Final Version of Magazine article

After much deliberation the final edition of the magazine article has been finished, the basis of the interview has remained the same informing the audience of our opinions and the process of filming and editing, however we decided to change the background giving it a look that would better suit a magazine also making it more attractive to the audiences eye.

Prezi Presentation

These print screen images show my Prezi Presentation. Prezi is a innovative website that allows you to create a presentation with a difference.

The website allows you to flow from one piece of information to another, looking through each image.

I found this website and type of presentation really useful, it was interesting for the audience and fun to make. It also allowed me to use a creative way to display my information.

http://prezi.com/ifzsv5si-v1i/edit/#1

Audience feedback

Evaluation

Continuing on from a previous blog on my evaluation for my advanced portfolio, i have now completed the evaluation including slides on influences from other documentaries, the filming process and my ancillary pieces.

Audience Feedback

To gain the knowledge of constructive criticism we conducted a screening of our final version of the documentary to three students, all three were media students and this became apparent in their knowledge of the editing processes and the technical terms that are said. Overall they were all impressed with the fluidity of the piece and variety of people in the documentary, taking into account the positive and negative opinions of the students we will now go back to the documentary, editing it until we feel we have produced to the best of our ability.

Final edition of voiceover

After finishing the filming and editing process, we have now been able to post the final edition of our voice over. This narrates the documentary providing the audience with factual information and helps to connect parts of the documentary together,this took quite a long period of time as we had trouble choosing the right facts the were most relevant from the extensive research we had performed we also had to edit snippets that would fit in the restricted time period. In the end we decided that we would both narrate the documentary as the final workpiece was joint contribution:

Voice over final edition

Charlie: In today's society, television is seen as the gateway to learning, with such shows as family guy do we really know the real effects TV has on children? What do they see? And what do they learn? What's really going on behind the screen?
In this documentary we will be investigating the causes and effects these shows have on children.

Kate: From watching TV with friends to family, do we really know if its really acceptable in modern day and if children should actually be watching it?

Charlie: So does TV influence children's behaviour in the classroom?

Kate: But what happened when TV first emerged?

Charlie: With children watching an average of 19 hours and 40 minutes of television per week could it really damage their future lives? Or are programmes educating our children? If so, what shows do children watch?

Kate: In Australia a child spends an average of 18,000 hours watching cartoon. this is the same amount of time spent behind a school desk up to the age of 18. Is this good for education?

Charlie: With exams and tests at school , is TV a bad distraction during revision or does it help to teach important skills?

Kate: There are many shows such as The Simpson's that teach real ,orals. but what do the children really think of the cartoons?

Evaluation Powerpoint

With filming finished, my evaluation process now begins, during the Easter holidays I started to construct my evaluation PowerPoint which helps to show the links, videos and factual information in a clear and simple format easy for the audience to read and understand.

After experimenting on PowerPoint I decided that the colour schemes weren't right so I started to research backgrounds on Google, I was looking for a background that was simple yet colourful that wouldn't distract the audience from the information being displayed on the page. After exploring a few websites provided by Google I discovered these two images...

Both these images were very professional looking, they were both engaging enough but not distracting from the information. However when using the first image as a background it was pixelated and out of proportion, whereas the second image on the right worked really efficiently.

To provide sufficient information for the receiving audience, I used various techniques in conjunction to questions given by the exam board, one of these techniques used was word cloud from the website http://www.worditout.com/, a technique which artfully designs words relevant to your topic that will visually engage the audience.

Final Supporting Pieces

After much deliberation we have produced three final supporting pieces, two being created by each individual as the third being produced as a team. From previous blogs it is seen that their were many ideas and drafts that were created in order to get the best possible effect.

The three final supporting pieces are as so:

1. The first supporting piece was created by myself and is a newspaper advert. From looking through several weekend and daily newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian and The Sun I have concluded that most adverts that are seen in newspapers are black and white and lighting plays a huge role in setting the mood of the advert... adverts promoting such products as bathrooms use bright lighting with neutral colors giving the reader a sense of positivity. Adverts shown to promote serious or solitary products such as a documentary or a new upcoming movie, use minimal colours and lighting, with harsh, bold writing. Such adverts as these send messages of seriousness and interest to the reader. This was the effect I wanted to create for my advert, I wanted to send a message of seriousness and shock that piques the audiences interest. To create this effect I used a black background and bold white writing, this keeps the colour pallet to monotone colours and a sense of an edge is introduced to the documentary. The image to the left hand side of the ad is of a young girl looking somber, the photo uses minimal lighting which again adds to theme of the advert.
2. The second supporting piece was Charlie's individual work which was a magazine article which shows our experiences and opinion of the documentary. this article is to help better inform the audience. There are two sets of photos, the first set are portrait photos and the second set are us working editing and directing. these will help the audience to understand the work that will go behind making of the documentary.
3. The third and final supporting piece is the groups combined piece, these are posters created to interest the audience and to inform potential new audiences. the poster will ask parents whether they are educated enough on what their children are watching.

Newspaper advert

Editing Continued...

After gathering all of our new interview footage, we have now started the process of adding the new material to the already existing documentary, interjecting it at certain points that we thought lacked continuity.
This process will a take a large amount of time as we have a lot of material to condense down to the appropiate time margin. So far we have spent an average of 2-3 weeks editing and re-assembling, at the moment the accumalated time of our documentary has been reduced to the time of 6 minutes, by the end of editing we plan to have marginalised the time to a total of 5 minutes.
At the start of the project both charlie and I had decided that by filming lots of extra footage we would be able to pin-pick the top quality moments and the required basic scenes and create a documentary that would should show a good use of camera angles, lighting, audio and provide the audience with a biased argument; which is the main aim of the documentary. By carrying out this plan we had around 20 minutes of material to edit and re-assemble.

Re-arranged Interview

In recent hours we have learned that our interviewee has cancelled our appointment to meet him at Southbank for other personal reasons. We have now arranged to meet a new interviewee, a senior citizen, who will still be able to compare programmes to an era where there were no televisions when she was a child, we thought that this interview would be a good substitute because we will still be able to demonstrate a difference between past and present and engage the audience on a more personal level.
Having this comparison we can also ask the interviewee's opinion about children's behaviour before and after television and her opinion about what effects television has on younger audiences.

Third arranged interview

This week we have had an opportunity to incorporate an extra interviewee to our documentary, when we were asked if we wanted to perform the interview at Southbank, London on Thursday 11th Febuary, we decided that adding it to our documentary would prove to be an excellent opportunity showing essential key points and demonstrate a professional opinion.
Michael Metcalfe is a TV industry expert who was the former director of GMTV, he will explain to the audience his experiences within the TV industry, what he thinks is acceptable and not acceptable in the contents of programmes, what effects he thinks these have on children watching the programmes and comparing modern day children's programmes to programmes he watched himself as a child demonstrating the differences and engaging the audience on a more personal level.
Despite thinking that we had all the necessary footage, having Michael's opinions included into our production will give the documentary more depth and help us conclude the documentary.

Editing - Voiceover

After accumlating all our necessary interview footage and editing it on the apple mac we have created a rough documentary, this includes still images of cartoons in place of where footage from that cartoon will be, background music and voice over.
The voice over has been created in the past two lessons, together we both decided that Charlie should be the one to narrate the voice over as she has a clearer, defined voice.
The voiceover includes facts that we have aquired from various books, magazine/newspaper articles and websites from when we started to conduct our research. The narration also questions the audience in which one of our various interviewees will answer with their opinion.
Of course this is a rough draft at the moment as we still have to gather various clips from our cartoons and define certain areas of the documentary, but having this rough draft of the documentary gives us a base in which we can work into and improve so that overall we have produced a documentary to the best of our ability.

Supporting piece- positive poster idea

After creating two posters designed to shock and attract audiences, using bold stencil fonts and monotones, we decided that it was essential to create a third poster with a positive atttitude. So from what information we had gathered from the interviews we had conducted we decided to use a cartoon that was predominatley popular with the children.... Spongebob Squarepants.

Again we focused on the colours and fonts we would use on the poster and what reactions they would create from the audience. we found that using a colourful palette meant that the audience were attracted by the brighter colours and created a more positive attitude.

The font we used on the poster was relevant to the topic of our documentary which was children. The font has an almost nursery theme to it which we thought was deal for the tone of the poster.

Added Interviews

Over Christmas holidays we conducted two more interviews that will be included onto to our documentary.
The first interview is with a children's TV director Ken Grumbaum who gives his views on modern day children programmes and how he feels these programmes affect young children. having 6 children himself he shared with us his thoughts of the shows and whether they are seen as good or bad TV for children.
The second interview is with a local parent who describes their thoughts and concerns to their own children's reactions as they watched violent shows. Some of the shows they mentioned depicted violence and some inappropriate language. However not all the shows were of a negative view and some resembled a learning and resourceful nature. Once again proving the balance in our argument of TV because of the pros and cons in the viewing material.
By adding these interviews to our documentary we will have the full perspectives from parents, teachers to industry experts, this will give our audience a more balanced argument allowing them to become more educated on the subject.

Developing the Magazine Article- Supporting Piece

This is a developed version of the magazine article, after creating the first draft we decided that the article layout wasn't effective as we thought it would be, so after changing the layout to a satisfactory place we then started to review the actual interview itself.

When we reviewd the wording of the article we both agreed that it was missing more information on the creative process so we decided together that we would talk more about our views of the documentary, the making of and the technical side of the production. After re-reading the edited interview we found that the artcile had become more effective in promotion terms and looked more professional.

Media on supporting documents

To help give our supporting pieces a more polished and overall professional look, we decided that we would look on the Internet to find fonts for the documents that were different from the typical word fonts that you can find on Microsoft word, the resulting website was http://www.dafont.com/
On this website you can scroll through hundreds of different fonts from stencils to calligraphy.

On the Posters I created I decided to use stencil because my aim with the posters was to catch attention and to invite the audience in. These fonts below are just some that I considered and used...

Preliminary Interview Article

These two pages were the first drafts that we created for our interview. This interview was created to promote our documentary, to give both sides of the argument to the audience and then let them make their own decision based on what we have reported, and that we don't come across as too biased against the argument.

The interview explains our own ideas and views about the documentary, we thought that this was relevant for our audiences to know because it gives them better understanding as to why we made the documentary in the first place.
We decided on a total of four pictures because we didnt want the article to seem too crowded and jumbled, so after much deliberation we decided to keep it simple and well informed. The final four pictures are one each of us working and a profile picture each.

As our first draft of the interview i'm very pleased with how it is written, how our views are put across to the audience. If i had to improveit the article i would rearrange the presentation to make it look like it was being inserted into a newspaper.

Advertisement Ideas

Recently in lessons we have been coming up with ideas in which to promote our documentary.
such ideas included magazine or newspaper articles, posters, TV advertisements, interviews and radio adverts. considering the time deadline we have we decided from the start that we would advertise using a method that wouldn't cost us too much time but was still up to quality of standard, therefore we decided that we would focus mainly on posters and interviews for magazines or newspapers.
After deciding on these two medias we decided to split the workload so charlie would be writing the interview and i would be creating the posters, by splitting the workload we were able to use the best of our abilities to create the highest quality of work.
The posters i created were based on shocking the parent, so that when they saw the poster they would become insecure about the amount of time their child watched TV for, therefore making them to discover more about the subject.
I decided to use a monotone colour palette and the stencil font because it makes the poster more eye catching to the audience and because their is minimalist information on the poster it will cause the audience to want to research about the documentary more.


















This second poster is'nt as bold as the first poster but the image shows the violence that can be on TV that children watch to parents.
If you notice that on the bottom of each poster i have written that the documentary is on channel four and is based on dispatches.
We decided on this because dispatches are a series of documentaries dedicated to revealing the truth to their audiences and shocking them.

After discussions with our teacher we soon realised that we could not place dispatches on the posters due to copyright laws, so we decided instead to replace it with "march 2010".
The resulting posters ended like so...