My Evaluation for our Skin Deep Documentary.

1. Ellen Crane. Advanced Portfolio Evaluation.

2. Our documentary seems conventional when comparing it’s structure and content to real documentaries seen on television. We have used conventional techniques when interviewing throughout our documentary, ensuring that we have an interviewer present yet out of shot when asking questions. Right from the beginning our intention was to create a Poetic documentary, with an artistic narrative, dealing with issues of human interest. However, we have also developed sections of our documentary such as researching into ‘The Suicide Girls’ agency, so that our documentary is at times expository to it’s viewers as it analyses and exposes a topic relevant to the subject. We have stayed conventional throughout our filming process by ensuring that our documentary expresses views and opinions to our viewers, as well as recording, revealing and preserving information. Comparing our Documentary to real media products.

3. Embedded photos with Hazelle’s voiceover running over the top. The footage of the interview is used at the start and at the end. Another conventional technique we used when editing would have been to in-bed photographs when interviewing. We detached the audio of the person speaking and then cross-cut pictures in order to grab our audience attention, extending their knowledge of the subject. We were conventional when interviewing Hazelleas our inbedded modelling shots were continuous throughout her interview, having a section of her speaking only at the start and at the end of her interview.

4. A conventional medium would be our use of subtitles when introducing interviewees, so that the viewer has a better understanding of the person’s purpose within our documentary. However, we ensured that the writing fonts would be in a tattooing style to sustain a constant theme for our documentary, which is common amongst many other poetic documentaries on television.

5. Our voice-over used throughout the beginning section, when introducing a new location and further in our television advert was a conventional technique used to educate and interest our viewer. At the beginning, we used facts and statistics on tattoos to introduce our topic and to give the viewer prior background knowledge as a small introduction. Our intention is to draw viewers, so we thought that by using brief facts and figures, people would gage the purpose behind our documentary, giving them enough knowledge to carry on watching. Here is an example of the way in which we added a voice-over over the top of our footage. We faded the sound in and out so it sounded professional as it would if it were for a real documentary. The establishing shot was used with a smaller title explaining the location of the tattoo parlour for the viewer.

7. Research. When researching different styles of documentaries, we were inspired by techniques which have helped us to develop our own final piece. We were inspired by Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends documentary style as he always opens with clips of the upcoming footage and then uses his title before starting to interview.

8. Main Task and Ancillary Texts. Television Advertisement: Our supporting piece, being a television advertisement would be extremely useful for attracting our target audience before its release. The 30 second ad is extremely fast paced, using a montage of pictures and footage of tattooing and interviews from our documentary. We used a fast paced drum and bass song to encourage our young target audience (aimed from around 14-25), and kept the pictures and clips in time to this music. We intended for our supporting advertisement to not give too much away regarding the content of our documentary but nevertheless to encourage our viewers and to remind them of its release. Our advertisement has certainly enhanced the meaning and the intended message of our documentary as it is promoting the beauty of tattoos using tasteful photographs and positive interviews.

9. Promotional Review. My promotional review of our documentary would be useful for attracting our target audience if published in a magazine such as OK, or Hello, to encourage viewers to watch the show when released. It is useful as it sums up the theme of the documentary and what types of people or events will take place, such as interviews with professionals themselves and an interview with an upcoming model promoting tattoos. This is similar to other documentary reviews such as the ones in magazines such as glamour or OK for ITV2 documentaries such as Fearne Meets... Or BBC Three’s, Sex, Sun and Suspicious Parents. The use of a rating out of five stars would encourage our target audience who may base their decision on the rating in comparison with other reviews for different documentaries.

10. Audience Feedback. Our audience feedback was particularly useful for seeing if our style and genre really did appeal to our younger audience. We had around ten 17/18 year olds watch our documentary and feed back their comments as an interview for our evaluation.

11. We got lots of positive feedback commenting on how our documentary was conventional to the ones they would watch on television. They mentioned that the use of voiceovers and credits was successful, and further, the use of crosscutting between archive footage (such as pictures) and also our tattooing footage between the shots in Camden was engaging for the opening section of our filming. It was further interesting to hear what sort of channel they would expect such a documentary to be aired on and whether they would choosingly watch it or not if at home.

13. Media Technologies. We have used a variety of media technologies for the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages of creating our documentary. We edited together all our footage and further created our audience feedback and television advert using imovie on a mac. imovie is straight forward and simple to use and also has a lot of different editing techniques available which were useful for creating a documentary suitable for our target audience. We were able to speed up lots of our footage by converting it, and also adding music from either itunes or garagebandwhenever necessary.

14. We used a Yeti to record our voiceovers and used garageband to edit and save the recordings before importing them into our project library for our documentary. We used Dafont as we desperately wanted to find a font which matched the theme of our documentary. Initially we wanted to use a drawing of a tattooed word and have it scratched onto the screen using sound effects however this seemed near to impossible when using imovie, so we decided to find a suitable font which we could continually use throughout. We used Blogger to record the process of our documentary , slideshare to post my PowerPoint presentations and also YouTube when finding different music and watching different genres of documentaries so as to get inspiration when researching.

15. I used Microsoft Publisher when creating my Promotional Review which was useful as it had lots of different techniques and styles available for me to choose from. I edited my pictures in Picasa and then opened then in Publisher so I could crop them down and insert them where I preferred. When filming our documentary we used a digital camera, a tripod and also the flip cameras to get free-hand shots and pictures for blogging or for our evaluation. The flip cameras were so useful and they were quick and easy when importing any photographs or footage. I used PowerPoint when writing out my evaluation and also when cropping down a few of my photographs for my blog before uploading them. When researching we also used many online viewing websites such as 4oD, ITV Player or BBC iplayer to find different documentaries for inspiration.