AS Task - Codes and Conventions

I have studied many documentaries to discover what the codes and conventions of them are. Two of them are called, "The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special in 3D On Ice" and "In The Teeth of Jaws".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orLGl7c5oHc (The Simpsons, Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42Zj8R0kumw (In The Teeth of Jaws, Part 1)

After analysing these two documentaries carefully, I realised that the interviewee always speaks as though they are answering questions but no questions are heard, therefore, they must answer in full sentences. As well as this, the interviewee never looks straight into the camera but as though they are talking to the interviewer. This gives it a more relaxed focus and doesn't make it look personal but as though they are talking to a large group of people. They are also shot in either a mid-shot or a close-up but very rarely in a full or long shot. This again is to make it look more personal.
Another code and convention is the title that appears whenever anybody new speaks. This title tells us their name and why they are important to the documentary and how they are linked to the subject. For example, in The Simpsons documentary, Sting is talking about the Simpsons so a title pops up in the bottom left hand corner saying, "Sting, Musician". A cutaway to a Simpsons episode which Sting is in then appears to show how he is related to The Simpsons.






Cutaway shots are used to add interest to a documentary because if it was just talking all the way through they would be very boring. Cutaway shots also backup the points that the interviewees are saying. For example, in documentaries about films, such as a documentary that I have watched about the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times, the cutaway shots were often of the section of the film that the presenter was talking about so that even if the audience hadn't watched the film then they would still understand what the point was.

AS Task - Planning

One of the first things that we planned was our setting. We have chosen to use the Wicked Cafe at college because it has a relaxing feeling and it will appeal to the age of the target audience, teenagers, as this is a place that they can relate to, especially ones who go to our college. We then thought about who we were going to interview and the person who we have decided on is a member of our media class who we can trust will give a good interview because she knows all of the codes and conventions herself as well as understanding what we are trying to achieve as she has to do the same task.
We have also begun our story board for the documentary. We want our first shot to be of a telephone mast to establish the subject of our documentary, mobile phones. Our second idea is to have one hand staying in the same place and changing the phones in it to show all of the different types you can get, for example, a flip phone, a sliding phone, a touch screen phone and a normal button phone. This will introduce the start of the documentary and reinforce the subject of it. We have come up with an idea to fade an image of a phone saying, "1 message received from ..." into an image of the interviewee and the documentary will begin. We are unsure if this will work though so it may not happen. We will plan the cutaway shots after we have filmed the interview because they need to relate to her answers.



We have now filmed the interview for the documentary so we have planned our cutaways. Some of them will have to be pictures off the Internet because of our time frame we wont have time to get all of the images we would like. Most of the cutaways will just be general ones with people phoning others or texting rather than being specific to what she says all of the time. However, this will still relate to the documentary as they show general usage of mobile phones.

AS Task - Filming

We have now filmed the interview for our documentary. We had to change the person who we were interviewing because our original interviewee was also filming for her documentary. It took us a while to find someone but in the end we asked Katie Scutt about her mobile phone. We asked her all of the questions that we needed so now we can watch it back to plan the cutaways. The setting for our documentary remained the same in the Wicked Cafe. As this is a fairly noisy place we used a small microphone that clipped onto her top so we could clearly hear her answers and the general noise from the cafe is now background noise. Hopefully this microphone will have worked well and because Katie was wearing a black top, it will not be noticeable which is better than her holding a big microphone to link to the relaxed angle of our documentary. We had no issues with the filming and it all went smoothly.


We have now filmed the whole of our documentary including establishing shots and cutaways. We got an image of a mast for the opening and filmed the changing phones by keeping one hand in the same position and having someone else swap the phones in whilst one of us filmed it. We also shot two people texting and one person on the phone as well as some images of scrolling through a menu on the blackberry phone to show the interactivity and convergence that is available on them. This cutaway is to be inserted into the documentary after Katie has spoken about why she likes her phone. She also says that she would be lost without her mobile phone so we have shot someone stood on their own looking at the floor.

Now we just need to edit everything in place and make sure that we have everything we need.

AS Task - Editing

Editing began with cutting out all of the questions from the interview to just leave the video and audio of the answers behind. We have started to edit images from the Internet into some of the spaces, for example, images of an old nokia phone, a sliding samsung phone and a blackberry as cutaways for which phones she has had. We have added crossfades in between the images to make it flow more so that it looks less jumpy. We have put the same fade on everything because we think that this makes it look classier and less busy. We are not trying to get in every transition type but to create a good quality documentary and we thought that a simple, elegant fade worked the best.
After finishing the filming we edited everything together to make our finished documentary. To create a flashing effect with the swapping phone clips we added a very small section of white video so that it flashed up quickly in between them all. During our editing, we experimented with unlinking the video and the audio to place some of the cutaways over the image with the audio still going. One example of this is when Katie says what her ringtone is. As she is describing why she chose it an image of the album artwork appears. Originally we wanted to put a section of the song in afterwards so that everybody would know which song it was that she was talking about. However, the file format of the song that we had got was not supported with the software and we did not have time to convert it or get another one.
The tools that we used during editing include the razor, to cut the images in the places that we wanted, the normal mouse to move the clips to where we wanted them and extend and shorten the clips and crossfades. We also added lighting effects because of where we had filmed it, with the light behind Katie, it was too dark to see her face. We lightened it up by using several of the settings layered on top of each other.

AS Task - Evaluation

After finishing the documentary, we watched it all together to make sure that we were happy with all of it. However, when evaluating the documentary we found faults in it. For example, one of the main codes and conventions of a documentary is the title that appears with the name of the interviewee. We have not done this. I also think that it is too short and that some of the cutaways could be changed to be more specific so that we do not have to use images off the Internet. This was due to our timing that we produced it in though so when we do our real documentary next year, we will know what to change and what to remember including not filming with the light behind our interviewee. On the positive side, i feel that the small microphone worked really well because you could clearly hear her speaking and yet the microphone on the camera picked up the atmosphere of the Wicked Cafe. The changes that we made to the lighting has also been successful because we can now see Katie's facial expressions clearly. This is important so that people can understand her points. Linking to the codes and conventions of documentaries, Katie looked towards me when I was asking her the questions and ignored the camera. For most of her answers she answered in full sentences but there are a few that maybe would not make sense if you did not know what the original questions were.
Overall, I think that our mobile phone documentary full filled the brief of the task well.