Evaluation of Production

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_________________________________________________________________               Maja Prodanovic                                                                                                                  

Media A2 Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My five minute documentary preview, a view on the current influences Vivienne Westwood brings to London’s youth culture incorporates generic conventions, which are developed by comparing other real media products. To enable the use of codes and conventions, I watched different documentaries. It was difficult to conduct research that had a similar genre to my documentary however watching any documentary helped me gain some visual experience when it came to framing, layout and lighting etc.

One documentary that I liked and paid particular focus on was the BBC documentary “Michael Jackson’s influence on Black Culture”. In my opinion this documentary somehow related to mine as they both look at influences on a certain culture.

I often paid attention to the framing of each shot to help me establish how a documentary should be filmed and then taking into account the conventions I learnt, and using them in my documentary to result in a professional look.

One of the conventions I used was formal interviews. When filming the interviews i had to learn how to frame them accurately, and therefore i had take into account the position on the interviewee. In order to do this I used the rule of thirds.

Rather than having the interviewee looking straight into the camera, the eye line is positioned slightly to the side looking opposite at the interviewer. While expressing their views it shows that the interviewee is having a direct conversation with the interviewer making it look as formal as possible.

On the right side of the frame, i left room for any names that need to be added.

In most real media documentaries the setting is quite apparent, there is not usually too much of a distraction behind the interviewee. Therefore whilst filming my documentary i tried to keep the background fairly ordinary in order  to prevent the audience losing their concentration and instead to focus on the interviewee.  

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During the plannnng of my documentary the idea i had in mind was very vague. However after having researched more and having got hold of some contacts that would be of use in the documentary, my ideas started to develop and change, resulting into a real plan that would have depth by including a beginning, middle and end.

I had planned to go to different locations ie. Oxford street, Camden Town, Covent Garden etc – where i would be able to find individuals that came from different sub cultures and interview them on the spot about their ...

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