Final Documentary

The Newspaper Advertisement

Radio Trailer

Evaluation

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




2. How Effective is the Combination of your main product and ancillary texts?






3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

For our audience feedback we distributed questionnaires to people who we thought fell under our specific audience and asked them five questions; How informative would you rate The Gig Experience Documentary, How entertaining would you rate the Gig Experience, How would you rate the technical quality of its production, How eye catching would you say The Gig Experience Documentary is, and How well do you think we did at obeying conventions compared to professional documentaries. The audience feedback basically demonstrated how successful or unsuccessful our documentary was. However, we received almost 100% feedback with not negative comments. Which we took as a sign that our documentary has exceeded our expectations is looking professionally made.   

It was indicated by the high mark in our feedback that people believed that our documentary was informative in telling people about the leading ticket agents such as Ticketmaster. They also thought that the documentary was informative in the way that it informs the audience on what the performers think of when they perform to a live audience as well as the audience’s opinion on going to a live concert. They thought that our documentary and poster featured appropriate visuals such as someone going through the process of buying a ticket and a gig guide of the bands/artists playing at venues. A member of our specific audience stated that they thought "The documentary gives us information in fun ways such as voiceovers, and the appropriate visuals."


The fact that we had professionals involved with our documentary including Tyler Hilton (from One Tree Hill), Dion Roy and big names such as Alex Clare (known for the hit single Too Close) made the audience more interested in the documentary and amazed by the fact that so much effort went into the production of it. This also drastically enhanced the entertainment factor of the documentary because people actually know who we have featured in it instead of friends or local bands that not many people have heard of. The audience also thought that our radio trailer was effective in building up anticipation for the documentary as we used teaser snippets from the documentary and used the song Too Close by Alex Clare which was the song that they would be most familiar with.   

The audience we received feedback from rated the technical quality of our documentary's production highly and it was very positive in suggesting that if they had not have been previously informed they would have thought that the documentary was made by professionals and not by three college students. This suggested to use that they couldn’t fault our camera angles, mise en scene, the quality of the shots ect. This was very encouraging for us as we spend so much time – Over at least a hundred hours - in creating, editing and altering our documentary so it had a professional feel to it. From this we learned that we had accomplished what we were aiming for in the unit.  

Furthermore, we learnt that the majority of people thought our documentary and advertisement was very visually effective as it drew the attention of the audience towards it. When it came to the newspaper advertisement the audience said that the centralised subject of someone performing with a microphone enhanced the aspect of live music thus, gave a clear indication that the content of our documentary and the main topic of it was live music. They suggested that the tagline in the trailer and advertisement ‘turn it up loud’ was also effective in sending this message out to our audience that our products are about live music due to the fact that it emphasises the atmosphere of a concert because they are loud and exciting. The fact that the channel we were featuring the documentary on was MTV live also emphasises this because it is a bold and quirky channel. Some said they liked the way the text stands out because the yellow is so bold.

From the evidence shown from our results we collected we learnt that we did obey conventions well as people thought it looked professional. Technical details such as the rule-of-thirds, mise en sense, sound-beds, and graphics are all featured in both our documentary and professional ones so I think we accomplished this quite well. We also used a variety of transitions and a montage that also featured in professional documentaries to obey the conventions. . Throughout our documentary we also used a narration which the audience stated added to the professional feel of our product.    

If I was being critical about my own work I’d say that it felt rushed towards the end of the documentary as the footage was almost random in parts. While editing the documentary at the start I felt that the music was too grainy and wanted to change it. However, after changing the sound levels of the sound it became more adequate. I think overall as a group we worked well together to get this project finished and shared a common interest in music which helped us come to an agreement on which style of music we would have as the main theme.

Filming

These images were took at different points whilst filming. The first image was an eye level, low shot of someone playing guitar to be used as B-roll. The second image was taken when Devon recorded a student singing in a talent show and the final image was Natalie filming the drums at a band practice in college. We shot these as we wanted to ensure we knew how to use the cameras correctly, however did not put it into our documentary as it was not necessarily gig related.

Interview Questions

Interview Questions

When writing our interview questions, we decided to ask questions about the musicians backgrounds to give a brief introduction to who they are, and what they appreciate about live music. We asked questions based on the best and worst things about gigs, so we can explore both the negative and positive aspects of going to a gig. We also asked questions about fans and venues because it enabled us to retrieve information that only a professional artist would be able to give a detailed description of. These are the interivew questions that we employed to construct our interivews:

1)      What inspired you to become a musician?

2)      How do you feel when performing to a crowd?

3)      How do you feel before you go on stage?

4)      What’s the best thing about performing live?

5)      What’s the worst thing about performing live?

6)      How would you describe your fans?

7)      What was the first concert you saw and how old were you?

8)      How old were you when you first performed live?

9)      Where has been your favourite venue to perform?

10)   How many gigs do you go attend, personally?

11)   Do you prefer live music to recorded music, why?

Newspaper ad Conventions

Here is a newspaper advert that was made to promote the MTV programme, the Death Valley Show. This advert shows the conventions that professional companies employ when they are promoting and advertising their programme. We will therefore try to employ all of these conventions to make our newspapers advert as professional as possible. For example, we will employ a tagline in a bold font which gives an insight to what the content of our documentary may contain.