1.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products Our media product mainly consists of a five minute opening extract of a fictional documentary, on a topic of our choice. Alongside this as our ancillary task is to create a radio trailer advertising the piece, and a double page spread for a television guide relating to the piece. To begin with, and to understand the various categories, we gained initial research from watching examples of existing documentaries, primarily Morgan Spurlocks Super Size Me. Through doing this, we discovered that documentaries fall into different categories such as investigative, social, educational, cultural and commemorative. Like Super Size Me, and a majority of existing television documentaries, we decided that ours would be an investigative documentary, to give the viewers an insight into current subtleties not covered into everyday life. Here we decided that the topic would be on CCTV and how our country is being watched by the authorities of Britain. I would say that the main purpose of the outcome of our documentary is to reflect on the opinions of society by having millions of these devices around the country.

Theatrical poster for Super Size Me

We later looked into other documentaries which relate to this topic of surveillance and CCTV such as Suspect Nation and The Conspiracy Theory which led us more in the direction of what type of documentary we would want. Likewise these documentaries are investigative We also began by looking at the codes and conventions of documentaries and how they are conveyed in Bill Nichols theory of documentary modes from 2001 as we discovered our documentary was mainly expository mode as it investigates research into a specific element of our society and displays this knowledge. Where a poetic mode documentary would only focus on the mood of the research, primarily visually, rather than the content provided. Super Size Me however is an example of performative mode as filmmaker and presenter; Spurlock engages with the investigation by conducting an experiment on him to physically explore the side affects of what is being researched.

CAMERA Many of documentary conventions have been followed in our documentary by the use of camera. For example we have used a variety of framing or shot lengths such as;

Long shots,

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

3.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?