For the past few months me and three other members of my group have been working on making a documentary about cars to determine the contrast between classic and modern cars, and how each car has an affect on a persons passion for the car. So we decided a fitting name for our documentary would be 'Cars: Man's Best Friend'.
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our documentary that we created uses conventions of real documentary films as we ensured that we knew exactly what the typical conventions of a documentary film were, we did this by watching documentaries together in a group. We also chose two documentaries each to watch and write an analysis on, one being related to our theme, and one unrelated to get a feel for what general documentary conventions are, and what conventions may have been more specific to our genre of documentary, this would help us make sure to use the conventions in car documentaries more often than some of the more typical ones. The documentary convention that we all thought we needed to use was the voiceover as we thought this was one of the most used conventions in a documentary, and because of the cars topic we decided to do, it was important for the film that it stayed informative and we portrayed a sense of knowledge of the subject to the audience. Also as our focus was the passion and connection people share with their cars, it was essential that we made the audience see that the presenter/voiceover himself had that connection with his car, so that the voiceover for the rest of the film has more meaning to it. Of course that is also another convention in itself as the presenter is using the fact he shares a passion with his car to go on a journey to investigate further into other peoples experiences, which is providing a human story to go along with the exploration into the subject of cars.
Another convention we used in our film is that the footage we used was completely based on our own research and exploration, therefore the footage used was real footage that we filmed first hand, and some clips that showed the history of the motoring industry we found purely on our in depth research into the subject. We also felt we had to include a few stills of cars with a descriptive voiceover to give an informative edge to the film, this was using a documentary convention as still images help aid the authenticity of the film, as it provides an opportunity to give information on cars that we as filmmakers wouldn't have been able to obtain ourselves.
In our documentary we included a real interview that we constructed ourselves, in terms of filming it and asking the questions in person. This was obviously us trying to address a key convention in a documentary, as an interview gets you primary material in which you can present to your audience. Although we did include an interview in our film, it was difficult for us to develop the convention further because we aren't professional documentary filmmakers, so we were unable to use the convention to obtain a high quality expert on the subject, which a lot of documentaries need to authenticate the vision and thought being expressed in the documentary. Having said all that, the man we interviewed - Clive Skelhon was Head of PR & Marketing at Coventry Transport Museum, so when I say he wasn't an 'expert', I mean for the area of investigation we were trying to discover more about. He wasn't the perfect type of 'expert' for this, maybe to improve it we could have had a professional specifically involved with cars, not any means of transport. However he was the absolute best we could have possibly gotten hold of, so this was still brilliant for our documentary.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?
The main product and ancillary tasks were effective together, as a large number of an audience will need to see some form of advertisement to either learn of the film or to be drawn in by the different creative ways we distributed our product, which our radio trailer and magazine spread enabled us to do; along with other extras like the film poster, magazine posters and TV trailer we created. We designed three magazine covers and the magazine spread which all had the car we used in the documentary in the design, the '1968 Beetle', which belongs to one of our group members. We had many other cars in our footage but we decided to use this car in all three magazine covers and the magazine spread, as this is the car that started the human story within our documentary, which we felt was the most important symbol to present to our audience in all of our visually constructed marketed designs.
We were also tasked with producing a radio trailer for one of the ancillaries which we took great advantage of as cars have sounds that everyone recognises and even like to listen to because of some car's incredible engines. We decided to include a car engine revving up, and as the trailer goes on it gets faster and faster, which gives the audience the feeling of a build up to something, but then suddenly all the sound cuts off and the presenter in the documentary gives information on where and when they can see the documentary, therefore the audience might be drawn into watching our main product as they feel like they want to know what the build up was leading to.
As we felt the radio trailer benefited our main media product we decided that we should create a TV trailer because it would give us that same influential effect as the radio trailer and more as this would give us a visual aspect to the advertisement which is always going to be a bonus from a radio trailer, especially since the only other visual distributed content we have are still images, which usually wouldn't be enough advertising to capture the audience's willingness to try the film out.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our target audience for our documentary film has an age bracket of ages 25 and over and are predominantly males. This is broadly our target audience because all ages above 25 can share a love and passion for their cars. Some people will spend their entire lives with the same car even if it means they don't drive it anymore. Of course people under 25 can be impacted by a passion for cars as well, but we found that for people to usually develop a passionate interest in cars, they have to find the right one for them and to have owned it for a while, which for people under this age is in most cases unlikely. It is also widely known that men more often than women are passionate about cars, but again women still can have that connection as well. There are probably a lot of women that like general car documentaries, but when our topic is focused on peoples passion for cars, we believe that men will take more of an interest.
The audience feedback I have received from people that I know has been mainly positive, from family, friends and people in my class, which is a good sign for our final product. I'm not overly sure this kind of feedback is always good enough to learn something from, because people you know aren't always going to tell you if there are a lot of areas for improvement in the documentary, not only because they don't want to hurt your feelings by saying its awful, but also because they might not actually have an interest in the subject of the documentary itself, or even documentaries at all. This is why I felt that YouTube was the perfect solution to upload the documentary to, because not only are people who comment not going to know me, therefore they will be honest in their opinion, but they will also only click and comment on the video if they have an interest in car documentary films.
This is one comment from YouTube I received giving feedback which helped me learn a lot about what I did well, and what I could have improved, "Really nice way to introduce the start, summing up what you plan to do. The shot at 1:10 was high quality, very well done. Good job on the interview, it was good to see not just your opinion but the opinion of a professional. I would say that I think the ending was cut a little bit short but apart from that, a very interesting documentary." This was one of the best pieces of audience feedback I received as its completely honest as the commenter doesn't know me
personally, so I know that I did do a lot of things well, but I also could have improved the ending which I agree on to an extent, I feel the way it ended flowed nicely, however I see the point of the commenter as the documentary extract could have lasted slightly longer, so I think the correct decision to fix this would not be to add more to the end, but more in the middle because like I said I feel the ending is already good enough.
How did you use media technologies in the construction,
research, planning and evaluation stages?
The internet was an important part for a lot of stages throughout the production of our media product for all the different types of media we needed to use to either plan for our product or create distribution items post-production. For our documentary on cars, we wanted to travel to Coventry Transport Museum and potentially get an interview from an employee there. In our plan to get an interview at Coventry we sent an email to the museums email address - which we gathered from their official website - to see if we could go to the museum on a specific day (which we specified in the email) in order to borrow the time of one of their employees for an interview. Not long after they got back to us, unfortunately they said the day we specified would not be possible but they didn't rule out the possibility of getting us an interview on another day. So the next week we decided to get back in touch, only this time it was via mobile phone - again the number was located on their official website - because we wanted the fastest response possible as the date we had planned to go had already passed. The phone call was successful in establishing that we could travel to the museum and receive an interview whilst also exploring to film some extra footage.My research into the topic mainly consisted of internet sources, for example websites giving useful information on the history of Coventry's motoring industry. This was something I felt was important to research as it is a main part of the documentary film so as a result it needed some background information. I also went to sites to learn about documentary film conventions, or YouTube for tips on what a documentary should include(which I included in the blog). I also posted information to the blog from a website, which showed filmmaker Col Spector's advice for people who are in the making of a documentary, which was helpful for the preparation of making our own film.
As for the media technologies used for the evaluation stages, we created advertisements for radio and TV using our own footage, however for the radio trailer we used the internet to find a good source for the sound of a car engine starting up and then continuously revving. Similarly, for the TV trailer we used the internet to get access to the music, which we used over the top of the footage in the trailer. We also used some images from the internet to include in our magazine covers that we produced. We had to use Skype and YouTube a lot as well, because the editing and creation of items made post-production was all produced on one group members laptop. We used Skype to send the images to each other so we could upload them to our blogs, and YouTube to enable all of us to add the video files, like the TV trailer, radio trailer and the documentary itself to our blogs. We didn't send videos through Skype because they take an awful long time to send, if they send at all, so the easier option was to upload them to YouTube, especially since blogger allows you to upload a video from YouTube.
