1. IN WHAT WAYS DOES
YOUR MEDIA
PRODUCT USE,
DEVELOP OR
CHALLENGE FORMS
AND CONVENTIONS
OF REAL MEDIA
PRODUCTS? By Devon McManus

2. RULE OF THIRDS.
Our documentary employed the
conventions of a documentary to
resemble a real media product. One way
we achieved this was by employing rule of
thirds, which can be seen here in an
interview with musician Danny Gruff.
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However, we also decided to challenge the
convention of rule of thirds, by placing the
interviewee in the centre of the frame.
Here is an example of this, in the interview
with musician Dion Roy. We decided to
place him centre so that he was in the
centre of the lights for the mise en scene.


3. CAMERA SHOTS.
We challenged conventions of filming a documentary We conformed to the professional style of
by using handheld cameras .The effect in this image filming by using a tripod to make sure our
was to show a whole queue outside a gig to really footage was steady. This image is a master
emphasize how many people go to gigs. shot from the Alex Clare gig we filmed.
To make our documentary more artistic, we We employed medium close ups in our
decided to add some close ups of relevant documentary to fit with the conventional
footage, such as this image of a guitar player, to structure for an interview in a documentary.
make the whole sequence more dynamic. This was our interview with Alex Clare.

4. SOUND.
• In the creation of our documentary, we developed the
conventions of real media products by adding a sound bed
under interviews to keep the documentary exciting. We did
this by adjusting the volume of the interview and the sound
bed to ensure that it wasn’t overpowering.
• In our interview with Dion Roy, we decided to include
ambient sound instead adding music later because we
thought it would create a live atmosphere by having music
from the venue playing in the background. Ambient sound
also developed conventions as we filmed a vox pop in front
of a crowd. Usually, there would be some ambient sound
during a vox pop, however we decided that it would be
more suitable to have the ambient sound relate to the
documentary – crowd noise.
• We additionally included a narration to give our
documentary a structure. We were able to plan what
footage to use around the theme and structure of our
narration, and added to the documentary being informative
as well as entertaining.

5. TITLES.
• Our documentary is similar of a real media product because we employed titles to
introduce the name of our documentary and also to give the name and profession of our
interviewee’s when on screen. This is important because it adds structure to the
documentary like the narration. We wanted our documentary to look as professional as
possible so therefore employed this feature that would avoid making the documentary
look amateur.
• We did try to use as little titles as we could so that the audience would completely rely
upon the narration for information and the footage for visual entertainment.

6. EFFECTS.
We decided to add a black We also employed cross The fade to black effect is
and white effect to some of dissolve during a montage of used in many
the footage in our gig footage to be entertaining documentaries, so to
documentary to make it and to make the documentary conform to the professional
more dynamic and exciting. look as though it wasn’t made convention, we included it
by amateurs. in our documentary.
We included the convention of title We added animation of a flashing recording sign to
graphics in our documentary to make the documentary more artistic and to further
resemble a real professional media give the impression that it was a professional
documentary. documentary.

7. FOOTAGE.
We varied the types of footage in our documentary to
entertain the audience;
Like many documentaries, one type of footage we used
was B-roll footage. We did this to accompany the
voiceover when talking about relevant subjects. An
example of this in our documentary is footage of buying a
ticket when talking about the website Ticketmaster.
In addition, we employed footage of live concerts mainly
because it was the key concept of our documentary. We
organised to film concerts with the management of real
music artists (eg. Alex Clare and Tyler Hilton) which we
were then able to use in our documentary.
Furthermore, we used archive footage so that we could
show successful artists, such as Paramore live in concert.
This is similar to what professionals do, in the creation of
documentaries.
Finally, the footage helped give our documentary
structure was interviews. We included these as they are a
key convention of professional documentaries.

8. MISE EN SCENE.
We took the mise-en-scene into consideration when producing our documentary because we
wanted it to resemble a professional production. We focused on the locations of filming to
stick to the theme of live music. Therefore we filmed outside of venues, in front of stages, in
music shops and in front of crowds. We also used stage lighting for one of our shots to put
emphasis on performance and playing live. Some of the props include having a guitar on
stage to indicate music is the theme of the documentary. These are all ways we developed
the conventions of real media products.