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.