Evaluation - Question 1

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

Our radio trailer follows the conventions of a professional radio trailer as it uses extracts fromfrom the programee which is conventional for radio trailers to do and it also uses a voiceover which is intercut throughout the entire trailer. The scheduling information is at the end of the trailer and it is delivered with a calm, clear voice and the voiceover artist should be around the age of the intended audience which is conventional. We have also used a music bed throughout the entire trailer which is conventional to most radio trailers.

The 'BBC Four Weather Series' trailer intrigues the audience and makes you want to find out more about it, we tried to re create this with our radio trailer as we have asked certain quiestions which only the audience can answer tehmselves and they will want to find out where their view would be in the documentary.

Our slogan is used just before the scheduling is said and it is conventional to have this in the radio trailer. The scheduling is said in a certain order which is: title, day and time, channel. the radio trailer should last between 30 and 40 seconds which is conventional and our radio trailer is 32 seconds so it shows we have followed the conventions.

Cutaways

Above is a cutaway (between 2 interview shots) which we used as a visual aid as she says "my tattoos are quite recent..." and this cutaway is placed here to show that it is a recent tattoo she has got and then the cutaway ends and it goes onto the interviewee answering the next question.

The cutaway(between 2 interview shots) was used to avoid a jump-cut in the interview. It is also relevant to what the tattoo artist is saying as he is talking about "noone has never not liked their tattoo..." and this tattoo shows that they are happy with what they got.

Using cutaways is conventional when creating a documentary as it helps avoid jump-cuts and also it helps create the visual aid for parts of what is being said. This could just be to show what is being talked about and help the audience understand what is going on.
Cutaways are edited into interviews for two reasons:
- to break up interviews and illustrate what they're talking about
- to avoid jump cuts when the questions are edited out
The Cutaways can either be
- archive material
- something suggested by something said in the interview and therefore filmed after the interview
- sometimes aspects of the interviewee are filmed with another camera such as extreme close ups of eyes, mouth and hands, and used as cutaways

We followed these conventions and filmed cuataways that are relevant to what was said in the interview. We used a variety of different uses for the cutaways shuch as: using them to avoid jump-cuts, it represents something that was suggested by the interviewee, we used some to break up the length of the interview as it seemed too long to be used on it's own and we also created a montage of cutaways that were used for our voiceover to go with it as it links to what the cuataways represent.