EVALUATION-How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluatiuon stages?

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

Media Technologies

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EVALUATION-What have you learned from your audience feedback?

3- What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From our audience feedback, we have learnt that people found it hard at the beginning to understand weather the mockumentary was supposed to be real or believable. They didn’t necessarily understand what was going on and they found this a little confusing. They said that the title cards helped with this, yet these title cards were hard to see as the writing was quite small.

"I LIKED THE WAY IT CHANGED IN THE MIDDLE"

None of the focus group said they had witnessed this kind of situation themselves and they didn’t realize that it was such an issue among teenagers and they thought that this mockumentary helped them and would help other people to realize the dangers. The majority of the focus group were aged between 17 and 18 but we had one teacher, this pretty much matcyhed our target audience.

Charlotte’s character reminded a lot of the focus group of an American teenager which made them feel like our mockumentary was similar to an American teen movie.

The focus group didn’t say that they wanted to know what happened later on, as they didn’t feel that there was a later on.

"NOT VERY REALISTIC BUT IT MADE SENSE WITHIN THE GIVEN GENRE"

The last question, people had a mixed feeling about. Some said that if a drug results in death then it isn’t for a good or legit reason and therefore it is just as bad as other drugs.

On the whole people enjoyed our film and were impressed with it, they thought that more time would have resulted in maybe a better production but the enjoyed it.

"IT WAS VERY INFORMATIVE"

In general comments, people said that it looked like a real documentary and was very professional looking.

EVALUATION- How effective is the combination of your main product with ancillary texts?

2- How effective is the combination of your main product with ancillary texts?
Our movie poster targeted teenagers. We used anindependent style that appealed to the niche audience that we tried to attract.We used a de-saturated image which connoted the nostalgic and independent stylewe wear aiming for.  The poster revealedthe main subject of our film, Ben Collins, the boy who died and the title ofthe movie, ‘Why did Ben Collins die?’ A name that catches your eye andsummarizes what the mocumentary is all about.

We made a double page spread for a magazine,featuring an interview with us, the directors, and a summary of themocumentary. This was similar to the two art house magazines, ‘Little WhiteLies’ and ‘Sight and Sound’. Both magazines targeted a certain niche audiencesimilar to the one that we wanted to attract to our mocumentary. We consciouslydecided not to use successful actors as we didn’t want the audience to bedetracted from the films verisimilitude. Therefore the magazine article focusesmore on us, the directors of the mocumentary and our motivations and reasonsfor the film.


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

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

The media product that we chose was a short film, a ‘mocumentary’.  To create this mocumentary, we developed and challenged forms and conventions of real media products. The two genres that we chose to use were Teen and documentary and so we experimented with their forms and conventions. We joined these two genres’ together to form a hybrid movie as we didn’t want to just create a Teen movie or a documentary. After researching about them we decided as a group whether or not each convention would be suitable for our mocumentary.

In our mocumentary we have used ‘real’ footage, in the way that we have used real photos of our main subject, ‘Ben Collins’. We used these photographs to make the mocumentary seem more ‘real’. A convention that we used that we were not planning to use was using a handheld camera.

We only used this in part of the mocumentary and for the beginning we had a very formal and conventional style which split the style of our mocumentary. We however didn’t use voice over to guide our audience through this break in style, the reason being, that we thought a voiceover was too influential and leading for the audience. Instead we wanted it to be a hybrid which would create an active audience rather than a passive audience.

We referenced the convention of interviewing experts in our mocumentary. This could be called ‘pastiche’ as it was a fake expert in our ‘fake’ world, this could have been regarded as mocking real documentaries.

One convention that we did use to help guide our audience throughout our mocumentary was text. We used this to show time, place and what was happening. This is ordinarily would be the voice of code.

The codes and conventions from a teen movie that we used were that we situated our mocumentary in a high school and we included a relationship and illegal substances.

Anotated final film

(make sure that you turn on the annotations on YouTube.) )

Feedback questionaire sample

Production

Having watched the final copy of our Mockumentary and spent time annotating and analysis it, i have found a few small mistakes. For example, there isn't a question mark after 'Why Did Ben Collins Die' at the beginning of the film. Another mistake is a spelling on 'regularly' and a few other small ones. Overall i really like the way that it has coem out an di think it is very succesful and has conveyed what we wanted to achieve.