The document discusses the group's documentary project and how it used and developed conventions of real documentaries. Specifically: - They used interviews with real people instead of actors to convey authenticity, as seen in the documentary "Mixed Britannia" that influenced them. - Common documentary conventions like interviews were used to provide insight into the topic. Still images were included but they focused on capturing their own filming. - Stylistic elements from documentaries like "Supersize Me" influenced their choices, such as using handheld cameras, jump cuts, and graphics to engage the audience.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real
media products?
When creating our documentary, my other group members and I decided that we wanted a sense of
actuality. By deciding this, we used people with real opinions as opposed to actors with scripts, to
convey a realistic approach. During our research process we watched a number of documentaries,
one in particular called ‘Mixed Britannia’ featured on BBC2. This documentary had a similar theme to
ours which was ethnicity, and the documentary showed real-life incidents and people who were able
to share them with the audience. The most common convention in a documentary is the interviews
and essentially makes up a documentary as they provide insight and realism into the topic.
As you can see from these two screen shots, on the left we have an image of a woman called
Pamela being interviewed and telling her story on ‘Mixed Britannia’; on the right we have an image
of Jag Jagdev being interviewed on our documentary. Both interviews were real.
As well as our own filming, we added various still images. However, we wanted a documentary
which was mostly our own work therefore we only had one shot of still images which was to
highlight the history of our documentary which was an aspect that added a sense of background
knowledge. Similarly, in ‘Mixed Britannia’, there are various still images throughout the whole
documentary yet we decided to put our own twist on it by adding several smaller images into one
clip as shown below:

2. Throughout our research process we saw several different ways in which narration is used.
Narration can be a voiceover, which is added afterwards to the production, or it may be a
commentary by someone on screen talking directly to the audience. Two documentaries we
watched beforehand were ‘Supersize Me’ and an episode of ‘Airline’. On ‘airline’ the principal source
of sound was mostly diegetic, with people talking to the camera however the narration was also
voiced over the documentary in a plain speaking tone. On ‘Supersize Me’ there was also a mixture of
voiceover and ambient sound however; the narration was colloquial in an attempt to relate to the
audience. By watching both techniques, we decided that a voice over narration would be the best
ideal for our documentary and the rest of the sound would be ambient for example, interviews and
vox pops.
Picture here shows Morgan Spurlock creator of
Supersize me who stars in the documentary as
well as voicing the documentary.
Image depicts random people at the airport who
feature in and whom the documentary consists of.

3. A number of stylistic elements used in ‘Supersize Me’ helped us to create our documentary and
follow forms and conventions for example; in the sense of camera hand-held cameras were used
often to show a sense of realism. Jump- cuts were used to shorten interviews so that the audience
would be captivated throughout. In the sense of graphics, appropriate images were used to break
up speech; and where formal interviews were being shown, tripods were used to show that it was an
important message for example, our interview with college coaches, and in ‘Supersize Me’ the
interview with the law professor as shown below:

4. Our other media product was the double page spread magazine article. In order to collate our ideas
together, we decided to draw a rough plan of what we intended to include in the actual article. The
arrows signify the features found in a real article, this helped us to follow the codes and
conventions.
DROP CAP TEXT
TITLE
RULE OF
THIRDS
GRAB QUOTE
BYLINE
Below is an image of the finished article and a real article.
As you can see we used many codes and conventions of a real article which included the drop cap at the
beginning of the article; the rule of thirds, in which we used two thirds of images in order to appeal to a
younger audience; and also still images from the documentary in at attempt to promote our documentary.

5. Our last method of promotion was the radio trailer, which we created in garage band. In order to get an idea
of what a radio advertisement sounds like we listened to a variety and understood that the basis was simple,
we had to keep the same theme tune of the documentary and include snippets of narration. The orange
boxes are narration from the documentary and also the radio narration. The one blue box is the theme tune
which was also featured in our documentary.