Evaluation 1

How do your products follow conventions? (Jack)

Our products follow some general conventions associated with short film documentaries. This is firstly seen in the use of melancholic soundtracks to implement the hybrid genre associated with reckless driving. The Hybrid genre commonly associated with reckless driving is a mixture of the following main genres, Action and dramatic. This allows our documentary to stay in the back of our audience’s mind. I used simple yet professional looking transitions between shots in our short film documentary, I did this to make our documentary not only look better but follow generic conventions associated with short film documentaries. Our short film follows generic conventions as well as challenging them, this is why our short film documentary is so successful. To complement the short film documentary our group created posters and a website not only to follow with conventions usually associated with documentaries but also to promote our short film documentary. Our postcard follows conventions through the use of composition, colour scheme etc… these are all generic conventions although in order to challenge them aswell we did not freeze frame a part of our short film documentary we actually had a photoshoot to make our postcard look more professional and challenge generic conventions. Our website follows conventions through the use of simplicity and basic layout to not over complicate our audience. This works well

How do your products challenge conventions? (Sanaz)

Conventions are what the audience expect to see in a media product. As a group we tried progressing from A2 in terms of conventions. We learned that certain conventions can define a genre so we previously mostly only followed them. However over the course of our time making different products we learned that genre conventions are not set in stone, that genre is a more fluid concept that is less easy to define. This made us feel more comfortable with subverting conventions, deconstructing them and even challenging them instead of simply ascribing to them. Most documentary conventions are followed, such as the use of interviews, dialogue, voiceovers, and a non-diegetic score as previously mentioned. However, we ended up subverting and challenging several conventions along the way for the sake of creating an effective delivery system and an overall coherent, thoughtful short documentary. Creating an objectively ‘thought-provoking’ documentary is not always about following established rules, but rather modifying or tweaking them to both the producer and consumer’s liking to contribute to an overall efficient and methodical outcome. One prominent example of challenging conventions that we decided on very early was the purpose and message behind the documentary. We got this idea of tweaking a more abstract narrative convention while conducting our audience research. A focus group stated that they had a high preference for documentaries that take strong stances on social issues rather than documentaries that play devil’s advocate. As a representative sample of our target audience, the focus group believed documentaries that don’t argue for a particular side or turn important issues into ‘debates’ are in abundance, so we decided to forego to objective approach typical of most expository documentaries and instead opt for a more personal, subjective approach on a controversial topic. although our short film documentary consisted of all males and no females due to the fact that men are more interested in different stunts than women. Another convention we challenged was the font used that

Mise-en-scene:

Sound:

Editing:

Camerawork:

How do your products represent social groups or issues? (Mariam)

Characters -

• Ian Maund: Stereotypical male representation; ‘biker’/racer image, sports enthusiast, strong build and frame, etc. However, challenges social stereotypes in his penultimate response where he attempts to choke back tears (display of emotions unconventional for males, especially in documentaries where content is meant to be sincere and personal to provoke reactions). Subverts age expectations to an extent: while he does proactively encourage control and regulation in driving amongst youth/the newly licensed, he fully embraces the ‘stunt driving’ lifestyle. Cultural representation: foreign to country of focus, part of a ‘gentrification’ process?
• Torque: Stereotypical cultural male representation: reckless/stunt driver - this is stereotypical of an Arab male his age, which happens to be our primary target audience. The fact that a member of the demographic we are targeting happens to act as a narrative foil that helps us spread our message means that members of our target audience are more likely to have a negotiated or even dominant preferred reading to our product and conform to our line of thinking i.e. reckless driving is dangerous and needs to be controlled. However, due to the highly provocative nature of our product, we also expect oppositional reading and in fact address it with a plethora of facts, statistical evidence and logical reasoning/common sense.
• In terms of cultural representation, our products generally represent Qatari culture quite realistically since Qatar has one of the highest number of traffic fatalities in the world This is in fact the subject of the documentary, wherein we attempt to challenge cultural perceptions and modify cultural norms, which is where oppositional reading would occur. It can be argued that the postcard is quite stereotypical with the expensive high-end vehicle shown.