Evaluation Question 1

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

USE

Shots from Louis Theroux's
documentaries inspired us to use similar
shots in our own work.

We followed a lot of the conventions that we found in our period of research. Looking at Mockumentarys really helped to inspire us and was where a lot of our ideas actually came from. Furthermore, we also found it helpful to look at Louis Theroux's series of documentaries as they helped us to see a pattern of conventions within this type of production. From watching examples of other documentaries we were able to get an idea of what kind of shots to use.

We were also given an idea of what kind of story lines to follow and  were inspired to use interviews from Alex's family and friends to give the audience more information about the main character of our media product.

Furthermore, I also looked at Katy Perry: Part Of Me. This is a documentary which I was able to watch using Netflix. I feel like I benefitted from watching this as it is of a similar genre to what we were going for; following a famous celebrity figure through her everyday life and showing "Behind the scenes" clips that help us to understand more about her lifestyle and personal life. This is what inspired us to use an interview with one of Alex's fans as we found it was extremely effective in the Katy Perry documentary we were inspired by.

Interviews with fans inspired us to include similar
interviews within our own work.

An interview with Katy Perry herself
we found to be effective.

 

DEVELOP

Looking at films such as Borat inspired
us to go for a "Mockumentary" Genre.

After looking at a range of documentaries we concluded that the best type for the character we had chosen was to be a Mockumentary. We then went on to look at other Mockumentarys such as Borat - although this is an example of a much more extreme mockumentary it helped us to discover certain conventions which we then went on to use in our own work. For example, the use of a fictional character with exaggerated personality traits; where Alex's "Diva" personality came from. Furthermore, this helped us to think of the idea of using an obsessive fan, played by myself, in order to mock extreme fans of celebrities.

CHALLENGEOur product challenges some of the conventions we found to be the "norm," when looking at other documentaries. For example, our documentary has more of a comical side to it than other documentaries that are following the lives of a celebrity. However, our documentary does also follow a large amount of other conventions, that we found to be successful as it makes it appear more proffessional and realistic looking.

We decided to use characters with
exaggerated personality traits, such as
a "Superfan."