Evaluation 1

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

Our documentary is similar and uses conventions of real documentaries in many ways.

Firstly, we used interviews throughout our documentary to show different people's opinions and interact with the public. We used an Expert palm reader who does this job as a living and believes he can tell people what they are feeling and how this can affect the future. He also answered questions that many people would like to know and he makes some very interesting points, such as, he believes that palm reading is a science and that anybody could study the theory of it. When we filmed him, we made sure that all of the aspects of mediums and psychics where also in the shot, including, a crystal ball, candles, tarot cards.









Compared to a real media interview.....



When being interviewed, the audience are unable to hear any questions being asked to the interviewee, so all of the questions where stated in the beginning of the answer for example ‘I do believe in psychics because…’ by doing this, it is easy to understand without having to hear the whole question. We edited all of the clips so the questions asked were not heard.

The lighting used in documentaries tends to be bright/natural lighting so that all participants are clearly visible, however, we thought that with some documentaries which focus on psychics and supernatural beliefs, they appear a bit darker to imply mystery but are interview was filmed in a dark room and even with added lighting from lamps, the quality of the video was still poor as not enough lighting was used to highlight the main speaker in the interview, therefore losing focus.

The use of archive footage that we have put in our documentary was a limit of 20 seconds. we decided to use a range of different shots of well known aspects which people associate with psychics e.g. crystal balls, which helps it to become more interesting and entertaining because the audience then have visual clips to look at whilst the clips are being introduced.

The music in our documentary is at the beginning and we chose to use non diagetic sounds as we used a piece of music from a video which we used in our archive material. The music is soft and slow which connotes mystery.
The rest of the documentary is made up from diagetic sounds of voice overs, interviewees and vox pops.

In our Print Advert their are also many ways in which our product uses conventions of real media products.




We compared our print advert to a collection of previous adverts used for channel four documentaries and both of the adverts share specific qualities. Our print advert represents channel 4 print adverts very well as it looks like it would be seen on a bill board or in a magazine, due to having the channel four logo situated in the bottom corner. Also the text is highlighted by a white background so that it is visible and stands out to attract attention.



The radio advertisement is very conventional, it contains clips from the interview and voxpops. This is effective as it gives the audience a taste of what they're going to get but doesn't reveal too much, which is one of the codes and conventions of a radio advert. We compared it to other radio adverts and they all started with music which slowly faded out and then ended the same, so we abided by this convention. We also included the time, date and channel it would be broadcasted on along with the slogan, and used the same narrator as we did for our final documentary.