''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.
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
How did you photoshop the 6 people?
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