Media Technologies within Documentary

The Use of Media Technologies

within TakeOut

When choosing a topic, it was important to research a topic which was relevant in today's world and related to popular culture, in order to appropriately address our target audience. We used news sites and watched the news on television in order to find a popular cultural topic, which wouldn't be too 'serious', as to keep focused on our target audience.

It is extremely important to use a range of media technologies in order to make documentaries exciting; without an element of differentiation within video, image and sound, the documentary would be boring and uninviting to watch for the viewer.

It was important to use modern social networking sites when investigating our target audience; FaceBook was useful when investigating how people feel about various different topics, and helped us to choose a popular theme.

When researching and planning TakeOut, we used the internet to research past documentaries related to takeaways and fast food. We also looked for documentaries and other footage related to fast food when investigating archive footage to use within our documentary.

Also when planning our documentary, we used the internet to research potential interviewees; we ironically used the takeaway ordering website, Just-Eat, in which we rang takeaways in the local area and requested interviews. This was a very useful tool as it helped us rapidly investigate our potential interviews and gave us a structure to our documentary.

Sources of research need to be appropriate and up to date when making a documentary; a source of info-tainment for viewers.

When editing the documentary, it was important to keep monitoring news about fast food within the news; on television, in newspapers and on the internet. This meant that archive footage could be kept current and fresh.

We used an advanced camera in order to record our piece, which helped me learn a lot about the way that cameras work, and helped the documentary become more well shot and well framed.

Even during the editing period,

we used our college's radio room in

order to record the sound of our

voiceover. This would not have been

as easy to do with a camera, or as easy

to edit.

We used photoshop to edit our print advert, and Adobe Premiere to edit our radio advert. I found this interesting as I had never used PhotoShop professionally previously, which expanded my knowledge greatly. I found photoshop difficult to use, but I felt that together, my group and I produced a good print advert.

during evaluation, it was also important to not only investigate the advantages of the process, but also the disadvantages.

what went wrong was just as important as what went right in each stage; editing, research etc

When conducting audience feedback, I used Facebook, Twitter, MSN and YouTube in order to show my target audience the documentary in order to gain comments and see what I could improve on if I were to repeat the exercise; for example, in this case, sound was commented on as something which I could improve on.

Without media technologies such as Facebook and YouTube, I would not have been able to gain my audience feedback as quickly and easily as I had done, and therefore the data from the comments that I recieved would have been harder to analyse and evaluate.

In conclusion, without the various media technologies available today, I would not have been able to have produced a documentary of the same quality and wouldn't have been able to include anywhere near as much research, editing or even archive footage. Media technologies have benefited me hugely throughout the process of my documentary, and without them, my documentary would not only be boring; it would be out of date.

During evaluation, it was important to make sure all of our information was correct and up to date; we checked figures using the internet and researched relevant online newspaper articles in order to verify our sources