John Boocock - Critical Evaluation Question 2

The Effectiveness of the Combination of our main product and ancilliary texts.

The additional media products of the radio trailer and the poster for the documentary were moderately successful in my opinion.
The poster was a little easier to complete than the radio trailer. As previously mentioned, our aim was to create a documentary that would be shown on Channel 4, so to accomplish this a few members of our group went to the Channel 4 website and looked into the styles they used there with other documentaries in terms of promotion and features they included into their posters to make them iconic. In addition to this, I looked at several previously created documentaries that the channel had produced that came with a promotional poster. One of the posters that I found was 'A Very British Storm Junkie' for the series of documentaries Cutting Edge.

Looking at this poster, three things stand out to me that we tried to incorporate into the poster that we created. The first would be Channel 4's very iconic logo placed somewhere within the content of the poster. This would identify immediately with any reader of the poster as to where this product will be showing before they read anything else on the page just be looking at the logo. It is a great piece of advertising by conveying a symbol the general public are familiar with and using minimal amounts of text to convey the message.
The second thing is that it uses an image that invokes questions in the audience's mind when they see it. It must be a simple question, one that makes them curious such as 'What is that man doing?' in the case of 'Storm Junkie' or 'What is that man reacting to' in the case of our own poster.
The third and final observation would be the use of the descriptive font. However on this point, Whilst the group was looking on the style and layouts on the Channel 4 website, we found that the font they used for their advertisements belonged to C4 itself, so using it would be a breach of copyright, as we didn't have the expressed permission of C4 to use the font that they owned. Therefore a member of our group found a similar substitute to give our poster the air of credibility without breaching copyright laws.

The Radio trailer was a little trickier. When doing research into what a radio trailer for a documentary was composed of, we couldn't find any radio trailers for recent Channel 4 documentaries to compare techniques with. However, I instead looked at techniques for how a movie made in the style of a documentary was advertised over the radio instead, and took techniques from that. The docu/film was Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story' and the trailer was aired on BBC Radio 1. The trailer incorporated soundbites from the film to make up most of the dialogue in the radio trailer, although it did include a narration between the dialogue to give the audience information about the trailer they were listening to. The most important points included in the trailer was at the end. It told people the title of the product, the time that it would be available for viewing and where it would be available at. We incorporated these factors into our own trailer and overall I believe that it was successful at getting the message across to listeners.

John Boocock - Critical Evaluation Question 1

Conforming and Challenging Conventions.

Looking back, I believe that our media project both conformed and challenged in different areas of conventions normally found within documentaries of its kind. We looked at two distinctive sub-genres throughout the research phase of our project. These were associated with the content of the piece (Teen Pregnancy) and also which channel hosted the documentary (Channel 4) as both of these would affect which audience we were speaking to and make us think of the best possible ways that this audience could be engaged with our five minute documentary.
The technical aspects that we used to create the documentary are very common in the sub genre's that we picked. They are filled with establishing shots of setting and scene, reactionary shots of characters reacting with their environment and sticking to a typical 180 degree line when filming a conversation between an interviewer and interviewee. This keeps the film looking professional and able to be accepted more as a professional piece and less associated with being an amateur production when conforming to these creative staples of the genre.
To give our five minute documentary more credibility, we looked into similar documentaries shown on both Channel 4 and on the BBC site to see the differences between the two. The two examples that I chose was the Channel 4 produced short: 'Christmas with Dad'; a look into the life of a working class man at Christmas time with the entire setting being a gritty depiction of "Broken Britain" and the effects of it on one family.

The second was a longer BBC produced documentary: "My Big Decision"; taking two teenage girls who are separated by culture, lifestyle and location but are brought together by the one thing they have in common: their desire to have a baby. The documentary takes the two girls along with their families through several interviews, meetings and searches into what it would be like to look after a child before the girls reach their final conclusion at the end of the programme; do they continue their urgent desire to a child to call their own, or do they give it up as a childish fantasy?

From 'Christmas', I learned about the crucial nature of establishing a scene with several shots to engage the audience in the world they are about to enter. Though Christmas was definitely a mood piece meant to show a glimpse into a life that would be very different from the one its target audience would be used to, it has no set story and makes no use of staged scenes to heighten drama or recreate a scene that the camera crew were not allowed to show. I also learnt that a very quick introductory caption of a character before they are developed helps the audience determine who they are before being shown a scene. It helps them to gain familiarity with the cast before they are shown. We used this in our own documentary, having a caption appearing next to new characters to show who they are before any dialogue and personality is shown.
From 'Decision', I learned how to introduce characters and their relationships to one another not be stating how they act with a voice-over narration, but by showing the characters react to one another and help that aspect to draw out what kind of people they really are to the audience. It feels more naturalistic and convincing to an audience to see a relationship develop rather than being told about it. Showing, not telling, is the crucial element here.

Our piece challenged the medium first and foremost with the premise. On television and in the media today, it is teenage mothers that are given most of the screen time by documentary crews with the fathers being mentioned in passing or simply have left the picture altogether by the time they arrive. We challenged this notion by making the teen father, not the mother, the protagonist and main focus of the documentary and tried to make him the overall focus of the story that went on through the piece. It tackled the various decisions that teen fathers have to take and, much like in 'Decision' follows the character trying to find the answer to a tough decision: accept his role as a father and stay with the mother to support his child together as a family, or move on and try to develop his own life instead?

Thomas Oldroyd - Critical Evaluation

Radio Trailer for Pregnant Guy

Here is the radio trailer for 'The Pregnant Guy. I used recordings captured using a Zoom Recorder, and got the background soundtrack from a free sound effect website.

James' Critical Evaluation.

Question 1.
When filming over multiple days, we had to pay a lot of attention to continuity. As to give the impression that the filming is only taking place over a single day. When editing, we also had to pay a lot of attention to the lighting and time of the day, especially in the later scene where Kevin is waiting, a time lapse is shown, so the lighting needed to change to reflect this. As shown in the 2 images , the one on the right shows Kevin waiting early on in the day, the one on the left shows later in the day, where the sun is lower, shown by the darker lighting, the elongated shadows. This is done to show time passage, and to make the documentary seem more real and believable.

Content wise our film stays to the stereo-typical documentary genre, while investigating a less seen side of pregnancy, the one of the father, where most documentaries look at it from the side of the mother, our documentary looks at the documentary from the fathers side, through all the tussles and toils of being indecisive about being a father, and what to do after the child is born. We keep all traditional elements of a documentaries such as a narrative voice over, scenery shots etc.

We have tried to provide and enticing story line for the viewer, as well as being factual and keeping within realism boundries. We have tried to keep the viewers wanting more throughout, with intense scenes such as the last scene from our clip where Kevin ends up fighting Beth's brother and walking off, this scene was taken from a handheld camea to keep up with the pace of the scene and so that the cameraman could give chase to Kevin upon ending the shot. whilst showing what help fathers can require when their partner is pregnant, and where to find this help if it is required. This is mainly highlighted in the interview with Sue, at college, where she mentions there is a father to farther support group of men whom all have had experience being a father who are willing to help and advise others through their journy into fatherhood.

When filming we took consideration of our audience questionnaire and used these findings in our final work, such as, with one of our questions, the audience were indifferent about when it would be shown, before or after the watershead. So to reflect on this, we decided to censor out all fowl language to allow our program to be shown just before the watershead, as non of the main viewing is on C4 at his time, so no critical shows will be moved etc.

Question 2

In our production we are trying to provide and interesting story, whilst also showing soon to be parents, experiences that they could be going through and any help/support that they may like use use.

2. b)

Question 3

3. c) When looking at other advertising products, comparing them to ours, i have found that we use similar styles to convey our point, in the poster, it follows the same conventions as all channel 4 documentaries, with a main character, posing, with some relevance to the documentary, with the title of the documentary and showing times the main visible features as well as the C4 logo. There isn't many radio trailer s for things like this, but after listening to radio adverts, we decided to have a pair of people, conversing about a common theme.

Question 4

Through aid of the internet we were able to research a great deal into documentaries, and how they are presented, from a narrated documentaries, such as 'Extraordinary People Documentaries', to documentaries with a presenter, such as 'Mark Dolan's Chanel 4 Documentaries' All these available on the internet, one way or another. This was a great advantage to us as it allowed us to see other documentaries and give us an example of how to produce ours. Like the amount of commentary, how long the shots are, the type of shots used, volumes of music and dialog and other general editing things.

The use of Sony HD3000 digital cameras was greatly useful as it allowed us to re record any bad scenes, or just delete any scenes we did not like. With the use of final cut, we could cut sections of our recorded material, which allows us to select the best bits from each scene and splice them together to make an overall more complete and compelling scene. It also allowed multiple audio tracks, so we could have the recorded audio with the film, along side music, and a narrative track, all simultaneously played. The zoom microphone allowed us to rerecord any specific audio segments that were inaudible, and to record the narrator track in high quality audio, and placement of these sound segments where they are required.

James' Poster Idea Sketch

On the right, there is the C4 logo, the title of the documentary and showing times/days.

On the Left hand side, there is a picture of Kevin, touching a mirror, with the mirror image of him holding a small child in his arms. In order to reflect upon an internal toil wit himself.

Online Survey

the 'The Pregnant Guy Survey can now be found online here, or at http://tinyurl.com/PregnantSurvey