Documentary Intro and Ancillary Products

                                          

Evaluative Questions

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

''Faith Off'', our product, uses the same idea of another reality documentary Pilgrimage with Simon Reeves. In this documentary it shows reeves going on a journey to discover various religions and the stories behind them. Our idea of Faith off is similar to this as we take 8 different people as well as interview another range of people and discover what is good about their faiths and the levels of importance their faiths have in their lives. It is sort of our own Pilgrimage but instead we use one of our Focus group members, Matt, to help us discover the truth behind youth and religion today and this helped us develop our idea further.

We tried to go for a more VICE style documentary. This because we are trying to target a more youthful audience. So we tried to make the documentary quite humorous especially with our focus group members and how we put them in pairs to ask each other about their faiths. We wanted to make it a more VICE style to make it more interesting. VICE have a reputation for very interesting documentaries that seem to capture a youthful audience as well.

Developing the idea we decided to put our focus group into groups of two, where they would sit back to back in a room and find out more about each others faiths. This obviously not the same as pilgrimage but we also got the idea from 4thought. A 2-5 min video diary of prisoners as well as other people living in the UK, discussing how religion has helped them change their lives around. So using this idea we decided to involve to people having a discussion with no limited questions. They were allowed to ask whatever they wanted and how they wanted.

Here is a 4thought example:

This is 2 of our focus group members discussing their faiths to one another:

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts

Our two ancillary products are a poster and magazine article. Our poster idea for the programme was influenced by another programme called Seven Days. In the Seven days poster it showed different parts of seven peoples different faces all attached together to make one face. With the use of the poster it could help explain to people to get some idea of what the programme is all about. The different parts of peoples faces can show how this programmes involves different people lives and their faiths and this is why it is so effective.

  

The magazine article which we want to use the radio times magazine. This would be an effective way of promoting our main product. The radio times is the most profitable magazine in the history of the UK, meaning more people read it more than any other listings magazine in the UK. However this may not help us seeing as their average readers are 54 - year olds, the radio times has released an online version and app that is easily applicable on smartphones or tablet PC in order to get more youth interactive. Our magazine article could go online to attract the youthful audience we require. With the article we give an interview where we describe exactly what has influenced us to make this programme and our research with the survey of 160 students at our college. In the magazine article there is also quotes from the focus group and how they found being participants in this documentary.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback was pretty interesting. Some people who watched the intro for our documentary did not fully understand what we were trying to do. Some thought we were trying show the importance of peoples faiths in their lives and trying to show other people that being religious is good. However we are trying to show that we are disagreeing with article the daily mail wrote about how the youth today in the UK are less religious than 10 years ago. Most people thought some of the interviews were interesting as they too thought the daily mail was right in saying religion amongst youth is becoming extinct. In order to get audience feedback we used different social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Creating pages where people could see what was posted and give us feedback to see whether or not it was good. We also asked for feedback from our focus group while they were participating in various discussions and during some of the photo-shoots for the portrait shots.

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluate stages?

Using different technologies such as iMovie, it showed me different things in terms of editing and developing my documentary. We imported all videos and pictures we had shot onto iMovie and began to start editing. I was very familiar with iMovie having used it in the past so there was not a great deal of new things I could have discovered. However, there was one thing in particular that helped me improve the quality of the documentary. This the option to stabilise the shakiness of some of the videos we wanted to include in the final documentary piece. I used the cutaway option more to add more footage to the documentary when I was talking about the focus group, I could include footage of them. With the use of the transitions and different titles as well as the voice over technique, iMovie showed me how to be more creative.

We used photoshop for the editing of our ancillary products. This was the first time I had used photoshop so I did not know how to use it properly. Photoshop has shown me how to edit different pictures and merge them together. For example, in order to construct our poster, using the same idea we got from The channel 4 programme seven days, we had to take portrait shots of every one of our participants and merge different parts of their faces into one face.

After deciding to only use 6 of our focus group members for the poster, we began to put the different parts of the 6 peoples faces together. We did this so we could show that this programme was bout the lives of different people coming into one place and interacting with each other.  In conclusion, photoshop has shown me how to edit pictures better using different options and techniques.

Another programme which i used was GarageBand. Using this programme to make the soundtrack for the programme I learnt how to mix difference sounds, beats and melodies together to make the soundtrack that was able to fit to the documentary intro.

For the evaluation stages I used blogger. This is where is blogged about everything I did about the documentary. I had used blogger before so there was nothing really new that could have learned. Through blogger I was to connect to YouTube to upload different videos I had shot and put on my YouTube channel.

RESEARCH, PLANNING AND CONSTRUCTION

Radio Times

Our other ancillary product is a 2 page magazine article about our programme. We have decided to use the Radio Times for our article. The Radio Times is the UK's most profitable entertainment magazine. There are quite a number of articles for shows about Religion which was also an influential factor in us choosing the magazine. One article in particular stood out the most. It was about how Broadcasters must have faith in religious TV, as even if you disapprove of religion you cannot resist it.

Also there was something about voting for the Faith Awards and anyone could win £1000 voucher to spend on Home Entertainment equipment. 6 shows were listed; The Story of Jews, The Choir, Cathedrals, God's Cadets, Ramadan and Make Me A Muslim. One of these programmes was almost similar to ours. God's Cadets followed the lives of several people, as what we have done in our documentary. God's Cadets however, follows new Salvation Army Recruits at William Booth College in South London.  

Student Activism with Aidan Butler

One of the members of our focus group has been trying to get people aware, at our college, about Fair Trade. Aidan held an after college meeting informing people of just exactly this is all about.
Here is a video of Aidan talking about it in the meeting:

Radio Times

When designing the two page featuure for a magazine, I came across the Radio Times as a possibility of using there magazine for the ancillary product as well as promoting. It is the most profitable and well-known magazine in the UK, and this can be good for our programme because this would enable us to get a lot of people finding out about our programme. However, the problem is that the average age of the people who buy the Radio Times magazines is 57. We are trying to target a much younger audience, although the radio times have decided to release a DiscoverTV app targeting an audience of betwen 30 and 35 years of age. This may or may not help us in getting our much more youthful audience. If we can make the features article very appealing then I think we may get our target audience. More visual rather than text because we are trying to get a more youthful audience, I believe the less text there is the better in helping us reach the target audience. Not to mention there subscription strategy, giving viewers or consumers an option to have a ''freemium'' version. This can get alot of people seeing as they wouldn't have to pay any subscription fees.

 

 

BBC Three

BBC Three has recently axed one of its broadcasting channels, BBC Three, as they feel they do not gain enough people watching their shows. heres a link to the story:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26447089

Audience Research

Get ideas from focus group about the programme. How existing documentaries target audiences? e.g Twitter. The most medium television prgrammes are using to target audience. Use twitter as a way of communicating with subject people. 140 character statement about what is good about their faith. Ways in which newspapers and magazines advertise documentaries. How Radio Times target audiences?

Promotion of programme through facebook and twitter. To put up portraits on the facebook page, to get a feedback response from people who have liked the facebook page. Using twitter we would create different hashtags around faith and our programme idea, for example #FaithOff or when presenting paired discussions using some of our focus group. Our participants should have public twitter accounts where people could follow them, But this is a tricky area for two reasons; the public/storke private relationship is central to religious faith. The twitters area is an area where there could be a lot of abuse. For example, There's a lot of nasty people out there like with the whoole Maajid Nawaz issue around Jesus & Mo controversy. Caroline Criado-Perez was one the first women to campaign to have women on the money in britain.

How many people read Radio Times?

Research for Ancillary Product

Looking at advertisements in newspapers for different documentaries we have realised that they are not that many advertisements for different documentaries in newspapers. We looked at 2 adverts. One for a programme called ''Brain Games'', and another for a programme called ''Hunted''.  Hunted is a programme about anti-gay gangs in Russia who hunt homosexuals and severely brutalise them as a sport. The advertisement for this programme in the newspaper is an image of a man lying on the floor, thought to have been beaten up, a sort of blurry image. The picture is surrounded by a black background and comments from the Russian Embassy to the United Kingdom. This is all present in The Guardian Newspaper. This kind of advertisement is not one that we would be too interested in for our documentary as for us it does not really stand out.

The advertisement for Brain Games in the Guardian is similar to the type of advertisement we want to do. There is a face present in the advert and what they have done with the face is made two different angles of the face and made it into one face. Similar to what we intend to do with our poster having each person for a different part of the face

Poster shoot

We have just taken pictures of 3 people in our Focus group; Sarah, Elena & Aidan. For this we used our college photography room in Tenison Road building. Our main target was to get a photo quite close up on their face that will be able to work with our selfie idea for our poster. Our next objective will be to get the remaining 5 people in to take photos of them. These are the photos that we think will work best with the editing of our poster.

Elena

Sarah

Aidan

We will use Adobe Photoshop, which is a programme for editing photos, so that we can make the poster look similar to the one Seven Days have done for their programme. 

Jesus & Mo

There has been recent controversy as something that started with two students wearing a shirt with a cartoon of prophets Jesus and Mohammed has escalated into a national and political debate.

This is an example of this cartoon. Maajid Nawaz, a Liberal politician in Britain has received death threats on twitter because he tweeted a cartoon of this and found nothing wrong with it. However his fellow adherents of Islam did not take this side of the matter and 20,000 Muslims quickly moved to sign a petition for Nawaz to be removed as a Liberal politician by Nick Clegg. Channel 4 covered the news of this situation and covered out the Mohammed part of the Cartoon (They did not show his face) as they feared it would offend viewers.

Here is a link on Maajid Nawaz's views towards this whole predicament and how he explains his actions: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/28/speaking-islam-loudmouths-hijacked

There is a website where there are many existent Jesus & Mohammed Cartoons. In some of these cartoon s there is a use of strong language made by the cartoon of Mohammed which may help to understand as to why many Muslims are offended by this. It is mainly Mohammed who is portrayed as standing against everything their religion is about. For example, in the picture above it shows Jesus & Mohammed at a Bar drinking. This is offensive towards Muslims because in their religion they are not supposed to consume any alcohol.

The link to this website: http://www.jesusandmo.net/

Interview with Characters 1

We did an interview with 3 of our focus group members Elena, Pisit & Aidan. They talked a bit about their faiths. Given us details about why their faith is important and what it is all about. Elena spoke about Russian Orthodox, another branch of christianity. Pisit talked about being Buddhist. Aidan talked about being Taoist and even gave an poem about Taoism.

Radio Times and Faith Off

We believe that our programme idea will work well with Radio Times. This because they are trying to target a more youthful audience. Also the radio times is the best selling and most profitable magazine in the UK today. One of the ways they will try to do this is through the app DisoverTV which gave us the idea of possibly creating an app for our programme. On this app it could include the schedule for the program as well as character insight, weekly topic discussions, information on various religions and religious articles. The app would also include episode recaps and promos for the next episode. An idea maybe to possibly put a quiz section in the app, about the characters and their faiths, making viewers more interactive and giving them a chance to meet the characters on the show by answering key questions.

Radio Times 2

Radio Times is owned by immediate media. They've got 56 magazines and they have all the BBC magazines, they bought the lot. Radio times is the most profitable magazine in the UK, but the average age of its print readers is 57. So they want to hold on to the print readers but they want to reach out to younger audiences. One of the things they ways they wish to do this is with their Discover TV app for iPads where you an get best of recommendations for younger audiences. There is Radio Times website and they are trying to build that base but you don't make allot of money out digital, hence the quote ''digital pennies versus analogue pounds.'' the point being you make good money on print media, you don't make so much in digital. The profits digital wise are pennies, and the analogue profits are pounds.

 

 

Here's is an article that the guardian did about the radio times and its aims to break into the digital industry: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/19/radio-times-immediate-media

Post-Group Meeting

We have held our first group meeting with our focus group. It was quite interesting as most of them were comfortable with each other. They were very suggestive and open. There is 8 people, 4 boys and 4 girls. We have 3 Christians; A Catholic, Anglican and an Orthodox. A Buddhist, a Taoist, A Judaic, An Agnostic and a Muslim.

Our discussion lasted about 30 Min's, which we also recorded. We introduced our ideas to them such as for our ancillary products; The poster and magazine interview. We also made the suggestion of visiting the Kings College Chapel and they all thought it was a great idea. The group was quite shocked about our findings in the results from the survey. Particularly about the part that 73% of people in our college thought that Religion was a positive influence in the world today. Many of them seemed to agree to the fact England is not as religious as it once was, as it was also found in the Article in the Daily Mail.

Here's a clip of our discussion where two people talk about their faiths:

 

VICE

We want use a more vice-documentary style. They look at things through different angles, they are able to get a younger audience to wtch these things as they make them in an interesting way. Seeing as our documentary is based on the lives young people aged 17,18 or 19 this is the best way of learning how we would attract a more younger audience.

Focus Group 1st Meeting

We have arranged our first meeting between us and our Focus Group. Our intention for the first meeting is mainly focusing on getting to know each other, so that everyone can be more comfortable with each other. In this meeting we will also make a suggestion to the group about doing an activity together, again increasing comfort ability around each other. Introduce the main ideas of the programme, make it clear to them what the idea of the programme is and discussing the ancillary products as well as our findings in research. After we do this we will then offer them the chance to voice their own opinions and suggestions, for example if they have a different view as to how we should do the documentary.

Another thing that we thought would be could is trying to get them on Twitter and put a 140 character statement about their faith and why it is important to them. Then we will make it clear to them about our selfie idea and what we plan to do more with social networks. Our selfie idea is that we will change it every week so the parts of the face look different. Our plan is to film in a period of four weeks, so we will meet every Tuesday at 14:00 with an update.

Facebook, Twitter and Production

We have now set up Facebook and Twitter pages to spread word about our documentary. Our intention with both pages is not only to spread the word about our documentary but also to collect new ideas and feedback from our audience to see where we could improve etc. These are the links:
https://www.facebook.com/#!/GanzeDaviesProductions  https://twitter.com/FaithOffCCSS

 

The pages will also be used to introduce our characters on the show and more about their faiths e.g what is good about their faith? what makes their faith different? Our idea for our poster will also be presented on the page. The poster idea which is similar to Channel 4's ''Seven Days'', where apart of each persons face is attached to form one face. So we will ask our participants to take a selfie (a picture with just them in it, preferably a close-up of their face) and a 140 character statement about them and their faith on Twitter. Twitter will also be used for more discussions using a hashtag. For example, people who find out more about the show and want to offer their views on characters and the show will be able to comment using the #FaithOffCCSS hashtag. Facebook is used more for information and advertising, such as videos.

 

 

When we meet with all our characters, we will allow them to make suggestions about what they think the documentary should be like. Our intention at this first meeting is to put them in pairs to do different activities so they can become more comfortable with each other to make our documentary process easier. There might be a trip for us to the Kings College Chapel in Cambridge to hear the choir sing. Another idea is to maybe attend one of our participants places of worship if no there is no issue with the other participants.