Evaluation- What ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

What ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?


Our inspiration for 'Teaching Teens' came from the current documentary Channel 4 set in an Essex secondary school 'Educating Essex'. This was our starting point of having it set in a secondary school to give the viewers an inside view of the modern day secondary school. When we watched the first 90 seconds of Educating Essex to get ideas on how to open up our documentary, they jumped straight into it which was not how we wanted to start our documentary, so we created a montage of footaged we shot around the school to music we had created ourselves using FL Studio to make it unique,which is also used to break up the programme between adverts. At the end of the montages when the bell sounds (diagetic) the hash tag #teachingteens because the social network site Twitter uses this to open up topic discussion for all users using the hash tag. We used interviews in the documentary to give the audience a chance to get to know the characters and become more familiar with them to make it easier to watch. To help this, their names appeared at the bottom of the screen along with their status i.e. Student or Teacher. They also did this in Educating Essex because for this type of documentary it is useful for the characters to talk directly to the camera, especially after a situation like when Bradley is sent out of his lesson. When watching Educating Essex, they edited their documentary using lots of jumps cuts to make it fast and realistic. We also used jump cuts, especially at the begining when we wanted a rapid introduction, however we also used other editing techniques like cross blur and fade to black depending on the atmosphere and which ever seemed appropriate. At the end of the clip we added a 'coming up' scene to give the viewers a glips of whats coming up so they stay watching and do not switch over to another channel. Many T.V. programmes including documentaries use this like Channel 4's 'Big Brother' and 'Educating Essex' as well as many others. Overal 'Teaching Teens' does use and develop conventions of other media products by using editing techniques and social networking to keep viewers interested as well to make it a talking point.