Evaulation: Question 1 (typed up)

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In comparison to the example documentary ‘Grizzly man’ where music is used in places to create a more abstract movie feel, we chose to keep our documentary raw by leaving the natural surrounding sounds in place of a music background being placed over the shots. This can be placed in comparison with the documentary ‘A Damn Nice Caff’ which focused on leaving the natural, atmospheric sounds.

Our documentary was a mixture of two modes; observational and poetic, which helped to create a documentary with a narrative, as well as observing the subject. Our overall aim for our documentary was to produce a documentary which had a meaning behind it but also explored a storyline aspect. This is why we included interviews - like in ‘Winnebago Man’ - as well as having story like scenes walking in different locations which we felt were relevant to the country style setting. As the five minute clip we made was made to be placed at the beginning of the documentary, the titles we used reflected most examples we watched, simple, basic design with plain primary colours.

We looked at channel 4 and BBC 2 documentaries for inspiration as we decided we wanted to create a film which would be played on either channel, where sophisticated, educated, historically interested people would watch it. Specifically looking at country file, planet earth and My New Brain all three have similar ideas as ours, we tried to in cooperate what we had learnt from watching these documentaries, such things as, which shots worked best, which sounds, (natural or abstract), which lighting, editing techniques etc. Whilst going through the editing process we revisited the examples looked at and gathered ideas from these to help us edit our piece.

We figured out that whilst these documentary examples would help us to figure out the styles which are effective and work for an observational documentary, we needed to broaden our research base by finding out basic movie techniques for documentaries through websites which gave us the knowledge we needed to include documentary filming techniques into our own work.