1. Is Fast Food Killing Our Children?
By Nisha Singh
(Candidate Number: 5184)

2. In what way does your media
product use, develop, and
challenge forms and conventions
of real media products?

3. Documentary Conventions
• Expository: Voiceover addressing the audience directly; variety of
footage, stills, interviews, and archive footage used; trying to prove a point biased.
• Observational: Camera follows the person as the events unfold; no interviews; no
voiceover; long takes used; light equipment used.
• Poetic: Usually artistic; mood or tone created by music; little narration.
• Reflexive: Shows behind-the-scenes footage; voiceover is not authoritive; film
maker is in front of the camera; uses techniques from fiction films.
• Participatory: Film maker becomes a character, becomes part of the events; use of
archive footage; many interviews included; hand held camera used for location
shots.
Looking at these conventions, you can see our documentary includes both
expository modes and participatory modes. We had a specific point we wanted
to get across about fast food and we used a variety of footage and archive
material to do this, as well as a voiceover. This shows our documentary as
expository. We were also involved with the documentary, becoming a
character, this also classes our documentary as participatory. Being a hybrid
documentary shows it as conventional.

4. How Is It Conventional?
• We chose to do a documentary about the fast food industry and how it is aimed at
young children; so when showing facts, we used slow, sad music to enhance the
mood created.
• We used a variety of interviews to get different opinions from
students, teachers, parents etc… and were able to find out why parents take their
children to fast food restaurants so regularly.
• We both were involved in the documentary and I did the voiceovers to speak to
the audience directly and engage them

5. Opening Titles
• We decided to show someone putting a fast
food bag down on the kitchen table and then
have the credits appearing on the bottom
right hand side of the screen.
• This is also a familiar scene for people who eat
fast food meals – coming home, and putting
the food down in the kitchen, ready to eat.

6. Archive Material
• We used a variety of archive material
including different news stories about fast
food, obesity and the effect it is having on
children.
• We started our documentary off showing
some of these clips and then later on we
showed some more.

7. Images and Voiceover
• We then used different images of fast food
restaurants to show the amount of fast food
restaurants in one town.
• Then I added a voiceover to speak directly to
the audience and engage them with the use of
rhetorical quesitons.

8. Interviews
• We used a variety of interviews to get
different opinions and so the audience can
make their own opinions on the topic.
• We did some short interviews asking people
what their favourite fast food restaurants
were, and then we had a long interview at the
end of the documentary asking a Food Tech
teacher about the dangers of fast food and
childhood obesity.

9. Participating
• We participated in the documentary by
appearing in some scenes to talk about what
was happening, and have a look at some facts.
• We also appeared in the scene where we
looked at what was in a McDonalds Happy
Meal, and how unhealthy they really were.

10. Statistics
• We found different facts surrounding our
documentary topic, using sites such as BBC
news, Bupa, and NHS. This way we knew the
facts were legitimate and reliable.
• We showed these facts over a scene of people
walking into a fast food restaurant sped
up, and had a voiceover of myself reading
these facts out.

11. How effective is the combination
of your main product and your
ancillary tasks?

12. • Our main product compliments our ancillary
tasks well as it is another window of
advertising our product.
• Our first ancillary task, produced together, is
of a double page magazine spread.
• Our second ancillary task, completed
individually, is of a newspaper poster
advertising the documentary.

13. Double Page Magazine Spread
• For this we looked at different magazine spreads in listing magazines to help us
decide on the best way to lay our article out.
• We used our theme of fast food as a background for our article, having chips as a
background on the left page, and being a foundation for columns of writing.
• On the right hand page, we had different fast food chips, burgers etc… with facts
falling out.
• We included an article about the documentary and fast food, and then on the left
hand side we had the interview we did with the Food Tech teacher in our school.
And we also used some facts we found on the news websites.

14. Poster Ancillary Task
• For this ancillary task I decided to have a large photo of a child eating fast food at
the top half of the page. This was done to shock people and almost bring a comic
effect to it.
• Underneath I wrote what channel, date and time it would be shown on television.
I also wrote down a little box saying if audiences wanted to do more research into
the topic being looked at, to visit the NHS website address written at the bottom.

15. What Have You Learned From Your
Audience Feedback?

16. • I learnt that where the majority of it was done to
the best of our ability, we did have to fix some
aspects of it.
• For us, this included the background noise in
some of the scenes which prevented audiences
from hearing what was being said by the
character speaking.
• We also needed to edit one scene more clearly
where the transition had cut off the end and the
beginning of part of the end interview.

17. Main Areas Of Improvement
• As well as what had already been said in the
previous slide, we also wanted to be able to
film inside a fast food restaurant, and
interview a dietician or manager of a fast food
chain.
• This was originally very difficult to do as for
legal reasons ,we were unable to film in these
situations.

18. Most Effective Part of Our
Documentary
• However we did do some shots that really
complimented our documentary and helped
create a certain mood.
• The use of music worked really well.
• The interviews worked well, with the titles
along the bottom.
• Voiceovers and statistics was another good
point that helped us to engage the audience.

19. How Did You Use Media
Technologies in The Construction
and Research, Planning, and
Evaluation Stages?

20. Documenting Our Work
• We use Blogger to document our
progress, updating our blogs frequently. We
used Slideshare, Prezi, Wordclouds etc… to
help make it more interesting to view and
show a variety of platforms for documenting
our work.

21. Filming
• For filming we used a Sony hand-held video
camera to film our indoor and outdoor scenes.
For some scenes such as the interviews, we
used a tripod to help steady our footage.

22. Editing
• For editing we used the Apple Macbook and
iMovie to edit our final piece.
• Here we could add
transitions, music, voiceovers, edit sound and
video clips, add images, speed the clip up etc…
• We also used iPhoto to upload our still shots
we had taken of fast food restaurants.

23. The End