Evaluation Question 1

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

USE

I followed a lot of conventions from a typical documentary. Firstly, I included interview scenes, this is because many documentaries have interviews in them and by including them in my documentary, it helped make it look more professional. I filmed the interview scenes from a few different camera angles to switch between and keep it interesting for the audience to watch. I also included a title/ logo like real documentaries do, so that the audience know the title of it when they start to watch it. A title/ logo helps create brand and product awareness, if the audience see my logo often, then they will begin to recognise it when they see it advertised elsewhere. 

DEVELOP

I developed the conventions of the script by taking inspiration from the interviews in 'Dance Moms' but discussing topics in more detail. For example, in an episode of 'Dance Moms' one of the dancers, Brooke, mentioned that she is auditioning for a ballet school however she does not go into detail about what will happen at the audition and how she is going to prepare for it. Therefore, in my documentary, I wanted to cover this topic in more detail because my target audience are dancers and need to or want to know about audition preparation. In the 'Dance Moms' interview scenes, it is just the dialogue. I developed this by having music behind Angharad talking.

An existing documentary that I was inspired by was the docusoap 'Dance Moms'. Here are some of the shots that inspired my documentary:

In this interview scene, Chloe is placed to the right side of the screen and there is a caption which tells the audience who is on screen. I liked this and therefore used these techniques in my own documentary.





'Dance Moms' includes medium long shots of the girls dancing. I liked this shot because it allows the audience to see the dancers' movements and whole body, rather than if it was a close up shot. The medium long shot allows the audience to also see the dancers' facial expressions while they are dancing, which a long shot or extreme long shot does not allow.

Using inspiration from the shots above, here are a couple of shots from my documentary:

CHALLENGE

I challenged the conventions of a usual documentary because normally,  in terms of narrative, there is usually some sort of event or build up that the documentary is progressing towards. I gave a suggestion in the 'coming up' section at the end of my extract, as to what else will be seen in my documentary, but other than this, I focused on introducing your main character and an outline to their usual routine as well as telling the audience about her dance background.