What media texts did you look at to research your ancillary text?

What media texts did you look at to research your ancillary text?

Throughout, we used a variety of media texts to research the documentary genre, become clear of its conventions, and influence our individual shots. 

Firstly comes the research done for documentary's in general. As an avid 'Louis Theroux' documentary viewer, much influence and initial ideas came from his style. His unique way of presenting the documentary almost like a journey of education, on a subject that is both new to him and the audience is something we took influence from (we too where working on a subject new to us). This is evident in our use of camera shots - for example, the train journey sequence connotes the process as being a journey, not just literally, but also a journey of discovery for both us and the viewer. Secondly, our voice over used describing the problems occurred creates a link between the viewer and documentary maker which in effect establishes an intimacy, reminiscent of Louis Theroux's style of talking directly to the viewers. 


The following interview I watched before planning, provided research into exactly how Louis goes about planning, and creating his documentary ideas - it was very helpful.





Louis Theroux makes the statement “I’m not a journalist, I’m a friend” and even though we didn't take this as far as Louis Theroux does, we did make sure to incorporate it partly. In the first interview with Julie the newly trained priest, I invited her to my house and had a near one hour chat beforehand, which created a greater understanding of each other and made us both feel more comfortable in the interview.


In terms of documentary films, as a class we visited The Ritzy and saw the documentary 'Starsuckers'. Although the subject matter differed greatly to ours, it proved a useful resource for something we can take influence from in terms of editing, camera angles and interview techniques. We also had a Q&A session with a representative after the screening. I asked a number of questions, however the question I wanted answered most ("Did you receive permission to use the television clips or not?") was not answered as the documentary maker himself could not show up. It would have been helpful to know the limits surrounding clips used, or if he knew of any reliable resources in terms of free to use clips we too could use.

Elliott's Documentary Convention PPT

from Elliott's Documentary Convention PPT.

For our radio advert, we first started by checking the listings of Radio 4 from this page. Once we had an idea of the times religious programming came on, mostly around 16:00 - 17:00 we could revolve our advert around this time slot, target audience and style. A few conventions where evident from listening: 

• The adverts typically began with a music fade in with a narrative describing a problem/issue
• Next it had someone who represented the problem/issue speaking about it
• An opposing view or someone else who represents the problem/issue speaking was next
• The narrator then comes in again to round it up and tell the time and date will it be shown

We followed this convention in the making of our advert. Although we changed some, we kept to our researched conventions quite a lot, most notably in narration, music and documentary audio inserts.