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

My media product follows conventions of a real media product in many ways. Firstly, we used a title sequence to show the name of the documentary, with this we used appropriate music as the sequence was sped up, we used a fast paced and upbeat piece of music, we also used quick, cut down vox pops of students and the professional interview to show what is to come later on in the documentary and grab the audiences interest.
Title sequence of our documentary compared with One Born Every Minute

This has been seen on many other documentaries, for example One Born Every Minute where they

use appropriate music (slow paced to fit with the documentary focusing on new born babies) and have humourous footage of what is to come in the series, to keep the feel light-hearted. Similarly in our documentary, we added humour which we felt added to the feel of the documentary as it dealt with issues that the media has bought to light and continue to focus on, giving younger people unrealistic aspirations. However with the humour it gave the documentary more of a human side and portrayed the issue as something to openly discuss and making body image less of a taboo subject, which is often the point of many documentaries for example, childbirth in One Born Every Minute allays some of the mysteries and concerns women have during pregnancy. The humour was also appropriate for the channel our documentary was on channel 4 at 9pm, attracting our target audience who would rather watch something with a touch of humour than a heavy paced purely factual documentary. Body Image & Me aimed to highlight the factual side of this subject as well, so we balanced out the humour with facts and statistics aimed to shock the audience and make them think about the effects of trying to achieve the size 0 image. This follows a realist narrative but also a fly-in-the-soup narrative structure as we polarised the Factual statistics view by using subtle persuasion to show the negative effects of the media portraying body image with a condemnatory tone. We also used a rhetorical narrative structure identified by Bordwell and Thomspon however as ours was only five minutes long we only included the first two points of this: the introduction to the problem and the discussion of facts, including opinions from real students. We stuck to the typical conventions of a rhetoric narrative as we presented a reasoned argument as we had researched into the facts and showed different peoples opinions on how they think the media influences students. We also addressed the camera directly through the voiceover but also with having a statistic saying 49% of women didnt know this, did you?. For our statistics, we used the same background music while these were being presented creating a motif to emphasis the serious nature of the facts.

We also stuck to conventions with having vox pops throughout the documentary. Many real documentaries include these to give an understanding of what everyday people think about a certain topic. Similarly, our vox pops gave us an insight to students opinions and thoughts on the media influence as well as highlighting how little is really known about eating disorders and the average UK womens size again reflective of the medias influence over society. The vox pops used were of students in college aged 16 to 18. We decided to develop these opinions and speak to a professional college counsellor Julie Maitland, who further backed up what the teenagers were saying and showed the audience the psychological side of trying to achieve a perfect body. Whilst Julie was speaking, we used visual effects to boost what she was saying showing alarming pictures of girls with eating disorders. This helped get our message across and provide a powerful incentive to the audience to realise that body image isnt everything. We felt highlighting certain issues in todays society was the aim of many documentaries and we wanted to make ours something that would help change views and opinions on something which is often seen as a taboo subject similar to another documentary Embarrassing Bodies aiming to change the stigma about things people find uncomfortable to talk to the doctor about.
Professional Interview
Small space above head

Relevant mis-en-scene

Medium shot

Occupying over half the frame

As you can see above in our professional interview, we felt we had to keep the whole theme of this

We thought that this part of the documentary was quite formal and so we used a tripod for the interview and made sure we kept within the typical convention of shot framing with the rule of thirds having eye level in the top third and her positioning in the middle not directly looking into the camera. We also used an appropriate background, not too busy but what is there relates to what we are speaking about for example the black and green poster is asking about gambling with health. We kept with appropriate backgrounds with the vox pops too as we set these up in the canteen where the background was of The Mix a vibrant, colourful setting where it felt more relaxed and youthful,

appealing to our target audience too. We also used conventions of real media products in terms of sound. We debated whether to use visual narrators or voiceover but went with voiceover as we felt this would make our documentary look better and have a more professional feel, plus we felt that if we used a visual narrator it could be seen as amateurish and less effective. We also used background music as most documentaries do, but changed it for the statistics so the overall feel wasnt too repetitive. Without the music, the documentary seemed a bit bland and not complete but with the music it gave Body Image & Me a more audibly pleasing feel. Our documentary follows many of Bill Nichols (2001) conceptual schemes of documentary modes. Firstly, our documentary aims to be aesthetically pleasing and so following the Poetic Mode in terms of photogenie. We also included part of the Soviet Montage Theory in terms of clashes within our documentary this was only a small part though when we contrasted the pictures of people with eating disorders aiming to lose weight and people with over-eating disorders. However, we also included the rhetoric aspect of the Expositional Mode by including statistics designed to shock and therefore persuade the audience to the idea that eating disorders are a serious disorder and to highlight the importance of these people getting help. We achieved this through our omnipresent voiceover and through many of the vox pops, where we saw the effect of the medias influence over the teenagers of today and how this needs to be changed. Many real documentaries use many different aspects of the Documentary Modes and we have followed conventions in that this is what our documentary does too. We have used actuality in our documentary as the background to our statistics people walking in and out of the canteen and this is in line with the Observational Mode to give our documentary a sense of realism and make it more relatable for our audience this again links to a real documentary: One Born Every Minute as we see actuality through the conversations and actions between patients and staff involved with the documentary, with the camera being as unobtrusive as possible in our documentary Actuality in One Born Every Minute it was placed on the floor to record students walking past. As the subject of our documentary is quite a complex issue dealing with psychology and nutrition, we decided to simplify this down to make it accessible for our target audience, as many other documentaries do such as Panorama or other BBC documentaries that explain each stage of the subject, this is following the Reflexive Mode of the Documentary modes to simplify complex subjects. At one part of our documentary, we decided to veer away from typical conventions and have one student act as a visual narrator and state his opinions on girls body image. We felt this was humourous but also interesting to get a males perspective on this topic aided with flash cards of different body shapes. It was delivered in a light hearted, comical way but showed how the media have an influence on boys with what they want to see in a girl from typical glamour models, which has also been reflected with girls wanting to be the ideal hourglass shape. Although we steered

away from conventions with having this included, it stuck to the theme of highlighting important issues and so we felt including it in the documentary was essential for our purpose. Our documentary didnt fit in with some of the Documentary Modes as we felt it wasnt appropriate or accessible for us to do this. For example we did not have a visual narrator as some documentaries choose to have for example Panorama, and so the Performative or Participatory Mode does not appear in our documentary, however the idea of this was discussed in the planning stages. Our media product has a slight downfall compared to real media products in regard to the sound levels, the music worked well but the voiceover was sometimes too quiet and re-recording it did not seem to have a major impact on the sound levels, so in post-production we edited it as much as possible to try to make it work, however there are some parts of the documentary where we felt it was obvious so we turned the music down but we felt that there was nothing that could be done to help this and so did as much as we could and hoped that it wasnt too noticeable after all the editing. We also had to bear media conventions in mind when creating our ancillary tasks, the radio trailer and a double page spread. Before even starting, we looked at professional examples of these so we had a thorough idea of what conventions ours should include.
Panorama presenter

Following conventions, we included a voiceover that was the same as that in the documentary to keep continuity. We also included shortened versions of the vox pops and professional interview to give an idea of what to expect in the documentary. We also used background music to help grab the listeners attention and started with a quick, upbeat piece of music, reflecting the start of our documentary. The downside to our trailer was the sound levels were inconsistent which we tried to combat by re-recording the voiceover however this did not seem to improve the sound quality so we changed the sound levels in Garageband and this seemed to improve things slightly. We chose Capital Our Garageband radio trail Radio as our station to broadcast this trailer as we felt this would be the station most likely to be listened to by our chosen target audience however, there would be other listeners as well as those we pitched this for and so could help attract more viewers to Body Image & Me.

The final version of our magazine contained the following conventions:

Picture credit Headline and byline

Pull quote

Smaller images relating to the article

Caption

Details about the documentary Different text for the questions and answers Page number and magazine name Rule of thirds

Our magazine follows typical conventions of a real article and we have kept the synergetic feel as we have used the same fonts and colours featured in the documentary although this can give the article a bland feel and may look like there is too much spare space however we justified this by using brighter colours too to grab the readers attention and make it appealing to our target audience by not having too much text and making the interview understandable and easy to read. Although this is designed for our target audience, there would be many other people reading the magazine and so could help catch the attention of people outside our target audience and lead to a bigger final audience ship for our documentary.