Documentary

Poster

This is the final production of our newspaper advertisement, for our documentary The Gig Experience.

Radio Trailer

Evaluation

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

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

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

At the beginning of the process, when the group were trying to decide what topic our documentary was going to be on, we decided to watch professional documentaries to see some of the subjects discussed and how they structured their documentary. We did this with the use of websites such as watchdocumentary.com. We were able to see what creative aspects each employed which distinguished it from another. (E.g. visual editing effects and animation.) As well as watchdocumentry.com, we also looked at some documentaries on modern topics that were on channels such as Channel 4. We did this because we thought it would be better to watch the documentaries that more people were likely to watch because they were on television as oppose to online.

Once we had come up with our topic of live music, we decided that we needed to do more research and find out what specifically our target audience would like to see in a music documentary. By the use of Microsoft Word, we created a questionnaire to distribute to our target audience to get their opinions. After we got our results, we used Microsoft Excel to analyse our results in graph form, so we could distinctively see what our target audience wanted and what they didn’t. From our results we were able to see that the most popular genre of music was rock, along with some others. Therefore, we decided that to make our documentary appropriate for a larger audience we would include multiple genres from multiple music artists and musicians in our documentary.

We wanted to get professional music artists in our documentary so that it looked more professional. Therefore, we used Windows Hotmail and Outlook to email managers of music artists. We used Google and Facebook to get the managers contact information of musicians such as Alex Clare, Tyler Hilton, and Imagine Dragons who all successfully replied to our emails. Whilst we were doing this and waiting for replies, we used YouTube to look at archive footage we could possible use in our documentary. We looked at bands like Paramore and Foster the People, whose music we thought was most appropriate for our target audience. We also used YouTube to pick our appropriate music to put in a sound-bed in our documentary. We decided to use the songs Artbreaker – Kids in Glass Houses and Too Close – Alex Clare so we could represent more than one genre.

After deciding our running order, we created a storyboard so that we had a visual look at how we were constructing our documentary. We planned how we were going to construct our interviews and then created the interview questions that we intended to ask every music artist we were going to interview for our documentary. It was then time for us to go and film the concerts for Alex Clare and Tyler Hilton, so we hired Sony HXR-MC2000E solid state AVCHD camcorders from college to get the best quality footage possible. We also hired tripods so that we had steady footage that would be easy to edit later on. We filmed the concerts, and in return got interviews with the musicians. This is where we applied the conventions of documentaries that we had learnt whilst in the research process, looking at professional documentaries and their structure.

When we were filming these events, we had to use a boom microphone to pick up all of the sound and headphones to ensure that sound was actually being recorded. When we were filming our interviews, we used a clip microphone so that the sound was clear, and we could add music later if we wished. We also used a clip microphone when we recorded the voice-over for the documentary and the radio trailer. Once we had all our footage, interviews and voice-overs recorded we imported them onto Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 to edit our documentary. We used multiple tools on the software such as the selection tool to move footage and images into place, the razor tool to cut footage up so the duration wasn’t too long and the zoom tool which allowed us to adjust the volume of our audio manually, until we were satisfied that all the sound was balanced. We also used Premiere when creating our poster because we needed an image for our poster so we exported a still from our documentary footage. Premiere was also used in the creation of the radio trailer because we needed to use the tools to cut up the audio we wanted and to include sound-bites from our documentary.

We also used internet service platforms at this point such as YouTube MP4 plug-ins to get music and archive footage off YouTube to import onto Adobe Premiere Pro. We used this software on a Dell XPS PC by using the plug-ins option on Firefox and searching for a YouTube downloader that worked for both audio (sound-bed) and video for our archive footage. When we found video footage or audio that we wanted to include in our documentary, we used USB devices to transfer the footage/audio onto the computer we were editing on.  When creating titles for our documentary, we wanted them to be unique to the standard fronts offered on Adobe Premiere Pro, so we used the Dafont.com to get a font more appropriate for our documentary. As the most popular genre from our questionnaire results turned out to be rock, we decided to go with a rock theme font style. This led us to searching for ‘distorted’ fonts that seemed best appropriate. It was on Dafont, that we found the font ‘dirty ego’ and decided that it was perfect for our documentary and therefore for our poster too because we wanted continuity.

In addition, once we had our font, we edited it on Adobe Photoshop CS5 first so that we were sure it looked how we wanted before we imported the image onto Adobe Premiere Pro. On Photoshop, we used the tools, crop and move tools to adjust our image and then the zoom tool to ensure that it was a good quality image to be placed as the opening title of our documentary. We additions used the fill tool to make our background black and then the marquee tool to select the font from the background to then readjust to make sure that it was the correct size. Finally, we displayed the process of how we created our documentary on blogger.com so that we were able to be organised and keep track of what we had done and what needed to be done.

Radio Trailer Conventions

Radio Trailer.

A typical radio trailer is approximately 30 seconds long and has a continuous sound bed. this sound bed usually indicated what channel the programme will be on, what the title of the programme is and what the programme is about. There is usually a narrator who gives this information and there is usually a series of 'snippets' from the programme. The sound bed of a radio trailer is very important in informing the audience. 

This narration is in the form of a voice over. The voice over for this trailer is male and his tone increases when he talks about the title of the documentary.  

This Radio Trailer, 30 years of Punk Rock the narrator starts by announcing what channel the documentary is about. We will incorporate this into our own and tell the audience that we will have our documentary featured on MTV Live. The narrator in our docuemtary will also emphasise the tagline 'Turn it up LOUD' by altering the tone of their voice so its much louder

Audience Feedback

This is the questionnaire that we gave to our audience when receiving feedback on our documentary.

How informative would you rate The Gig Experience Documentary?
(1 = Very informative, 5 = Not very informative)

1-----2-----3-----4-----5

How entertaining would you rate The Gig Experience Documentary?
(1 = Very entertaining, 5 = Not very entertaining)

1-----2-----3-----4-----5

How would you rate the technical quality of production? Eg. Sound, editing, continuity
(1 = Excellent, 5 = Poor)

1-----2-----3-----4-----5

How eye catching would you say The Gig Experience Documentary is?
(1 = Very eye catching, 5 =Not very eye catching)

1-----2-----3-----4-----5

How well do you think we did at obeying conventions, compared to professional documentaries?
(1 = Excellent, 5 = Poor)

1-----2-----3-----4-----5

From our questionnaire results we were able to see how well our documentary suited our target audience and how well they think the documentary was constructed.

 

This graph demonstrates how successful/unsuccessful our documentary is, in being eye catching to our target audience. Results show that all found the documentary eye catching, with half more than the others. This is indicated by the 3 "1s" and 3 "2s" which are the highest marks they could have possibly given.

This graph shows how informative the audience found our documentary. This indicates majority believed our documentary was incredibly informative, due to more than half picking the highest mark. This was also elaborated on, and was quoted saying "It gives us information in fun ways such as voiceovers, and the appropriate visuals."

This graph shows how entertaining the audience found our documentary. This indicates majority believed our documentary was incredibly entertaining, due to the majority choosing the highest mark. Overall for entertainment feedback, our documentary received 5 "1s"  and 1 "2".






This graph demonstrates how successful our documentary is at obeying conventions, compared to professional documentaries. Results show that all those who watched the documentary thought we did very well at obeying the conventions set by professional documentaries. This indicates that we have done well in avoiding making the documentary look amateur.

This graph demonstrates how successful our technical quality of production is of our documentary. Results show that all those who watched the documentary thought we did very well at making sure the technical aspects of documentaries such as sound and editing were professional. This indicates that we have done well in avoiding making the documentary look like an amateur production.

Video Responses:

Newspaper Advertisement Production

The first thing we did when creating our poster was export an image from our documentary which we thought would best highlight the concept of our documentary. We decided to have our main image as Alex Clare, because he is the most famous person we interviewed in our documentary, and therefore would be more recognisable to our target audience. We exported the main image as bitmap because it is the highest quality format on Premiere that would look professional.

After having our first image, we decided to export a second image that we could overlay with the main image. Then we would be able to create an effect that is distinctively unqiue to our documentary because both images are stills of footage that we recorded ourselves.

This is the effect that was created after we exported our two images as bitmap and used the overlay effect on Photoshop. We thought that it was unique and represented the documentary well because the picture was from live footage so it represents our live music themed documentary and because it is colourful, it is eye catching and will specifically relate to our target audience of young adults.

When choosing our font, we decided that we were going to use the same font that we used in the documentary so that they would be a similar style. The font that we used was called 'dirty ego'. We thought this font best represented our documentary because it looks raw, and we included some raw unknown artists in our documentary.

When we were selecting the font size, we decided that the bigger the font was, the better. We wanted to take up all the negative space, but still have a very simplistic poster because we wanted to put emphasis on the overlay effect that we created.

We selected the colour as yellow because it was the most contrasting, stand out colour that worked well with the blue and red based background. We knew that by using a bright yellow colour it would be eye catching, but to make sure that we didn't use it too much - so it would look tacky - we decided to put the tagline in a white colour, to break up the bright text. By using a different colour for the tagline, it also put emphasis and shown the importance of it.

When we added our logo, we didn't want it to look boring because the rest of our poster is very bright and eye catching. As MTV is known as a colourful, creative company, we decided to add yellow to the logo that would work well with the yellow text. However, we wanted to avoid there being too much yellow, like we did when we were adding the text, so we decided on a white and yellow logo.

We used the auto-select tool to resize the logo. We didn't want the logo to be too big because then it would be overpowering and would take away the focus from the rest of the poster. However, we wanted to make sure that the logo was big enough for the documentary to be visiable as a programme that was due to be on MTV Live, because then people would know that it was a music documentary, and it would give an insight into the style of documentary and footage that might feature.

We changed the opacity of the image overlay, to get the desired effect. We wanted to make sure that it wasn't too high so that we wouldn't be able to see the lights that we added in the background as an overlay. We also wanted to make the effect different from the first style that is given when selecting the overlay effect.