Evaluation Question 1

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

Throughout my production I research different documentary styles to construct, and create a understanding for my own documentary. The documentary "School life-From a girls" constructs a feel understanding but also confusion around these young Lady's and how the think about others around them. This is a contextual piece and relevant to the times. The purpose of my piece was to underpin an awareness for my target audience 14-19.

However, by using effects like slow motion and voice-overs reconstruct the documentary and challenges the way in which the audience create meaning. Some audiences will feel sympathy for the girls and believe their behaviour is routed from coming to a boys sixth form and and T.V. programmes, however others will feel confused and feel that the girls young age and unawareness of the "Real World" is blocking how they should feel for example two of the girls I interviewed said they didn't like boy because of...

1. The way they acted made them dislike able.
2. And their aggressive behaviour has rubbed of me.

Nevertheless both views from the audience are challenged and both have the same underlying message. This can be shown through a graph that was conducted from my questionnaire.

In addition I also subverted certain conventions such as the jump clips coming to the end of the documentary and the music I used. This can be explained through the uses and gratification theory. The audience can make choices about what they did when consuming texts. Individuals actively consume texts for a variety of reasons and in different ways. Therefore suggested that media texts had a function for individuals and society which in my documentary provided surveillance, correlation, entertainment and cultural transmission.

However this theory was expanded by me as I stated that individuals might choose and use a text for the following purposes:

• Diversion – escape from everyday problems and routine. ( in my documentary drink is the diversion)
• Personal relationships – using the medis for emotional and other interaction (interviews with the girls)
• Personal Identity – finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and values from texts (audience reactions)
• Surveillance – Information which could be useful for living (a child’s health can be watched upon by the audience)

One documentary style and technique that I concentrated on and researched thoroughly was cinema verite to allow my documentary to follow and develop documentary styles. I researched cinema verite because I believed it was neccessary to understand about the ‘truth cinema’ and was essential to my product to find the truth and motifs behind why girls may behave in a boys school.

Many different codes and conventions are used within documentaries and I tried to challenge these by using a variety of camera angles, jump shots within the documentary and interviews that are typical of the documentary style. These were challenged by using different background light on the interviews making Irma angelic from the olive green background.