A2 Media Evaluation

By Nathan Henry
Introduction
 As a part of my A2 Media Studies course, our class was required to put
together a practical production a long with two ancillary tasks
 For my practical production, I chose to work on my own and do a
documentary piece on the Homeless in Birmingham.
 In this presentation I will be evaluating the effectiveness of the research,
production and editing process of the documentary.
Using, Developing and Challenging Conventions
 The main purpose of all documentaries is to document or inform its audience on a
particular subject.
 Most documentaries will also have a purpose or an objective that is expected to be
fulfilled.
 In this case the purpose of my documentary was to inform my audience on
Homelessness in Birmingham and what is being done in order to help the homeless
in Birmingham.
 Throughout the research and production process of my documentary, I made sure that
everything that I did and all the decisions that I made were for the benefit of
fulfilling the purpose of the documentary.
 This is because I felt that in order for this documentary to fully inform people on the
subject, I needed to make sure that every creative decision that I made had to be for
the sake of putting the message of the documentary across.
 Unlike most genres, documentaries are not only made to entertain people but bring
about awareness of a particular subject. Therefore the informative side of the
documentary should not be sacrificed at the hands of entertainment value.
 Once I had established the conventions of documentary, and then attached them to
what I wanted to do I then began thinking of ways in which I could develop on this,
which I felt could be achieved through the content of my documentary
 This is why I felt that putting interviews into my documentary would be a good way
of expanding on the purpose of my film.
 This is because I felt that through interviews, the purpose of the documentary could
be explored in a much more in-depth level by hearing from people who are actually
at the fore front of the subject.
 Another advantage of having interviews in my documentary is that they can also be
used as a way of challenging the conventions of documentary.
 This is because the view of reality can differ depending on the persons account of it,
meaning that one persons view of reality can be different to another.
 Therefore the view points of people who are involved in an issue such as this may
differ to stereotypical views that are often accepted by society.
 E.g. Nearer the end of my documentary, one of the people I interviewed makes the
point of saying that it is not just Alcoholics, or drug addicts that end up homeless on
the street but anybody can find themselves in that scenario.
 This challenges the stereotype that a lot of people hold about a majority of homeless
people being either alcoholics or drug addicts.
Ancillary Texts
 As a part of the project I also had to do two extra ancillary tasks alongside my
documentary
 There were three ancillary text to choose from, of which I had to pick two. These were
1. A Double page spread from a listings magazine advertising the documentary
2. A newspaper ad for the documentary
3. A radio trailer for the documentary
 Of these three tasks I chose the first two, I chose these because I felt that these would be
the types of media texts that you would most likely see advertising a documentary.
 Before I actually began working on the ancillary tasks, I had to first establish what type of
software I would use in order to produce the ancillary texts.
 The easiest choice would have been to use Microsoft Publisher to do this, however this
would not have challenged me and would not have produced the professional results that
I was looking for.
 Therefore I made a decision to use Adobe Photoshop for the first time in order to my
ancillary tasks.
 The first time I tried to use adobe photoshop, I found it incredibly difficult and was very
much tempted to go back to publisher.
 However, I decided to go onto YouTube and make notes on some beginner tutorial videos
to help me in using this software.
 The first ancillary task I began working on was the newspaper ad.
 Initially I didn’t have any ideas in terms of what I wanted for this task.
 However, after thinking about it I came up with the idea of having a photo of a homeless man
with a collage of images of Birmingham landmarks behind the him
 To me, this seemed like a good idea because it represented a range of symbolic codes and
conventions
 E.g. The busy and somewhat chaotic look of the collage is a reflection of the nature of the city
and the having the homeless man in front of the collage represents how people like him have to
live in the midst of all of this despite the fact that the collage makes the city look very energetic
and elaborate.
 Also the pictures in the collage are all in colour, as a reflection of the happy and energetic
nature of the city. Whereas the picture of the homeless man is in black and white, showing that
in midst of this energetic city there is a dark aspect of life in the city.
 I feel that in terms of symbolic codes and conventions that this ancillary text was very effective
in complementing my main product.
 This is mainly because all of my creative decisions are justifiable and logical.
 However, because I did not use any form of newspaper template, it does not necessarily look
distinctive to that media text. Meaning that upon looking at it you would not know that it is an
advert for a newspaper.
 However there could be a positive aspect to this because it shows that the advert is versatile.
Because you could quite possibly see the advert in a magazine as well as a newspaper.
 But in respect to the task it probably would’ve been better to use some sort of newspaper
template.
 The next task that I began working on was the double page spread for the listings
magazine.
 This task was a little easier for me produce for two reasons
 One was because I was more confident with working with photoshop because I had
already used it for my newspaper ad.
 The other was because I had already had in mind what I wanted this task to look like.
 For this task, I had came up with the idea of taking one of the shots of my
documentary and actually using it for the double page spread.
 Therefore I used the very first shot from documentary, which was a view of the city
from a roof top, print screened it and pasted it into photoshop.
 I felt that using an actual image from the documentary would be effective because it
would give the audience an insight into what they will see in the documentary.
 I then used a photo of a homeless man and put it into my the double page spread to
show relevance to the topic of the documentary. I used the same font styles for this
task as I did for the previous task.
 Once I had done this I decided to add some information on the double page spread,
because I felt that this would be something that you would expect to see in double
page spread that is focused on a documentary.
 This information included information on the documentary, some quotes from myself
and information on when and where the documentary will be broadcasted.
 I feel that this task was very effective in accompanying my main product because the
symbolic codes and conventions that it represents helps raise awareness to the issue.
 E.g. By having the photo of the homeless man shown clearly in the middle of the
double page spread is somewhat of a contradiction of the way society often views the
homeless, as the homeless are often the unseen and forgotten members of society.
Whereas my spread shows a homeless man at the front of the city as sign of
importance.
Audience Feedback
 After I had finished filming and editing my documentary I decided to find people who were
willing to watch the documentary in order to evaluate their responses to it.
 I tried my best to show the documentary to people of different age groups as I knew that age is a
big factor when it comes to people ideals and opinions of media texts and controversial subjects.
This is often due to generational differences.
 I decided the best way to go about doing audience feedback was to allow people to watch the
documentary then discuss their thoughts and opinions with them.
 This is because I felt that I could gain more from discussing the documentary with my audience
rather than giving them questionnaires that only require yes or no answers.
 Generally, the feedback that I had got from my audience was feedback sessions was quite
positive
 When asked about how informative the documentary was a lot of people commented on how the
usage of interviews was a good way putting the message of the documentary across.
 When discussing how effective the documentary was at raising the issue of homelessness, a
majority of people told me that by interviewing a former homeless man they were able to realise
the seriousness of homelessness in Birmingham
 I also discussed with my audience members whether or not they had learnt something about
homelessness in Birmingham that they didn’t know before, all the people that I asked said that
they had.
 To end the discussions I had with my audience members, I asked them if the documentary was
something that they would go out and watch themselves. From this question I got a mixed
response
 I found that of all the people I asked this question it mainly the older audience members (aged 30
+) that said that they would most likely watch my documentary if it was broadcasted.
 From my audience feedback, I learnt that my documentary had met the purpose that I
had set out for it to achieve, which was to inform people and raise awareness of
homelessness in Birmingham
 However although my documentary had met its purpose, it is not necessarily
something that everyone would necessarily go out and watch.
 Meaning that my documentary would appeal to a more mature audience and people
who have a genuine interest in the subject.
Media Technologies
 Because I was doing this documentary on my own, I was challenged in many ways in
terms of the usage of technology.
 With regards to the research that I did for my documentary, I tried my best watch
documentaries that were broadcasting on T.V around the time that I was preparing
for the documentary e.g. one of which was the BBC Panorama special, ‘The Secrets
of Scientology’. I also watched the controversial Martin Bashir documentary ‘Living
with Michael Jackson’ on YouTube.
 I felt that these documentaries would be good to watch as a part of my research
because they are documentaries from credible and established T.V networks, which
gave me an idea of the standard that I should be aiming for.
 They were also both very different in terms of their subject and documenting style,
which allowed me to explore my options when thinking about how I could approach
filming my documentary.
 For the production aspects of my documentary, I used a high quality Canon video
recording camera.
 This was my first time having to operate a camera on my own which challenged me
substantially because I had to focus a lot on the quality of my camera shots without
the input of anybody else.
 For my previous media project I was much more on the sidelines when it came to
editing the footage. Although I had an input in the creative side of editing I was not
very involved with the technical aspects of editing, meaning that I didn’t get the
chance to actually use iMovie myself.
 However, because I was working on my own for this project, I had no choice but to
learn for myself how to edit a piece of film to a professional standard. Initially this
was a challenge for me because all the reliance and pressure was on me to edit my
film to a high standard but once I was able to operate the software and knew how I
wanted my documentary to look, this became easier for me.
 For my ancillary tasks I had to face the challenge of using photoshop for the first
time, which I felt was a very complex and difficult piece of software to use.
 However once I had watched a few beginner tutorials on YouTube, and knew what
my creative intentions were for my ancillary tasks. I found the software a little more
easier to use and ended up with professional looking ancillary tasks