My Hero
Bonjorno!, Please click on this link to view our A2 documentary project. It’s called “My Hero. Part 3: Celebrities” 🙂
Please post your thoughts and comments and be truthful about our production, no-one likes a liar!
Thank you!
My Hero – Link to our production
Bonjorno!, Please click on this link to view our AS documentary project…
Please post your thoughts and comments and be truthful about our production, no-one likes a liar!
http://vshare.hanhamhighschool.org.uk/view/189/a2-advanced-production-2012-my-hero/
Thank you!
(Sorry it might take a little while to load)
Evaluation: Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?
During the process of editing we did some peer assessment on class members documentaries so far, and obtained useful feedback on how to improve.
See our ‘Peer Review’ post. Many pros included; good evidence of contacting our interviewee, an effective organised schedule, successful use of media (images). Some of our cons were; to use less archive footage, to make sure all the images corresponded to the voiceover at the right time and to make sure all the sound levels were consistent.
One way in which we improved the poor quality of the sound was to bring sections of the interviews/voiceover up or down so, the sound was consistent throughout our documentary. There were also parts in Martha’s interview were the narrator had spoken over the top of Martha’s answer, so we decided to edit the sound levels by taking down the volume of the narrator, thus having no overlap of Martha and the narrator.
Another way we improved our documentary was by using less archive footage by creating our own images to replace the footage found online, as we found we couldn’t use as much as we thought. However, archive footage is a common feature in many real documentaries, providing evidence for the exposition of a documentary, we could not use much of it in our documentary as we would have penalised.
The advantages of having peer-assed our documentary before we finished, was we could take the criticism from our class mates and apply changes to our documentary and keep them in mind for the development of our documentary. Another advantage would be that our class mates were completely honest in their feedback and more precise, as they know what to look for in improving our documentary, as they are also improving their own documentary and are able to point out things that we may have missed. Moreover they can make suggestions on further development and technical suggestions (such as, transitions and sound levels) as they understand the production process.
A disadvantage of this form of feedback would be that someone that isn’t as familiar with the process of editing would be able to point out different aspects of our documentary, which aren’t necessarily technical problems. Moreover, our media class only consists of about 12 pupils which will not give a wide range of views and opinions.
ABOUT OUR FAMILY/FRIENDS COMMENTS
Akash Singh + Laura Dunning
Evaluation: Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our ancillary tasks consisted of a newspaper advertisement and a radio advertisement. The purpose of both these advertisements is to give the audience an idea of what is going to be included in our documentary. They also help promote our documentary across a wide range of media platforms, in our case radio and newspapers. These can appeal to people through reading newspapers/magazines and the radio. Ancillary texts also inform the audience of the release date, time and channel of the documentary and can draw the audience in to want to watch it.
This is our final print advert for our documentary:
http://hhsmediagroup110.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/evaluation/
As our documentary would be shown on Channel 4, we began looking at other Channel 4 advertisements to get inspiration for our own. We found an effective example from the documentary “The Great IRA Bank Robbery”, where it featured just one powerful image from the documentary itself and a strong, direct caption aimed at the audience, written as a rhetorical question. 
The effectiveness of this approach is that it connotes what the documentary is about and engages the target audience by addressing them directly. So we decided to do the same when designing our print advertisement, taking a still image from our documentary showing Martha playing the guitar and presenting the caption as a rhetorical question: “Who are the new celebrities?” in the top left hand corner. Below the image, we then presented the rest of the programme information in the bottom right hand corner (see print advertisement above).
Another of our anchillary tasks was our radio trailer. We recorded many different versions of the script, in the recording studio, and decided to edit them when we got back to the classroom.
[Insert radio trailer here]
The purpose of the radio trailer is to be able to use another form of media to advertise our documentary. Our radio trailer compliments our main documentary as it gives the relevant information to our audience through our script and gives little tasters from the documentary itself.
We recorded facts and figures for our radio trailer but decided not to use them as they were boring and didn’t fit with the format of our radio trailer. We used sections of audio from the interview with Dr Justin Park so our target audience could relate the radio trailer to our documentary. We also used rhetorical questions in the form of triplets which is a conventional feature of other radio trailers, we have analysed (see blog post “Radio Advert” from 21st November 2011.) Some of our group members recorded their voices, as answers to our rhetorical questions, to show a variety of people that could be featured in our documentary. Obviously, they are just our group members, but the clips we would’ve used from our vox pops weren’t brilliant quality as there was a lot of background noise.
Evaluation: Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
For our A2 practical production we created a documentary. We used many different features of a hybrid documentary genre, where we mixed both expository and interactive documentary sub-genres.
One of the generic features to the expository mode of documentary is by having a Voice of God narration. This can be through either voice or scripted title cards. We used both of these features in our documentary. Our Voice of God audio narration was by Akash (one of our group members). We decided to use him because the majority of our set target audience would be teenagers to young adults (13-25) and this would help them identify with h
im because of his age. Documentaries like Small Teen, Big World and Small Teen, Bigger World are similar as they both use a young narrator for their voiceover. We also used title cards in our documentary to structure our vox pop sequence, which is similarly used in Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922).
Typical to the expository mode, interviews are often used in documentaries. Interviewing experts are mainly used for effect, to present or support the main argument of the documentary. The interviewees are normally shown as a medium close-up sitting down in a formal setting e.g. their office or their place of work. As our hypothesis was “Are modern-day celebrities replacing old-fashioned heroes?” we decided to interview a psychology expert to talk about the effects of this in the modern-day. Our school psychology teachers helped with this and told us that the “psychology/fascination of celebrity” was researched and studied by social psychologists. We looked at University websites around, e.g. Bristol and UWE, and found a few possible subjects. One that interested us was “Dr Justin Park” a senior lecturer of social psychology at the University of Bristol. After we emailed him, he emailed back more or less straight away, consenting to the interview saying it was a good idea. We didn’t have to do any rearranging of his office, as it was all very much how we wanted it already, with a computer, books and posters. Typical of the genre, he spoke directly to the interviewer (Akash) rather than the camera and we used various cut-away shots of him at his computer (medium shot) and of the books/posters in the office (close-ups), which is also typical of the expository genre.
Here is a screen grab from our interview with Dr Justin Park. As you can see we have also added a caption at the bottom of the screen, to help introduce him and his occupation to the audience. We have used a simplistic white on black colour scheme for the captions as we found out from previous examples of title cards, used in Nanook of the North, that this is the most direct way for our audience to understand the captions. However, in this shot the lighting from the skylight was creating shade on Dr Parks face, unabling us to see his face expressions properly. In this shot, we made sure we could see the computer, in the background, as it acts as a visual aid for our audience.
This was one of our cut-away shots, which ran over the top of Dr Parks answers. We extracted the audio to enable to us to cut down the visuals of the interview and insert this cut-away shot for approximately 5 seconds. This helped to break up the long and complex answers given by Dr Park and to give the audience a change of visuals. We decided to take this shot as you can see the names of the books which relate to the topic of our documentary. Furthermore, we decided to use a pan in this shot as it shows the array of books and knowledge our expert has acquired over the years. the use of mis-en-scene will authenticate his knowledge, thus making the audience more likely to believe his answers. The use of mise-en-scene in an interview is a common feature of expository documentaries.
I feel the interview with Dr Justin Park went well and was successful. The interview followed generic features of an interview in an expository documentary and our research behind this subject prepared us for the interview. We also interviewed another subject to explore our hypothesis further. One member of our group, Martha, is a fan of the band Green Day, so 
she offered to be interviewed to show that maybe young people are beginning to replace traditional heroes with celebrity ones. We originally felt that this would prove our hypothesis, possibly to an extreme extent. However, the answers and reasons that Martha gave were independent and sensible, where instead of saying “they are amazing, good-looking and on T.V etc” she said “they write songs about the working class, politics and how we live today which many people can relate to etc.” We felt that interviewing her could justify why celebrities can become heroes.
We chose to also combine the interactive documentary mode because we appreciate the practices of documentary gurus Louis Theroux and Michael Moore. We also felt that the interactive mode is more edgy and less boring for audiences, yet the expository mode provides a balance of facts and information. During pre-production we decided we wanted to use techniques like Vox Pops, by Akash and I going out and interviewing th
e public. This technique is first used by Cinema Verite who developed the interactive mode of documentary. Documentary films like Chronique d’un ete (Chronicles of a Summer www.imdb.com/title/tt0054745/Cached – Similar) made by Jean Roach in 1960 by Cinema Verite use vox pops, and interview the random public, asking them a specific question. One thing we could have improved was that we should have used microphones/clip-ons because the sound quality of the vox pops wasn’t brilliant. The reason for this was we had a lot of background noise from the shopping centre e.g. music, talking etc.
Interactive documentaries are particularly known for their provocative approach, for example in the series Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends and the episode South Africa, Louis provokes his subjects to the point where someone gets angry or really defensive, which makes the episodes a lot more interesting to the audience. We do use this approach to an extent, when Akash interviews Martha, a huge fan of the band Green Day he asks her constantly if she is “obsessed.” The repetition of the word “obsessed” manages to provoke Martha, not as drastically as Louis Theroux’s subjects, but to the point where she does get a bit defensive. However, even though interactive documentary doesn’t present a clear point of view or argument like the expository mode does, through this constant provoking and repetition it does sway the audiences point of view. Because Martha is a fan of Green Day the soundtrack consisted of one of Green Day’s songs.
This was the layout of the shot we chose when interviewing Martha. Firstly, we decided on a mid-shot, as this is a common feature in expository documentaries, but we decided to get the whole of her in shot as her posture helps to reinforce what she is saying. For example, when she talks about her influences in life, she leans forward closer to the camera, showing that she wants to get her point across on camera.
Also, we focused on the mise-en-scene during the interview, Martha found many posters and merchandise and manipulated her room to look like she was a die-hard fan. Again, this will reinforce to the audience that she is ‘obsessed’ with Green Day. We wanted the audience to think this, as her answers to her questions will show that she likes the band not because of fame and money but because of their talent and the messages they give out in their songs. We wanted to show a more complex character of someone who likes a celebrity and challenge the reasons why they like them, as we thought this would contradict the stereotypes of her. This could even make the audience challenge future representations of people who like celebrities.
During the interview with her we also used cut-away close up shots of her room, posters and her playing guitar to a Green Day song. We wanted Martha to play us a song as we could have used this song in our docuentary. However, the sound quality was poor so we decided to use this clip as a cut-away shot instead. Cut-away shots are a generic convention of documentaries, particularly during interviews.
Written by Martha Shaw
Evaluation: Question 4: How did you use new technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Research
During the research stage we were able to use http://www.google.co.uk/ to find a senior lecturer which we wanted to interview about our topic on the social aspects of celebrity. We went online to the Bristol University website and located the head of Social Psychology, Dr Justin Park. http://psychology.psy.bris.ac.uk/people/justinpark.htm
We were provided with his e-mail address (J.H.Park@bris.ac.uk ) and decided to contact him through this form of media. We decided to use this type of media form as it was instant sending and receiving, compared to for example sending him a letter. We could have phoned him but e-mail was the most efficient and direct way, as we still had a lot of planning to get on with. E-mail also allowed us to easily send Dr Justin Park the finalised copy of our documentary, which he asked to see, with no fuss or complications. We are expecting a reply from him soon. Also, we used e-mail to provide an account of our interactions with Dr. Park and when setting up interviews the organisation ( times, dates, equipment, questions etc.) needed to be clear and consise for all the group memebers. Using e-mail helped us to create a more efficient and proffessional documentary. Another benefit would be we have the info in a text based for the blog to demonstarte our reaserch and planning.
We used Microsoft Word to produce our questionnaires.See post (Questionnaire)(https://hhsmediaa2.wordpress.com/page/3/)
We also used Microsoft PowerPoint to produce the analysis of the questionnaire we gave out. See post (Pie Chart to teachers feedback)(https://hhsmediaa2.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/pie-chart-to-teachers-feedback/) This helped us to display our work on our online blog more easily, as drawing would have been too time consuming and time was not on our side. We were able to input all of our findings and create pie charts or graphs within minutes, using this software to evaluate to access info the software
Planning
In the planning stage of our documentary Martha and I went to town to film our vox pops, were we planned to take a spare secondary battery pack as we weren’t sure how long the battery would last, we also fully charged the primary battery. This would save us time, not needing to fuss with finding a powerpoint. Furthermore, we were able to borrow a microphone from the prop department in our school to take to town, however we didn’t end up using it as we thought the microphone on the camera was sufficient enough to take the footage.
Another problem we encountered with the HD camera was the charger wasn’t fully working and when I interviewed Dr Justin Park my colleges had to hold the charger into the camera while recording. One thing I would have done to improve this, is to have checked this problem in advance before interviewing him.
As a group we also decided to read up on how to use iMovie HD to its full potential, by taking home and reading booklets(provided by the teachers) on the ‘Audio and Visual Editing’ and an online manual(http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iMovie_HD_6_Getting_Started.pdf). Even though we had used this software in our AS Foundation Production Portfolio, we wanted to make our documentary more detailed, complex and technically challenging, so we could get the best results possible.
Evaluation
In our evaluation stage we are going to upload our documentary to ‘HanhamHighTube’ (http://www.hanhamhighschool.org.uk/) our schools own spin-off YouTube site, were we can access it to specific audiences who can comment on our documentary. Using this new technology will help to give us a fair opinion on our documentary and give us the chance to re-evaluate it.
When we do this it will defiantly improve our work and help us to take into account the opinions of other pupils and teachers in the school. It will also help us to justify the decisions we made. If we were able to do this for our AS Production work, it would have become a more rounded piece of work which satisfied the majority of our audience.
Personally, I think if possible we should upload our documentary to http://www.youtube.com/ as it will give us a completely honest and impartial public opinion on our documentary.
Construction
The editing software we used, iMovie HD came with many pros and cons. Although we had used it in our AS production work, we wanted to push the boundaries of what the software would let us do, however it had some minor draw backs. One point during our editing we wanted to create titles for the people in our documentary, however the software had very little choice to choose from, which made it difficult to make our documentary stand out from the rest, as we all had very similar visual and audio effects, which included title cards and editing transitions. Near the end of the editing stage of our documentary, the entire group felt much more confident in using iMovie HD as we shared the editing roles equally.
Our Music was similarly made using GarageBand by the talented Martha Shaw who created a stunning cover of Noel Gallagher’s ‘What a Life’. She was able to produce a copy without the vocals also if we needed. However, she did feel the GarageBand software was limited by the simplicity of the recordings. She initially tried to record the guitar riff but the buzzing sound of the Mac in the background was drowning out the guitar. Instead, she was able to use the keyboard to record the guitar riff and melody. Creating the music to accompany our documentary has helped to dramatize the exposition of our documentary.In the opening sequence of our documentary, we mimicked pictures we found on the internet using our schools dark room along with Laura’s photography skills and her Digital SLR Camera. See Post ‘Copyright Issues'(https://hhsmediaa2.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/copyright-issues/). The Camera quality is second to none and made our documentary seem more realistic and believable.Utilising our WordPress blog (https://hhsmediaa2.wordpress.com/) was one way in which we used new technology in our A2 Year. We used hyperlinks and pictures showing a variety of media forms in our blog. We used these forms to display a more interesting and engaging evaluation. We would have wanted to upload clips of our documentary alongside our analyses to show evidence of what we did, however couldn’t due to time constraints. In the future this is something we would like to try. We wanted to use more forms in the A2 evaluation as we felt this is what lacked in our AS Evaluation.
In Conclusion, we have spent a great deal of time editing our documentary and if we had more time, money and advanced hardware/software, it would have enabled us to produce a more clean-cut and polished documentary. However we feel we have done our best, with the technology provided.
Written by Akash Singh
Kiss Radio
Kiss is a UK radio station broadcasting on FM and Digital Radio, focusing on Hip Hop, R&B, Urban and Electronic Dance Muisc. It also broadcasted on DAB Digital Radio around the UK and Nationally on Sky, TalkTalk TV and Freeview.
Kiss FM started broadcasting in October 1985 as a pirate radio station; it was thought to have at least 500,000 listeners even as a pirate station. It broadcasted across South London and later was broadcasted across the whole city on 94FM. This radio station attracted huge amounts of followers before the station finally acquired a legitimate license in 1990.
It was first set up by Gordon McNamee, and his friends; Tosca, Pyers Easton and George Power. Gordon Mac approached a successful London club promoter, Guy Wingate, to discuss ways of Improving Kiss. Wingate then launched Kiss nights at the Wag Club which were hugely successful. These nights gave the station a credibility boost and Wingate joined the Kiss team.
Kiss was ‘owned’ by Gordon Mac who in 1986 sold shares to 10 of the DJs, including Tim Westwood, Jonathan More, Norman Jay, Trevor Nelson and others.
On 1 September 1990 Kiss re-launched as a legal station, its studio and offices situated on the Holloway Road, and was supported financially by EMAP.
1999 rebranding and criticism
Whilst EMAP took full control of Kiss 100 as early as 1992, a rebranding of Kiss 100 and the Kiss brand started to take place during 1998, resulting in a new logo being adopted in 1999. In order to bring Kiss 100 into line with EMAP’s other radio operations; Mark Story was installed in January 1999 as the new Director of Music Programming.
Kiss 100’s iconic logo 1990 – 1998
Kiss 100’s logo 1999 – 2006
Ofcom record fine
In June 2006, Kiss 100 was fined a record fee for any UK commercial radio station of £175,000 by media regulator Ofcom. Ofcom punished Kiss 100 for “numerous and serious breaches” of broadcasting codes after getting 10 complaints from April to November 2005. They involved prank calls on the Bam Bam breakfast show where consent was not sought from the “victims” and inappropriate material was aired when children were probably to be listening. Kiss 100 said it accepted the findings and apologized for any offence.
Written by Laura Dunning
“Branding Heroes the new celebrity”
Wow, I found this great article on “Branding Heroes”, it talks about the truth in society today and the differences between the terms “Hero” and “Celebrity.” However, this is only one person’s opinion, I thought it would be a good idea to have a look at the subject from all angles. This will help us to create a non-biased exposition to our documentary.
http://knol.google.com/k/celebrity-vs-heroic-brands
“Branding Heroes (the new celebrity)
Has the world stop producing greatness in individuals? Or is greatness still here, alive and breathing among us, but no longer legible within existing paradigm of production, now that communication has entered the world as a productive force, vaulting entertainers above traditional societal roles.
A goal should be set to offer a new model for building human brands by finding authentic heroes and promoting the causes that inspire them. We must resist the idea that celebrities must only arise from the field of sports, entertainment and communication. Realty Television has proven that celebrities may in fact be produced just as inorganically as brands are produced from images and advertising. In a similar way, heroes may be identified from real life and then be transformed into celebrities. Their names may be aligned with marketing campaigns for products along with relevant social causes, giving both products and causes better representation. Along the way, good deeds themselves will get more attention, providing a better model of human behavior.
Wouldn’t a person that performed acts of true heroism be a better spokesperson for products and social causes than, say, an athlete whose heroics are not matters of real significance and are only made in the context of a game?
Corporations need to be pressed to do a better job in screening persons representing them. But where is the alternative? One place to look is the recent past.
Consumers want meaning. So give them meaning. Take the biggest names in modern history and align them with causes that inspire them. Resurrect them to breathe life into products and into a moribund society that still needs still needs them – a non historical society whose leading personalities are not heroes but are actors, athletes and talk show hosts.
Celebrities are both our chief culture figures and are themselves consumable objects. Licensing fees for celebrity indorsed products create a parasitic relationship to the masses. Exorbitant salaries and endorsement deals help to destroy the value of non entertainment related labor (traditional hard work) and education. Society must find a way to encourage hard work, self sacrifice, public works and the importance of education. Otherwise, we may fall away like the Romans, gluttonous, de-spiritualized, and inhumane; whose passing is remarkably similar. As the Romans glorified theatrical spectacles of gladiators and charioteers while being unable to replace its productive stock of engineers, city planners and architects, she fell into decay and ruin.
As alternatives to Trump, Martha, Paris and Diddy, Snoop Dog, Tiger, Peyton and Britney, we might offer Mandela, Gandhi, Einstein, Tesla and Madam Curie; Van Gogh, MLK, Neil Armstrong, Frank Lloyd Wright and Denton Cooley.
The list of persons above begs a question: Is a society that most admires persons from the first list, capable of producing persons on the second?
Given the complete vacuum of bona fide historical characters in recent history, our focus should be on aging historical figures still alive and as well as those unsigned underappreciated historic persons from all walks of life from our recent past. Helen Keller, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela represent powerful names that, when aligned with appropriate cause marketing campaigns and Social Responsible Businesses, they could easily exceed licensing revenue generated from the current top 13 dead celebrities. If Tiger Woods can generate $100 million a year, most of which is through product endorsements, imagine Gandhi, Mandela, and Martin Luther King might do, aligned with the right endeavors. These names hold amazing promises that, unlike celebrity athletes whose heroics last a lifetime, grow more profound with time.
As personal identity is directly linked to displaying the significant markers of consumption, consuming Denton Cooley may in effect assist in becoming Denton Cooley; which is to say, it increases the likelihood that a young adult might have a career in the medical field.
Contrast this formula to consuming the branded products of Paris Hilton or even Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. There are a very limited numbers of persons that have the ability and opportunity to play professional sports, while there are many unfilled medical, engineering and technical jobs. And there are few of us lucky enough to come from a wealthy and famous family with a name synomous with travel and leisure.
So culture is another instance where business operating on pure profit motive alone fail us. Our current product merchandising and licensing schemes exploits what is an already unbalanced system. It is difficult to rationalize the ordinate pay of celebrities with their social contribution. Astronauts, for instance, risk their lives for the sake of humanity but only receive government grade, similar to median income for an office administrator or salesman. Should celebrities be produced from the heroic acts of real people or from a greater range of living roles?” (James Pruett)
Written by “James Pruett”
Found by Akash Singh
Our Poster
Our first poster was an A4 page full of pictures of celebrities which Akash created. We soon found out that we could not use that poster because it was all found/archive images, even though they were heavily edited down.
After finding this out I researched some of Channel 4 posters to get some ideas to how we should lay out our poster.
I found that all Channel 4 posters had banners with a black background and white writing, usually at the top of the poster there is a rhetorical question and then at the bottom there is the name of the programme and when it was going to be on. It uses one type of font on the whole poster, also in the text on the bottom of the poster the bottom line is slightly smaller. So I took this research and applied it to our poster.
This is the poster I analysed, I was able to mirror the layout so our poster would look similar and have a more realistic quality.
After taking all the points I made above into consideration, here is our poster.
Written by Laura Dunning
Our First Poster
This was our first poster, this poster is full of pictures of celebrities and heroes.
Using our research I decided to incorporate everyone from Superheroes e.g. Hercules and Batman, to Spiritual Heroes e.g. Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr.
The poster was influenced by the mass target audience for celerities, teenage girls, who read celeb filled magazines. I wanted the poster to have a similar effect of that of a glossy magazine front cover, for example
However, I chose our poster to be black and white pictures to help hide the time differences between the modern and old celebrities and heroes, so they are said to be seen as more equal to one another because of this similarity.
To create this I took pictures from the Internet and changed them using ‘PhotoShop’ into Black and White. Then I individually put different font question marks over their faces, depending on their personality e.g Justin Bieber has a cartoonish question mark as he a child. After, I used a programme to put all the pictures together to make a collage and put a weathered frame around each picture. I had spent about 2 hours making it and decided to show my group members. They really liked the idea and the authenticity of the poster. However, I showed it to my teachers and they said that there was too many copyrighted pictures and that we needed a different poster.
I thought to myself they were right however, in real adverts they do use real pictures of celebrities and heroes. So, technically we aren’t making a ‘REAL’ Ad Poster, purely based on the theme of our documentary, but a poster only to the requirements of the course specification.
Personally, I feel this Poster links better with our documentary topic, target audience and exposition.
Written by Akash Singh
hhsmediagroup2 