Our media contains many forms and conventions which a real media product does. At the very beginning of our documentary, we added in a Channel 4 ident we found on YouTube to make our documentary look like it was real and being aired on tv.
Within our documentary, we use many editing techniques which can be related closely with real TV documentaries. For example, transitions such as fade to black and fade to white. Many of our clips are cut quite short, apart from the main scenes such as Brad's and Mr Kernans arguement Miss Haques and Brads interview. We done this because documentarys which have really long clips without cuts to other clips can possibly get quite boring so we decided splitting clips and encorporating another clip however still keeping the audio of the previous clip going, it would break up the scene for the audience and make it more interesting. We noticed many other documentaries do this too so we thought it would add to the realism of our documentary.We encorporated a hashtag Teaching Teens which is extremely relevent to most recent TV programmes, not even strictly documentarys but most programmes nowadays encorporate a hashtag since Twitter has become more of a worldwide sensation every day. We decided to do this as soon as we saw Educating Essex have it to make our documentary look much more realistic and modern. We introduced the main participants in our documentarys on their dominating clips, i.e interviews or lessons using medium sized text at the bottom left corner stating the characters name and what they do. We also named our documentary Teaching Teens, which is very similar to Educating Essex. We done this because we thought the alliteration of both words beginning with the same letter gives the documentary an instantly recognizable name which would stick in someones mind. It works really well because it describes exactly what the documentary is going to be about.
Camera
During the interview scenes, although it is an interview, the interviewee are not shown to be asked any questions which is also very similar to Educating Essex. Instead, it is more like a talk about their personal opinions or points of view. Our documentary also stays closely relevent to our subject throughout, with many filler clips such as panning shots of the school and close ups of work.
This can be easily linked with the real Channel 4 documentary Educating Essex, which was our main inspiration for Teaching Teens. We used typical camera angles you would see in a documentary such as over the shoulder shots, which are often used to emphasise a discussion or conversation, or when showing the audience something in particular someone is doing. Long shots were also used to show audience the surroundings and setting of the school which is used quite often in Educating Essex. We also used a high angle camera shot during scenes such as busy corridors to give the impression it could be of been filmed by a CCTV camera. This gave the scene an emphasis on school life. Most of the interview scenes were filmed infront of lockers which is an extremely common setting for documentaries set in a school. Because it is so typical, we thought it would be best to use it in our documentary. Again, Educating Essex also done this.
Sound
We used many non diegetic sounds, to emphasize a particular scene such as a bell ringing during the opening sequence. Other examples of where we used non diegetic sounds is the use of a busy classroom over the filler clip of a close up shot of equiptment on the desk. We also put a rainstorm sound over the clips we had of rain in the opening sequence. We also used a voiceover through out to introduce and guide the documentary but without speaking too much, to give the scenes space to speak for themselves.We also thought as many of our scenes are quite action filled, it may ruin them to have a voiceover speaking over them. On quite a few of the scenes, we muted the sound completely such as all of the opening sequence because we had our theme tune playing over. Scenes with a voiceover were also muted to emphase what the voice over was saying. We used a theme tune which we thought sounded upbeat and busy, relating very closely to how school life is on a day to day basis. We faded the out so it was less noticeable when it stopped and enable the introduction to the documentary to run more smoothly, however we did not fade in the begining to give it a more punchy and prominant start.
Mise-en-scene
All of our scenes we filmed were filmed in school, mostly during school hours to capture all of the students and the appropriate noise. We used our old school uniforms for the scene containing myself and alex misbehaving in lesson to make it more believable that we are students.
Many of the scenes were also filmed within the teachers and pupils natural environment to make it look more real, For example the scene with Mr Kernan teaching and Brad turning up late to the lesson were filmed during an actual lesson.
Overall, i think our documentary done really well with using the forms and conventions of a real documentary. In my opinion, there isnt any part of the documentary which you would not usually find in a real one and therefore everything we have encorporated due to research is relevent and realistic.
No comments:
Post a Comment