Question 2: Part 2

Audience research into there profiles, along with Blumer and Katz's User and gratifications theory:




Blumer and Katz- Users and Gratifications theory (Prezi):


Here is an example of one of the focus groups we had for our newspaper ad, that best helps with the decision of which one we chose:

Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Due to the documentary not being able to just stand alone and sell itself, we had to organise a campaign to help advertise the documentary properly.
Each piece of the ancillary texts was made to fit the profile of our documentary; it was given a specific title with specific colours and layouts, all to help with the production of the doc. We have targeted our audiences in 2 forms: one being in the form of a radio advert, the other being in the form of a newspaper ad. People that listen to the radio a lot will pick up on the ad and hopefully tune in when it is released, people that read the newspaper will see our poster and hopefully respond to it in the way we wanted. However, you could say that we got people that don't normally pick up a newspaper or don't listen to the radio, to do this by making the ads look and sound enticing.

Both ancillary texts have similar qualities about them, the biggest one being that we use the poster in the radio ad whilst the advert is playing, so if people are catching it on Youtube oh viewing it on a radio website they can see the shocking image and they hear the word addiction and heroine.

The radio ad really captures some of the best bits of sound and voice that we have in the documentary, the music too, having the Nintendo music playing at some point and that game noise at the beginning; really brings in the audience. In a radio ad if an audience was to hear something they have heard before, like a brand or a song, their immediate reaction would be to turn it up and listen. Having some elements of the documentary in the radio helps the audience to hear what type of things we are going to discuss and the lovely clear voice over also really helped to illustrate that.

The radio advert really helped with the campaign of our documentary, it allowed a lot of our audience to get really attached to the documentary and made them want to watch it. Read through the analysis of our poster ad below to find out how we catered for our audience and how it have helped with the production of our documentary:

Each part of what we have produced has worked really well with each other; each media text can relate to the documentary. For example the poster advert above: the title has been selected because it asks the question that people will ask themselves, during the documentary. It reminds you that just because it is not a physical drug you can take, doesn't mean that something, as natural, as dopamine can't be addictive. 

To look at some more stuff on our audience and how we managed to work up a target audience using their profiles and a theory- read part 2 of this question...

Question 3: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

To get some audience feedback I asked for a detailed explanation on what this viewer thought of the radio ad and the documentary. The viewer managed to comment on a wide variety of things, from the way the doc was filmed to the sound sync in the radio ad. Underneath is a short animation of part of this conversation, about the radio ad and documentary:  

Dopamine by Victoria18 on GoAnimate

Animation Software - Powered by GoAnimate.

To find out a few other details from our audience, I sent a few people on Facebook the main and ancillary task, to find out what they thought about it:



Here are a few more responses from Twitter that someone in my group has shared with a few people, each are some great feedback.

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The grid above works from left to right, starting with the news reports. See Prezi for further analysis

Question 4

First edit evaluation

The first edit of our documentary went really well, we could see that it was coming together and we could finally see a narrative. So after receiving feedback from our class mates and teachers, we came up with things to change on our documentary:
VOICEOVER- THIRD PERSON- (VOLUME HOW IT FITS IN TO THE DOC)
FADE OUTS- FADING INTO BLACK- SOME FADES LAST FOR TOO LONG
SHARPER CUTS- CUT AT THE BEGINNING FOR SMOOTHER CONTEXT
ENDING- END ON HOW ALI RELATES TO THE SUBJECT OF ADDICTION AND TECH. END ON HIS JOURNEY TO FIND OUT
CHANGE OF DOC MODE: OBSERVATORY- PARTICIPATORY
We then showed this edit to our teacher, who gave us a few criticisms that we could use in order to change a few things when we edit some more. He thought that the fades outs made the doc. look a little boring, because they went on for longer than expected. However, when it came down to editing it we found that it was difficult not to have such long pauses because without them, they doc. became too rushed and didnt flow as smoothly.
After dicussing the cuts and fades of our documentary, our teacher also made it clear that the sound wasnt very good at times, for example the short interviews we shot at Liverpool Street, had a lot of background noise, that we quite distracting. This is a problem that we already knew about, but we did find it rather difficult to block out the background noise and not disturb what the people we saying. After this, we dicussed the idea of changing the mode of our doc; from observatory to participatory, which then changed the voiceover script, from third person to first, in order for it to make sense to our audience.

Group Evaluation

Ali's shooting day Friday-Sunday

Friday- "Was all about setting up the different locations of where he was going to shoot... For example in his house, putting the camera in the right places, getting his nephew in the right places at the right time. In order to observe him properly. I watched Kyreece play games and watch TV, and did running shots, to discover what I needed to find out."

Saturday- "Next I got Kyreece (aged 5) ready to go to the park to watch him play around with a football or on the swings, showed him acting his age. Until I had problems with the camera again, which is when I decided to go home and get some more shots of him playing with the laptop, phone and watching TV. I started researching everything about the camera, trying to find out what was going on with it, so that next time I will be able to overcome this problem. I found so much whilst doing this..."



During Ali's research he found many different techniques to use in out documentary to show the addiction to gaming and TV. For example the 'Packman' one, which makes the lights in the shot to become that shape, which will emphasise the fact that we all see what we addicted to all the time. The fact that it makes it looks like it's in the sub-conscience, so always thinking about it, even in your sleep.

The music tone in the background is particularly interesting to us; the piano is a soft under tone to the quite eye catching colours. We would like to use this kind of music in our documentary, so that it doesn't take away meaning from the actual shots but allows something to keep the audience interested whilst they are watching- to allow something to fill the space when we are taking transition or establishing shots.

This might be something that the audience can watch whilst the narrator is talking, so that the audience can view watch the narrator is trying to illustrate- explaining what they are looking at, or explaining the next transition.

Shooting Day 4 Friday- Sunday

On this shooting day, Ali-director, will be filming his nephew and oberseving him as he watches his favourite programm and plays his favourite game. The rest of the crew is thinking that this will go really well; because Kyreece will be at his house most of the time, which gives him great oppotunities to get some good footage. Me as the camera woman, I'm kind of missing out, as I am too busy for these dates. Ali will show us the footage on Tuesday for out next meeting, hopefully it looks good and has the kind of effects I'm hoping it to have.

Evaluation of Shooting Day 3

Evaluation of Shooting Day 2

Evaluation of shooting day 1

Today was the day where we went to Liverpool street to shoot establishing shots and get some interviews from random people. This was a difficult process to start off with because my team were a little shy to start talking to people. It was also cold and getting dark very quickly so isn't wasn't going too well, in order for us to get some good interviews we needed to just work with the public.

This might not have been the best time for us to starrt recording as it was rush hour and no one could really talk to us because they needed to catch a train. Despite the fact that we had numorous problems with the camera, resulting in us having to ask people with cameras what was going on, we also tried the internet at the point; where we got this from Youtube:



However, despite the fact that we had a few shooting and confidence trouble at the beginning; we decided that it was time for us to start talking to people, so that we could just go home, becuase it was so freezing. We started to have fun after that, more and more people started to come and talk to us and give us the answers we wanted.

After understanding the camera a bit more, we had decided to try and shoot some establishing shots; although this was quite tricky beacuse we want to go in the middle of the road and shoot on coming traffic, coming from both ways. We found this quite difficult because we couldn't get the tripod to stand properly, nor would the camera stay on it, so the frame was shaky and we couldnt get a clear shot. Eventually; it was a matter of getting as many people to interview as we could. Which we did and got some really interesting answers.

However...

There was still TV!!!

I managed to watch a documentary that could relate to the documentary that I will work on...
'The Human Mannequin'- mainly about the facts of her illness and her life. This relates to my documentary because we will be discussing a drug that everyone has, we will be mainly talking about the drug itself- looking for facts and figures, but also looking at someone in particular, who uses it the most.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-human-mannequin/4od

Problems- Holiday!

The struggle to keep up with bogging!
On holiday, where there is NO internet and there had to just observe and take pictures and record some stuff, to make me feel better, after not being able to blog.

It wasnt all bad, the holiday wasn't bad, here are some snaps:

 Just as we were leaving, the sun decided to come out, so I quickly got a shot on the beach!








We were staying in these little cabin things, that were absolutely freezing, but still great fun.