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

Austen Mahon

 According to Bill Nichols' six modes of documentary, our documentary falls under the mode of expository, whereby information is presented in a direct form with a 'voice of god' narration.
When it came to developing our documentary, we started by looking at what exactly the typical forms and conventions are of this form of documentary.

We viewed a selection of documentaries, and used them to help us develop our own ideas
What makes our documentary conventional is that it includes: an introduction, voice overs, archive footage, location shots and interviews. We found that these were the most prevalent conventions of all the documentaries we watched, therefore, we developed them to make them our own - which meant we used them, developed them, and even challenged them.

Introduction
For the introduction of our documentary, our group decided to research a number documentaries, analyse their introductions, and then come up with ideas as to what we could do for ours. Documentaries we watched included 'Supersize Me', 'How TV Ruined Your Life' and 'Newswipe' (the last being a weekly look at the news, but follows many of the conventions laid out by documentaries). One thing we noticed was that each of these examples seemed to have its own take on what an introduction should be. Supersize Me opened with a montage of overweight people with the narrator speaking over the top, providing information and statistics. Both 'How TV Ruined Your Life' and 'Newswipe' instead chose to opt for a presenter to introduce the programme to the viewer. This involved having a host. When it came to actually creating our own introduction though, we decided to not follow and use these examples as the base for ours. We wanted to make something unique: something which stood out and seriously challenge the conventions. We wanted out documentary to have a narrative - A to B with an easy to understand path. For our introduction, we decided to establish the setting and the condition of our topic. Ours was on the effect smartphones have had on society, especially that of young poeple. Therefore, our introduction introduces this straight away, by having a first person shot of someone walking to a table, seeing their friends are on their phones, sit down, and there start using their phone. This was to be accompanied by a voice over, talking directly to the viewer (eg. "YOU get to college in the morning. YOU see all YOUR friends...") This is how we challenged the conventions of an introduction, making it our own, and making it unique.

Voice Over
Voice overs are in pretty much every documentary. It would be rather hard for their to ever be a documentary without a voice over. The alternative to a voice over would be to have a physical host, on screen, talking to the viewer. But this wouldn't work if this was the only form of communicating to the audience, as there wouldn't be any time to show actual footage. Therefore, we realised that it would be rather difficult to challenge the conventions of a voiceover. There's only really one way to incorporate a voice over - a voice over the top of the clips. We wanted to challenge the conventions though. We didn't want our documentary to drown in a sea of everything being the same. Our solution then, was to not challenge how the voice over was incorporated, but rather what was actually said in the voice over. Using the examples I presented in the previous slide, we find that the voice overs are all providing the viewer with information - facts, figures, statistics. We couldn't NOT do that. Therefore, we decided to change the tone of the voice over and the script. We decided to make our voiceover exaggerated - we were to provide factual information, but instead decided to go over the top. Generalise and mock. We made the style of the voiceover humorous, savage, profane and often pessimistic. This was all inspired by the work of Charlie Brooker, who employs a similar style in his voiceovers. Considering he is the example we found of someone doing it like this, we believed the our voice over was unique enough. Finally, we spoke directly to the viewer, outlined lightly on the previous slide. "YOU look at YOUR phone", "YOU spend most of YOUR day on YOUR phone". Our target audience was the very group of people we were 'mocking'. We had challenged the conventions of a voiceover.

Archive Footage
Archive footage is important. Many of things you would want to incorporate in your documentary would be near impossible for you to film, or it would actually benefit the message or point you're trying to get across. Take one the examples of archive footage we used. We used archive footage of the 2011 Birmingham Riots. The footage was off of Youtube, filmed with a mobile phone. It showed a group of people smashing the windows of a shop and looting. This is something we obviously couldn't have recorded ourselves, but it does reinforce a point we tried to make in our documentary: mobile phones are good because they allow for people to quickly record events for the news that a film crew could never get to in time. This is something that is used rather regularly in documentaries, therefore we didn't challenge the conventions or develop them. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, as we believed that any manipulation of this footage would be disrespectful to the original creator, as well as actually getting in the way and distracting the viewer. Another example of archive footage we used was of a TV advert. The advert was for EE, the mobile network provider, showing a conga line and Kevin Bacon. The advert itself was relevant, afterall, our documentary was on the topic of phones. This piece of archive footage though was not used in the same way as the Birmingham Riots footage. Whereas that was used in a serious fashion, this was used in a mocking fashion. We compared the advert to propoganda of the providers. This is an exaggeration, but then again, this is the style and tone we were going for with our documentary. For this piece of archive footage, we developed the convention. We used the archive footage now just to show the viewer footage we could never film, but actually mocked it and pointed out its flaws.

Location Shots
For our documentary, we used our local high street has the main location for our location shots.
These shots were focused on the shops of the mobile network providers We gathered shots of the logos of these stores, their shop frontages and adverts/deals on their front windows.

These shots were to accompany a voice over, describing the effect these providers have had.
These shots were not necessarily influenced by anything. You could compare it to the shots of the McDonalds restaurants used in Supersize Me, but it's not really much of a convention. It's just a filler shot to provide a visual reference for the information provided in the voice over. It's something which is used in most documentaries. Therefore, we didn't really develop the convention of location shots.

Interviews
Interviews are necessary for many types of documentaries, most importantly in poetic and expository ones. In Supersize Me, they interviewed health experts. In How TV Ruined Your Life, they interviewed the director-general of the BBC. These interviews are relevant to the topic at hand. For our documentary, we interviewed two people: Mike Hatton and Nick Waring, two teachers at the our college. The two are media teachers, experts in the field that we looked at.

We noticed that with the interviews in the documentaries we looked at that, they didn't just show us the documentary. They cut it up. They inserted images and clips over the top.
We did this for our interviews. One example being archive footage of amateur journalism of the Arab Spring being shown when Mike Hatton talks about the positive effects of mobile phones, in particular the ability for things to be recorded on the spot, in places that a film crew could either a) never get to or b) get to on time. We believe that we developed the conventions already established in documentaries: we didn't just show the interview. We placed clips over the top, and cut up the interview, playing parts of it in different parts of our interview, wherever relevant. Furthermore, we decided to not include any over the shoulder shots or shot-reverse-shots for our interviews. The reason being is that there is not host. The documentary includes a 'voice of god' narration, therefore there would be no need to have a physical interviewer. The interviewee is talking to the viewer. Not an interviewer.