions fits well with our documentary because, it really makes you think. It enables you to make up your own mind, and allows you to come up with your own opinion, which is contrived through our diverse interviews.
Our documentary topic is what it is to be mixed race in today’s society. I, Naomi, came up with the initial idea due to the fact that I am mixed race and the idea of asking other people what their views are on mixed race people interested me. The mixed race community is getting larger and as a group we wanted to know what effect it has in the wider society. As we looked into it, we found out that our topic could potentially become controversial, as we are asking about people’s opinions on race, which can be a touchy subject. For that reason it appealed to us.
One of the typical conventions of a documentary that is often used in the opening is voiceovers. They tend to use this opportunity to state facts or introduce the documentary. The advantage of this is that they are still able to show images which usually are linked to the topic. This allows the audience to understand what is happening from the start and also gives more of an entertaining way to learn the statistics; this is something we have used in our documentary. We introduce our topic and give interesting facts and statistics whilst showing a varied mix of characters to draw our audience in early.
Title pages are very important in documentaries, as there tend to be many different scenes, so these help the documentary flow and lets the audience keep up with the narrative. Another convention used in a documentary is titles. We used titles in every scene, where a new person was introduced, this was so the audience famlilarise themselves with the person who is being interviewed and gave the audience insight into their role in the documentary and their position in society. In the audience screening the audience said that the titles were too small and were not on the screen long enough to read and mentioned that we failed to identify some of the speakers so they were confused as to who was who. We tried to change all of this for our final edit and think that now the narrative is easier to follow.
Another key convention in documentary is music. Its genre is usually relevant with the narrative or tends to be there is to help transition the scenes. We noticed non-diagetic sound is not used as much as in a documentary like for instance in a movie and concluded that was because you don’t need to build any sort of atmosphere, or make it dramatic in every shot. This would make the documentary emotive and therefore sway the audience’s decisions, where as the main objective of documentaries is to show both sides of the story and allow the audience to make up their own mind. This is not to say in some documentaries that this doesn’t happen, it just happens less frequently. We used music in the background and through each change of scene. We chose cultural music from the reggae genre, so the audience can relate the music to our topic and they may feel more familiar. In our audience screening it was noted that the music sounded too subjective and one sided. However our original research survey found that the people of ethnic background were most interested in our subject, so we decided to keep the music as it is as they were our target audience and our main priority.
Archive footage can be used in a documentary to add history; this helps the audience, understand the background of what the topic is in the documentary. In our documentary we wanted to use achive footage, to help show social change from the early 50s/60’s to now. However we was unable to show the footage we found in the first five minutes and due to not being our own work.
The modes we used for our documentary was Pro active and Expository. We used pro active, so we could involve ourselves in interviews and group discussions, making our participants feel more comfortable and have a level engagement. However when it came to editing we decided to cut out when we were asking questions and getting involved as it took up a lot of time and we were unable to get good footage of ourselves as we were such a small group. We chose Expository to inform, educate and enlighten our audience through a narrative voice, into introducing our documentary at the beginning. Hoping to immerse our audience into the story as quickly as possible.
In our Documenatry we tried to show the ‘true’ picture of our topic by having many different opinions. Our inspirational text ‘Is it better to be mixed race’ did not have many opinions from ‘everyday’ people, just from people who had a theoretical viewpoint. We wanted to get more ‘everyday’ people perspectives as we thought this was more interesting then scientific dialogue. However, because we were unable to put in all of our footage into the 5-minute time limit, we had to cut and edit most of it. So we decided to use the most entertaining and the most opposing views that would shock people hoping to draw them in to the narrative.
For our pre production, we tried to organise as much as we could for the production section, however because it is a documentary, we couldn’t script all dialogue. We did script our questions that we would ask, but our participants were not aware of our questions and therefore we think we received their gut feeling on the topic, not a well thought through answer. We hoped this would make it truthful and not what they thought we wanted to hear. We let the people we were speaking to represent themselves by their clothes, their dialect and responses, to give more of a ‘true’ picture of them. After all we were asking about their identities and did not want to change the way they were represented.
At the start of our documentary we had many different faces, all these faces were of different ethnic groups, we chose to do this, to represent how society is now multicultural and hopefully grab people outside of our target audience more. In our audience screening a lot of people said that we had only included those of colour and that we should add people from other races too. In our final edit we filmed more people and edited it together so there is a more equal spread of ethnicities in the beginning.
Our Documenatry would be shown on channel 4 at 9pm. This is because we think that our documentary applies to the channel 4 objectives and programming.
Channel 4 tends to provoke the audiences views and challenges their opinions and we quote “foster the new and experimental in television. It will encourage pluralism, provide a favoured place for the untried and encourage innovation in style content perspective and talent on and off screen”. ''We will use our reputation for risk and non-conformism to engage a younger generation in the values of public service broadcasting’. I think our documentary would be very suited for channel 4, because of our controversial topic. Our inspirational text ‘is it better to be mixed race’ was shown on channel 4, so we know that a channel 4 audience would be most suited to our topic. Also it being shown at 9pm allows us to get our target audience (16-25 year olds) as most people are watching TV at this time. This helps the documentary to be more popular and should reach out to a wider audience as its prime time.
Our target audience for our documentary is aged between 16-25 however we understand that it may relate to people who are older, so it may appeal to them too. The target audience’s relationship with the product is intriguing because firstly, the participants in the documentary are mainly teenagers. Their dress code initially is a school uniform and their dialect, immediately reflects on the identities of our target audience. The characterisations and attitude of the participants is acknowledged by our target audience due to the common background and ideologies shared.
The diverse faces of students shown in the beginning of the documentary highlights the variety of cultures in the world this ultimately enables our target audience to engage with each person whom they feel is closest to their personal identity.
The questions have been asked and answered in standard, understandable and basic English which should appeal to our target audience.
The background music brings together people from all different ethnic minorities, which enables a wider audience to engage with the documentary. Reggae music essentially is embraced by the youth; this once again attracts our target audience.
Here are some of our outtakes.
Clip wrong 1 – to start off our documentary we have many shots of mixed race people, we had to take some out, for the fact they were not framed properly. In our audience screening the audience said that we had used too many ethnic faces and too make it appeal to wider audience we should include different races, we did this.
Clip wrong 2 – also at the start we have me (Naomi) introducing the documentary and what it involves. This shot was done many times before, in different scenery. We did this shot many times, because we had many sound problems like distortion and echoing. For that reason and others such as the long camera shot used and me being unable to remember all the words, we took it out and re-did our introduction by coming closer to me and breaking down the script.
Clip wrong 3 (groups) - We had a lot of unused interviews with groups. We couldn’t put most of it in our documentary for a few reasons. In our first group interview we realised the questions we used were very basic, we didn’t get reaction or enthusiasm in the answers. Also in our first group one-person changes after we changed our questions and asked for a second interview. This wouldn’t have worked for continuity reasons, so we took it all out. For our second group, we made a few camera errors, like zooming in and panning at random times, this would have confused or distracted the viewer, so it was taken out. We decided from then on to give our interviewers key statistics that would hopefully get their mind working and get them interested in the topic.
Clip wrong 4 (all clips) – what we found when we was making our documentary is that we had a lot of unused clips, that we was unable to use because we had to fit it into 5 minute time limit. So we picked the most controversial answers to coincide with our controversial topic, in order to make it interesting for all those who watch
A definition of documentary by Michael Rabiger says ‘ Documentary should act on our hearts, not just our minds; it exists to change how we feel about something’ with that definition, compared with our own definition which is, ‘A piece of media that is edited to show a ‘true*’ picture of the subject that is shown, which the viewer is left to conclude their own opinions on. The definition includes the word true, however because it’s edited the media only show what they want to be seen, so that truth can be twisted. Both definitions fits well with our documentary because, it really makes you think. It enables you to make up your own mind, and allows you to come up with your own opinion, which is contrived through our diverse interviews.
Our documentary topic is what it is to be mixed race in today’s society. I, Naomi, came up with the initial idea due to the fact that I am mixed race and the idea of asking other people what their views are on mixed race people interested me. The mixed race community is getting larger and as a group we wanted to know what effect it has in the wider society. As we looked into it, we found out that our topic could potentially become controversial, as we are asking about people’s opinions on race, which can be a touchy subject. For that reason it appealed to us.
One of the typical conventions of a documentary that is often used in the opening is voiceovers. They tend to use this opportunity to state facts or introduce the documentary. The advantage of this is that they are still able to show images which usually are linked to the topic. This allows the audience to understand what is happening from the start and also gives more of an entertaining way to learn the statistics; this is something we have used in our documentary. We introduce our topic and give interesting facts and statistics whilst showing a varied mix of characters to draw our audience in early.
Title pages are very important in documentaries, as there tend to be many different scenes, so these help the documentary flow and lets the audience keep up with the narrative. Another convention used in a documentary is titles. We used titles in every scene, where a new person was introduced, this was so the audience famlilarise themselves with the person who is being interviewed and gave the audience insight into their role in the documentary and their position in society. In the audience screening the audience said that the titles were too small and were not on the screen long enough to read and mentioned that we failed to identify some of the speakers so they were confused as to who was who. We tried to change all of this for our final edit and think that now the narrative is easier to follow.
Another key convention in documentary is music. Its genre is usually relevant with the narrative or tends to be there is to help transition the scenes. We noticed non-diagetic sound is not used as much as in a documentary like for instance in a movie and concluded that was because you don’t need to build any sort of atmosphere, or make it dramatic in every shot. This would make the documentary emotive and therefore sway the audience’s decisions, where as the main objective of documentaries is to show both sides of the story and allow the audience to make up their own mind. This is not to say in some documentaries that this doesn’t happen, it just happens less frequently. We used music in the background and through each change of scene. We chose cultural music from the reggae genre, so the audience can relate the music to our topic and they may feel more familiar. In our audience screening it was noted that the music sounded too subjective and one sided. However our original research survey found that the people of ethnic background were most interested in our subject, so we decided to keep the music as it is as they were our target audience and our main priority.
Archive footage can be used in a documentary to add history; this helps the audience, understand the background of what the topic is in the documentary. In our documentary we wanted to use achive footage, to help show social change from the early 50s/60’s to now. However we was unable to show the footage we found in the first five minutes and due to not being our own work.
The modes we used for our documentary was Pro active and Expository. We used pro active, so we could involve ourselves in interviews and group discussions, making our participants feel more comfortable and have a level engagement. However when it came to editing we decided to cut out when we were asking questions and getting involved as it took up a lot of time and we were unable to get good footage of ourselves as we were such a small group. We chose Expository to inform, educate and enlighten our audience through a narrative voice, into introducing our documentary at the beginning. Hoping to immerse our audience into the story as quickly as possible.
In our Documenatry we tried to show the ‘true’ picture of our topic by having many different opinions. Our inspirational text ‘Is it better to be mixed race’ did not have many opinions from ‘everyday’ people, just from people who had a theoretical viewpoint. We wanted to get more ‘everyday’ people perspectives as we thought this was more interesting then scientific dialogue. However, because we were unable to put in all of our footage into the 5-minute time limit, we had to cut and edit most of it. So we decided to use the most entertaining and the most opposing views that would shock people hoping to draw them in to the narrative.
For our pre production, we tried to organise as much as we could for the production section, however because it is a documentary, we couldn’t script all dialogue. We did script our questions that we would ask, but our participants were not aware of our questions and therefore we think we received their gut feeling on the topic, not a well thought through answer. We hoped this would make it truthful and not what they thought we wanted to hear. We let the people we were speaking to represent themselves by their clothes, their dialect and responses, to give more of a ‘true’ picture of them. After all we were asking about their identities and did not want to change the way they were represented.
At the start of our documentary we had many different faces, all these faces were of different ethnic groups, we chose to do this, to represent how society is now multicultural and hopefully grab people outside of our target audience more. In our audience screening a lot of people said that we had only included those of colour and that we should add people from other races too. In our final edit we filmed more people and edited it together so there is a more equal spread of ethnicities in the beginning.
Our Documenatry would be shown on channel 4 at 9pm. This is because we think that our documentary applies to the channel 4 objectives and programming.
Channel 4 tends to provoke the audiences views and challenges their opinions and we quote “foster the new and experimental in television. It will encourage pluralism, provide a favoured place for the untried and encourage innovation in style content perspective and talent on and off screen”. ''We will use our reputation for risk and non-conformism to engage a younger generation in the values of public service broadcasting’. I think our documentary would be very suited for channel 4, because of our controversial topic. Our inspirational text ‘is it better to be mixed race’ was shown on channel 4, so we know that a channel 4 audience would be most suited to our topic. Also it being shown at 9pm allows us to get our target audience (16-25 year olds) as most people are watching TV at this time. This helps the documentary to be more popular and should reach out to a wider audience as its prime time.
Our target audience for our documentary is aged between 16-25 however we understand that it may relate to people who are older, so it may appeal to them too. The target audience’s relationship with the product is intriguing because firstly, the participants in the documentary are mainly teenagers. Their dress code initially is a school uniform and their dialect, immediately reflects on the identities of our target audience. The characterisations and attitude of the participants is acknowledged by our target audience due to the common background and ideologies shared.
The diverse faces of students shown in the beginning of the documentary highlights the variety of cultures in the world this ultimately enables our target audience to engage with each person whom they feel is closest to their personal identity.
The questions have been asked and answered in standard, understandable and basic English which should appeal to our target audience.
The background music brings together people from all different ethnic minorities, which enables a wider audience to engage with the documentary. Reggae music essentially is embraced by the youth; this once again attracts our target audience.
Here are some of our outtakes.
Clip wrong 1 – to start off our documentary we have many shots of mixed race people, we had to take some out, for the fact they were not framed properly. In our audience screening the audience said that we had used too many ethnic faces and too make it appeal to wider audience we should include different races, we did this.
Clip wrong 2 – also at the start we have me (Naomi) introducing the documentary and what it involves. This shot was done many times before, in different scenery. We did this shot many times, because we had many sound problems like distortion and echoing. For that reason and others such as the long camera shot used and me being unable to remember all the words, we took it out and re-did our introduction by coming closer to me and breaking down the script.
Clip wrong 3 (groups) - We had a lot of unused interviews with groups. We couldn’t put most of it in our documentary for a few reasons. In our first group interview we realised the questions we used were very basic, we didn’t get reaction or enthusiasm in the answers. Also in our first group one-person changes after we changed our questions and asked for a second interview. This wouldn’t have worked for continuity reasons, so we took it all out. For our second group, we made a few camera errors, like zooming in and panning at random times, this would have confused or distracted the viewer, so it was taken out. We decided from then on to give our interviewers key statistics that would hopefully get their mind working and get them interested in the topic.
Clip wrong 4 (all clips) – what we found when we was making our documentary is that we had a lot of unused clips, that we was unable to use because we had to fit it into 5 minute time limit. So we picked the most controversial answers to coincide with our controversial topic, in order to make it interesting for all those who watch
Wednesday, 23 March 2011
Radio Advert.
To create our radio advert I (Naomi) used Garage band on the MACs. We decided to use the same music as we did on our documentary so it all links and also we like the music as it has a conation on the Caribbean. I then recorded Fatima’s voice (as Female Basic) and I overlapped it over the music. We had a few difficulties as we tried to make it loud as possible, also because its new software that I haven’t used before, I had to figure out what I was doing to make our radio advert. I also tried to stick to the conventions of a radio advert, with the fading in and out.
Radio Audience Screening
Through our audience screening we learnt that everyone understood what was said, however when we asked what we could we improve, the majority said, for the speaking voice to be louder. We will try and improve this, however I believe that was the highest we could go on garage band. Everyone said, that they enjoyed the music we chose. Everyone understood that the documentary was on at 9pm on channel 4. We are happy that this got across, as it was very important information. From our audience screening we learnt that the majority of people would pay attention if our radio advert came on and further more, watch our documenarty because of it.
Radio Audience Screening
Through our audience screening we learnt that everyone understood what was said, however when we asked what we could we improve, the majority said, for the speaking voice to be louder. We will try and improve this, however I believe that was the highest we could go on garage band. Everyone said, that they enjoyed the music we chose. Everyone understood that the documentary was on at 9pm on channel 4. We are happy that this got across, as it was very important information. From our audience screening we learnt that the majority of people would pay attention if our radio advert came on and further more, watch our documenarty because of it.
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Radio Advert Script
Radio Advert Script
Fatima:
A research study suggests that Mixed Race people are more ambitious, more attractive and more successful than any other race. Do You Fit into this category? Well join us on the controversial topic on how mixed race people are perceived in today’s society; on Tuesday night at nine o’clock on channel 4 this is the Caste Me Half documentary. At Nine on Channel 4.
Fatima:
A research study suggests that Mixed Race people are more ambitious, more attractive and more successful than any other race. Do You Fit into this category? Well join us on the controversial topic on how mixed race people are perceived in today’s society; on Tuesday night at nine o’clock on channel 4 this is the Caste Me Half documentary. At Nine on Channel 4.
Radio Station
The Radio station we choose to help advertise our documentary through our radio advert is Choice FM as it generally targets ethnic groups and promotes R&B, Reggae and Hip Hop sort of music which initially attracts not only ethnic groups but mainly the youth of our contemporary society which ultimately is our main target audience.
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