Evaluation Question 1
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our media product predominantly uses conventions of real
documentary films. We have used ideas taken from the documentaries that we
analysed to produce our own documentary video. We have chosen the
"expository" mode of documentary. Therefore; our documentary tends to
explain and illustrate the topic; "palmistry" to its audience.
Expository documentary uses "voice of God" commentary/narration
, meaning to say that the commentator or narrator is not seen in the film, but
only his/her voice is heard. In our documentary, Ifrah Khan has recorded her
own voice for the voice over to address the audience and to introduce them to
the topic and explain it. We have used still images to illustrate the voice
over explaining the history of palmistry. Our documentary contains a variety of
footage including images, interviews and archive material to support the
argument. Hence, we have used most of the conventions as they are in
real documentary films. However, there is one convention of this
particular mode of documentary that we have challenged.
Expository documentaries attempt to persuade the audience of a particular
point of view. Whereas, in our documentary, we have discussed two different
views about palmistry and left the documentary extract open ended to let
the audience to decide what they think is right.
We have begun our documentary with an introduction to the
location which is set in the Old city Lahore, aka, The Walled City Lahore.
Hence, the video begins with high-angle pan shots of the Lahore Fort and the
Badshahi Masjid, which are the two main historic monuments of the city and are
situated in our targeted location. Our media product represents a
version of the stereotypical reality of palmistry in our country i.e. the fake
palmists or charlatan who are found sitting on the road sides
claiming to be fortune tellers. After a brief introduction of the location, we
have established this stereotype of "fake" palmists using a series of
extreme close-up shots of a local man wearing shalwar kameez showing
his hand to a road side palmist for only rupees 50.
The narrative of our documentary film consists of facts. It
uses the open-ended narrative structure, as we want our audience to
decide for themselves whether they are for or against the practice and use of
palmistry as a tool of fortune telling. Our documentary film uses a
third person point-of-view where the voice over of the narrator narrates facts
and explains illustrations.
In his theory, Vladimir Propp grouped characters into 8
character types (Villain and Hero being the main two character types)
based on their role and actions in a film. In our documentary, however, there
is no defined "hero" or a "villain". The audience get to
choose their own antagonist and protagonist, depending on their belief about
the topic under discussion i.e. palmistry.
The media language is a mixture of written and verbal.
Written would obviously include the title of our documentary i.e.
"Hidden In The Lines". The title appears in a very effective way,
leaving an impact on the audience. This has 3 main reasons. Firstly, how the
text is written is very reader friendly. The font used is Birch Std. It is a
very simple font. We have used white colour for "Hidden" and
"Lines" and gray colour for "In The", because we want the
two important words "Hidden" and "Lines" to stand out on a
black background in the title. We have used a red line running across half the
display screen to emphasize on the word "Lines". According to us, the
title creates a sense of communication between the audience and the presenter
of the film; it gives the audience a hint of what the documentary is
going to be about, yet leaving a question in their minds about what is
"hidden". Secondly, the title appears on a loud, fast beat of music
which gives a strong impact to the title. Last but not the least, we have used
a cross zoom transition. The title suddenly zooms out on the beat and after
about 3 seconds it zooms back in and disappears from the screen.
On the other hand, the verbal media language comprises of
the voice over and the interviews. The voice over is in a soft, semi-formal
tone, as it directly addresses to the audience. We deliberately used a
female voice for the narration because female voice is considered to
be deep, natural and more believable, hence, appropriate for a documentary.
However, the interviews are in
a comparatively colloquial language, yet strong and
effective.
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| Screenshot from The Story Of India |
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| Screenshot from our dcumen |
The camera work and shot selection of
our documentary film is inspired by the documentaries that
we watched for reference and analysis. The idea of high-angle pan
shots of the monuments was taken from a BBC TV documentary series
named "The Story Of India". However, we haven't used many
post production video effects like those used in many videos that we watched.
We decided to keep it more natural. Therefore; we have only used
"levels" and "colour balance" to improve lighting and
contrast of a few of the shots where it was necessary. Other than that we have
used cross dissolve transition which is a very commonly used transition effect
in documentary films.
Answered by Shahbano Tariq
Evaluation Question 2
Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?
We conducted a small research before choosing which ancillary task we should go with. The options that we had were:
1) A radio ad.
2) A newspaper ad.
3) A magazine feature.
Research showed that senior channels such as National Geographic Channel advertise their documentaries through television ads, and magazine features. The main reason being the communication with the audience.For an effective advertisement, it is very important to communicate with the audience and show them some visuals from your media text in order to create interest. Thus, a newspaper ad and a magazine feature are a strong means of advertisement as compared to a radio ad.
After choosing our ancillary task, it was essential to think about making a relation between our ancillary tasks and our documentary.In order to do so, we created a logo for our title, "Hidden in the Lines". We used this logo in the very starting of our documentary and then we used it on our magazine feature and newspaper ad. This instantly make the viewer understand that all three products are inter-related.
The documentary opens with a man showing his hand to a palmist. For the magazine feature and the newspaper article, we made sure that we use images of hands. This shows the relation between the three products. We added some screen shots from our documentary in our magazine feature. This would help the audience understand the link of documentary with the magazine feature at their very first glance at it. Lastly, we picked up some of the lines from the narration and used them in our magazine feature.This clearly associates the documentary with the content of the magazine feature.
After creating a link between our ancillary tasks and our documentary, it was important to make our magazine ad and newspaper interesting to attract the audience.The photo shoot plays a key role in appealing the audience. The photo shoot has been kept simple, yet attractive. We have clicked images of hands only to focus on our main topic. We also wrote a quote by a street palmist whom we interviewed. The quote "A whole book can be written on a single line" might catch the viewers attention immediately.
Answered by Ifrah Khan
Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?
We conducted a small research before choosing which ancillary task we should go with. The options that we had were:
The documentary opens with a man showing his hand to a palmist. For the magazine feature and the newspaper article, we made sure that we use images of hands. This shows the relation between the three products. We added some screen shots from our documentary in our magazine feature. This would help the audience understand the link of documentary with the magazine feature at their very first glance at it. Lastly, we picked up some of the lines from the narration and used them in our magazine feature.This clearly associates the documentary with the content of the magazine feature.
After creating a link between our ancillary tasks and our documentary, it was important to make our magazine ad and newspaper interesting to attract the audience.The photo shoot plays a key role in appealing the audience. The photo shoot has been kept simple, yet attractive. We have clicked images of hands only to focus on our main topic. We also wrote a quote by a street palmist whom we interviewed. The quote "A whole book can be written on a single line" might catch the viewers attention immediately.Evaluation Question 3
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Audience played one of the most important roles in making our documentary better. We put up our documentary on social networking sites and Youtube to get comments on it. We received both negative and positive feedback. We changed a few shots after considering the feedback.
When posting the documentary on social networking sites, we asked the people to comment on:
· On the camera work.
· The beginning and the end.
· The usefulness of the content in the documentary.
· The overall concept.
Response no. 1: By Bint Ijaaz.
Starting is awesome.
At 0:10 music should be lowered down a bit so that the voice is audible.
The background music at the end should also be lowered down so that the narration can be heard clearly.
I loved the candle concept, really thoughtful. It did enhance my knowledge actually whoever will see it
I think will do his research.
Because this documentary is interesting and people would want to know more
like when i saw it i thought of doing more research.
Starting is awesome.
At 0:10 music should be lowered down a bit so that the voice is audible.
The background music at the end should also be lowered down so that the narration can be heard clearly.
I loved the candle concept, really thoughtful. It did enhance my knowledge actually whoever will see it
I think will do his research.
Because this documentary is interesting and people would want to know more
like when i saw it i thought of doing more research.
Response no. 2: By Noor ul Huda.
The starting was amazing! i LOVED the ending the way the candle blows off!
amazing idea! I got to know what people think about palmistry. But I think that the ending concept ruins the palmistry concept as it is slightly unrelated, the night life has nothing to do with palmistry so you should change it..
The starting was amazing! i LOVED the ending the way the candle blows off!
amazing idea! I got to know what people think about palmistry. But I think that the ending concept ruins the palmistry concept as it is slightly unrelated, the night life has nothing to do with palmistry so you should change it..
Response no. 3: By Adeena Lari.
1)i loved the camera work. In the beginning especially.. towards the middlish ending, it wasnt THAT professional. it wasnt that inconsistent.
2, i liked that fact that you personally went for the palmistry reading.
3) yup, it makes sense. i feel u managed to capture everyone's point of view.
1)i loved the camera work. In the beginning especially.. towards the middlish ending, it wasnt THAT professional. it wasnt that inconsistent.
2, i liked that fact that you personally went for the palmistry reading.
3) yup, it makes sense. i feel u managed to capture everyone's point of view.
Response no. 5: By Muntaha Ehsan.
It told me alot....was very informative..............you should focus more on the religion point........... superb effort....the ending 15 seconds were excellent....hatsoff.
It told me alot....was very informative..............you should focus more on the religion point........... superb effort....the ending 15 seconds were excellent....hatsoff.
We considered all the point of views and made the following changes:
- The content of narration was made stronger.
- Background music was lowered down so that the narration could be heard properly.
Answered by Ifrah Khan.
Evaluation Question 4
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
A variety of media technology was used throughout the entire
project for research and planning, construction and evaluation.
Computer was an essential hardware at every step of the way. Our initial research began on the computer as we learnt about the advanced portfolio coursework. Google Chrome was used to surf the internet. We visited numerous media blogs on Blogger.com to see examples of previously made media projects by other students. YouTube was the main user-generated content platform that we used. After we had settled on a documentary film for our coursework, we searched YouTube for professionally made documentaries like "The Story of India" to decide a strong topic for our video. We wanted to do something different than to show something so typical and commonly found on every other media about our country. So we decided to make a documentary on "Palmistry" which is an immensely controversial part of our culture and has been neglected by the media altogether. Therefore; we had to do a lot of research on this topic. We searched Google and found a few articles on palmistry. However, almost all of them contained methods and guides to learn palmistry. So we searched Wikipedia to get the history about palmistry and how it was spread and used till the modern day. This secondary research was not enough to go on with making the documentary. So we had to do an extensive primary research by ourselves. We started with interviewing general public about their beliefs and thoughts about palmistry. We used a digital camera and a tripod to interview people and compiled their responses into one video using Windows Movie Maker as it is quick and easy to use. The digital camera was a compromise on the quality. However, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 slightly improved the quality by adjusting the lighting and contrast of the footage. We used MS Word 2007 to produce a repost on our survey, including pie charts of the statistical data that we collected through our questionnaires. We used a handy cam and the tripod to interview a street palmist to get more insight into the topic. We took pictures of each other interviewing the palmist and posted them in a report that we wrote on our visit to the street palmist and put it up on our blog. Whilst planning the construction, we searched Google and Blogger for some examples of storyboards and learned about how we had to illustrate and describe our shots one by one. We used Google Images to search for images similar to what we wanted to draw. For example, we searched for images of the Lahore fort as well as images of men and streets as it was difficult to draw good and precise images from the mind. It proved easier to draw from hand than to use a computer as it enabled us to edit the sketches more effectively and details could be manipulated easily by hand. We made use of scanners to digitalise our hand drawn plans and storyboard to post them on the blog. We also printed 2 copies of the storyboard; 1 for each, in case we misplaced the original. We used YouTube to analyse camera angles and shots, framing and composition of videos that we were inspired from such as “The Dewarists” and “The Story of India”. We took screenshots of the ideas that we thought we could use for our documentary video. The screenshots along with the storyboard helped us take appropriate shots that we wanted.
The equipment and software were most essential for the construction stage. We used our Canon HD handy cam and tripod to capture all the shots including the interviews. The tripod ensured a steady footage, minimising motion blur. The tripod was particularly useful when filming in confined spaces, uneven places and gradual zoom. However, we had to deal with many complications with the footage. Unfortunately, due to some technical camera problem, part of our footage was not recorded, because of which we had to shoot the entire scene again. Plus, the mic wasn’t recording any sound after being attached to the handy cam so we had to place the handy cam close enough to record the interviews. After gathering all of the recorded material, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 was used to cut the scenes together and complete the final publication. This software provided a wide range of tools and transitions. It was very precise when editing the length and position of shots within the video. It also enabled us to adjust the speed of shots and place them at the exact moment when they were required, which was especially effective at the beginning where the shots have to sync with the beats of the music. The transition effects were essential to the flow of the video. We downloaded our music from Beemp3.com and saved YouTube files using www.keepvid.com. The pigeons’ sound effect in the beginning of our documentary film was downloaded from www.sounddogs.com. The audio was also added and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro. The software enabled us to adjust volumes of different audio tracks and also add transition effects such as cross fade and expositional fade to begin and end the audio clips. The still images used in the video were mostly taken off the internet so as to give historic evidence. Whilst, a few of them were captured using a Canon S90 digital camera. A few of the images were edited using Picasa 3 to crop them or adjust brightness and contrast.
For the ancillary tasks i.e. the double page spread magazine feature and the newspaper advertisement, we took images using the same Canon S90 digital camera. The images were cropped and edited using Picasa 3 as well as Adobe Photoshop CS5. Both the pages were designed in Adobe Photoshop, as it allowed the flexibility in editing and manipulating layers of images. It also enabled to insert text on the pages and adjust it precisely.
Google Chrome was used to upload the final documentary film onto YouTube because it wasnt uploading on the blog, probably becuase of the heavy file size. The video is saved in AVI format, due to which the 5and a half minutes long
video took approximately 20 hours to upload. This was the second attempt at
uploading it. Our first attempt failed after 15 hours and 70% of upload because
the internet crashed for a few minutes. However, uploading the documentary on
YouTube was incredibly useful. It enabled us to share it on our Facebook profiles
and blog with just a click. It became really quick and easy to access the video
from anywhere and show it to people to gain audience feedback.
Answered by Shahbano Tariq
