Many documentaries use different variations of the traditional codes and conventions such as:
Voice over
The voice over is seen in many documentaries, usually to explain the footage that is being shown at that time and to give the audience more information on the subject.
Footage of the event/subject
All documentaries will have footage of the subject or event specified, unless the subject was before any type of electronic documentation in which case reconstructions are used.
Interviews
Many documentaries will contain interviews to give the documentary a sense of addressing the audiences opinions.
Planning
The planned locations for our documentary are
The college smoking area: This is because it is a major social point within college and is always guaranteed to have at least 5 people sat on their phones
The college cafe: This also is a large social gathering area and many people can be found texting and ringing people.
We intend to film cutaway shots of various people on their mobiles and use this between questions in our documentary. We also intend to ask random people to answer questions for the documentary.
Filming
We filmed mainly in the smoking area and found two people willing to be interviewed, we found that there was a lot of background noise whilst filming so some of the questions had to be asked again.
We also noticed that our interviewees had to continuously re-film some of the questions as they had difficulty putting the question into their answer.
A further problem we had was after moving the interviewees to another part of the smoking area we noticed that the lighting was not as good as we had originally thought and they had some dark shadows across their faces.
Editing
Having looked at the codes and conventions of a documentary we edited our documentary to follow the guidelines as much as possible by inserting cutaways that were relevant to the answers given, we also inserted images to make the documentary seem more interesting.
Evaluation
Whilst evaluating the documentary I noticed that some of the images needed to be changed to some that were more relevant and to the point. We changed them and now they fit in with the theme more than the originals.
