1. IN WHAT WAYS DOES
YOUR MEDIA
PRODUCT
USE, DEVELOP OR
CHALLENGE FORMS
AND CONVENTIONS
OF REAL MEDIA
PRODUCTS? By Devon McManus

2. RULE OF THIRDS.
Our documentary employed the conventions of a documentary to
resemble a real media product. One way we achieved this was by
employing rule of thirds, which can be seen here in an interview with
musician Danny Gruff.
We decided to place him on the right side of the screen so that we
were able to see the O2 Academy sign on the left with all the details
of upcoming artists who are going to be playing at the venue. We
thought it would be most appropriate to include rule of thirds in the
documentary because we would be able to keep an eye-line match of
all the people we interviewed so that when our audience were
watching it, their eyes wouldn’t be looking all over the screen for the
next sequence of footage.
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However, we also decided to challenge the convention of rule of
thirds, by placing the interviewee in the centre of the frame. Here is
an example of this, in the interview with musician Dion Roy. We
decided to place him centre so that he was in the centre of the lights
for the mise en scene. Despite this, we still tried to conform to our
structure of the rule of thirds by keeping an eye-line match with the
interviewee. You can see in this picture that we did try to position
Dion Roy on the same line for eye-line as we did for Danny Gruff in the
picture above. Despite challenging this convention, we did try to
conform to the standard structure of professional documentaries as
much as possible which is why in the rest of the interviews we had
taken, we conformed to the professional structure for using rule of
thirds in a documentary.


3. CAMERA SHOTS.
We challenged conventions of filming a documentary by using handheld We conformed to the professional style of filming by using a
cameras .The effect in this image was to show a whole queue outside a tripod to make sure our footage was steady. This image is a
gig to really emphasize how many people go to gigs. We used handheld master shot from the Alex Clare gig we filmed. We decided to
by walking down the queue and filming every person we passed by. We film a long shot because it set the scene for the atmosphere
didn’t employ this camera technique much because it is considered an during a live concert. The mise-en-scene of the lights on stage
amateur technique and we wanted our documentary to look as and view of the audience really complimented our chosen
professional as possible. topic of a live music documentary.
To make our documentary more artistic, we decided to add some close We employed medium close ups in our documentary to fit with
ups of relevant footage, such as this image of a guitar player, to make the conventional structure for an interview in a documentary.
the whole sequence more dynamic. This contrasted with the rest of This was our interview with Alex Clare. This is one of the other
the footage we had taken because a lot of our documentary consisted interviews we employed the rule of thirds for. The use of
of long shots to take in the surroundings for the atmosphere or medium close ups also made our documentary more exciting
medium shots when viewing the artists on stage. through the use of different camera shots.

4. SOUND.
• In the creation of our documentary, we developed the conventions of real media
products by adding a sound-bed under interviews to keep the documentary exciting. We
did this by adjusting the volume of the interview and the sound bed to ensure that it
wasn’t overpowering. To keep our documentary interesting, we also experimented with
more than one song for our sound-bed, and finally decided that we would use two songs
of completely different genres to make our documentary more diverse and different. This
effect sometimes appears in professional documentaries to make them more exciting, so
therefore we developed the conventions of real media products.
• In our interview with Dion Roy, we decided to include ambient sound instead adding
music later because we thought it would create a live atmosphere by having music from
the venue playing in the background. Ambient sound also developed conventions as we
filmed a vox pop in front of a crowd. Usually, there would be some ambient sound during
a vox pop, however we decided that it would be more suitable to have the ambient sound
relate to the documentary – crowd noise. We avoided this ambient sound technique for
the rest of our interviews because we wanted it to be as professional as possible and
therefore have clear sound where the audio is easy to hear through using a clip
microphone.
• We additionally included a narration to give our documentary a structure. We were able
to plan what footage to use around the theme and structure of our narration, and added
to the documentary being informative as well as entertaining. An example of this in our
documentary is where we had narration about buying tickets to go to a concert, and
therefore we accompanied this with visual footage of actually being on a ticket buying
site (Ticket Master) and showing the procedure in which people follow to receive their
tickets before going to a concert. Narration is important to documentaries and is often , if
not always, used. As we decided to use narration, it indicates that we have took into
consideration the professional structure of documentaries and how we have tried to
replicate that so our documentary looked professional.

5. TITLES.
• Our documentary is similar of a real media product because we employed titles to introduce the name of our documentary and also to
give the name and profession of our interviewee’s when on screen. This is important because it adds structure to the documentary like
the narration. We wanted our documentary to look as professional as possible so therefore employed this feature that would avoid
making the documentary look amateur. To add these titles, we decided to use the website, Dafont.com, to look at all the different
styles of fonts we could choose from. We then selected one called ‘dirty ego’ and used it on Adobe Premiere Pro to get the titles that
we desired and thought would look best on a documentary for live music.
• We developed the conventions of using titles in a documentary because normally all profession documentaries will use titles to inform
the audience of the name of documentary, or any other relevant information they want the audience to know. We however, although
we employed titles, we tried to use as little titles as we could so that the audience would completely rely upon the narration for
information and the footage for visual entertainment. We thought that by developing the convention of the use of titles this way, it
would make our documentary more exciting to watch and make the audience more engaged with what they are seeing and listening
to.
• Finally, titles were important to our documentary because we needed to give information about some of the unknown musicians we
interviewed in our documentary. Titles are specifically employed for the purpose to inform, and I think it was necessary for us to use
them in our interviews because we wanted the audience to know who these individuals were, and that they have relevance to our
documentary about live music. An example of this is when we interviewed a local musician – Danny Gruff. Despite being unknown to
many people, he is still a musician and therefore has an opinion and view about live music and going to concerts.

6. EFFECTS.
We decided to add a black and white effect to We also employed cross dissolve effect during The fade to black effect is used in many
some of the footage in our documentary to a montage of gig footage to be entertaining documentaries and therefore to conform
make it more dynamic and exciting. It would and to make the documentary look as though to the professional convention of
make it more dynamic because the rest of the it wasn’t made by amateurs. We thought that documentaries, we included it in our
footage we have used has no colour effects the transition effect would make the documentary. We thought that this effect
and therefore it makes the documentary look documentary more exciting compared to the would make our documentary not look
more artistic. Some effects are used in normal standard documentary effects, were too tacky, especially with the other more
documentaries so by not overpowering the limited are used so that it lo0ks professional. dynamic effects that we decided to use in
effects we developed the conventions of This is how we developed the conventions of the creation of our documentary.
professional documentaries. professional documentaries.
We added animation of a flashing recording sign to make the
documentary more artistic and to further give the impression that it was
We included the convention of title graphics in our documentary a professional documentary. By including animation, it gives the
to resemble a real professional media documentary. We made impression that we are not amateurs because we can do such things.
the background for the title on Adobe Photoshop and imported it Not many professional documentaries include animation, so this is an
on to Adobe Premiere so that we could include it in our example of how we developed the conventions of professional
documentary like professional documentaries have. documentaries.

7. FOOTAGE.
We varied the types of footage in our documentary to entertain the audience;
Like many documentaries, one type of footage we used was B-roll footage. We did this
to accompany the voiceover when talking about relevant subjects. An example of this in
our documentary is footage of inside a music shop, to accompany the theme of our
documentary not only being about live music, but just music in general too.
We wanted to make our documentary understandable and relatable to our target
audience so we decided to film a reconstruction of someone buying a ticket. We did this
because it is the standard procedure for someone to buy a ticket before going to a
concert so we thought it would be best to include it. It is often that there are
reconstructions in professional documentaries because you cannot always film events as
they occurred live. We did however include some live footage in our documentary so we
didn’t have to use reconstruction after reconstruction to have a point to our
documentary.
In addition, we employed footage of live concerts mainly because it was the key concept
of our documentary. We organised to film concerts with the management of real music
artists (eg. Alex Clare and Tyler Hilton) which we were then able to use in our
documentary. This is a development of a convention professional documentaries use
because once they have a topic, they get a film crew to go out onto a relatable location
and get footage that would enhance the documentary more and make it more
interesting.
Furthermore, we used archive footage so that we could show successful artists, such as
Paramore live in concert. This is similar to what professionals do, in the creation of
documentaries. It then gave us diversity, as we were able to put professional musicians
next to some unknown artists, to indicate that there aren’t many differences, and that
people who create music, experience live music like everyone else.
Finally, the footage helped give our documentary structure was interviews. We included
these as they are a key convention of professional documentaries. We were able to
expand on what interviewee’s were saying with our own footage.

8. MISE EN SCENE.
We took the mise-en-scene into consideration when producing our documentary because we wanted it to resemble a professional
production. We focused on the locations of filming to stick to the theme of live music. Therefore we filmed outside of venues, in front of
stages, in music shops and in front of crowds. We developed the convention of mise-en-scene that documentaries employ because we new
there was an importance is relating the interviewee’s surroundings to the theme of the documentary and also to their profession . We even
used stage lighting for one of our shots to put emphasis on performance and playing live. Some of the props include having a guitar on
stage to indicate music is the theme of the documentary. The location of where we filmed our footage was very important for the mise-en-
scene because we needed the background to reflect the topic of our documentary – live music. It was hard to have a costume to represent
live music so we had to have music related props/location in the background to take away the normality of the subject in the foreground.
We really considered the mise-en-scene by planning before going out on location and filming. This is another way our product resembles a
professional product but overall these are all ways we developed the conventions of real media products.