Evaluation Questions

1. How do your products use or challenge conventions and how do they represent social groups or issues?

All types of media products have a certain codes and conventions to follow and similarly our documentary about women empowerment have its own codes and conventions too. The use of lesser known, unpopular and untrained actors is a typical convention of a documentary, furthermore making it more realist and relatable to the audience watching. Many actors used in documentaries are not of a high status in the industry or are not even professionals and many depict the same lives to their characters in the documentaries. Similarly in my documentary I have used non-professional, untrained actors so it is more relatable and realistic. I have tried to make it simple and close to real life experiences so audience can relate to it.

Documentaries also cannot afford celebrities as they are usually with low budget. My documentary is also a very low budget production. Documentaries are usually shot on location. It is highly rare for them to be shot in studios as they present artificial locations. To present gritty settings, locations such as council estates, parks, homes and other natural locations are used. By filming on location rather than in a studio it presents a sense of social realism more as the character and the audience can see the conditions of the location. My documentary is also shot on location with a very natural misc-en-scene. I have shown all the scenes in the exact location of happening. I have shot all the school scenes in a public school and similarly other scenes are shot in the character’s actual house to create a sense of realism. The lighting used is also normally naturalistic which means it does not uses lenses or soft lighting. In my documentary no such artificial lights are used. It is all shot in natural light as most of such social realistic productions are with low-key lighting.

Special effects are not used lavishly in documentaries. The audience generally does not expect the titles to come jumping onto the screen. This is because documentaries revolve around simple lives. Simplicity is the operative word here, and because social realism relies a lot upon the interactions between people, distracting titles are not desirable. Instead, effects such as simple fades or wipes are used. Mostly, titles will simply appear and disappear. This is why most of the documentaries have simple editing and sequences. In my documentary the editing is also more likely to become montage-like and simple in order to reflect the emotion or seriousness of the situation. Cross-dissolve editing technique helped me the most in creating the simple look of my documentary.

Documentaries usually reflect real life issues. They tend to be events that take place in everyday life but they may also portray issues that have not been highlighted and shown to the public. Such issues involve poverty, child labor, prostitution, and gender discrimination. The storyline of the wider social issues usually take place in a documentary that captivates an individual’s life and focuses on a single issue. I have also represented such a social issue in my documentary where we try to convey how females are deprived of their rights of education, along with an element of child labor for awareness among people.

In some documentaries enigma codes are highly used to convey a certain message to the audience. The audience is often left to wonder why characters behave in a certain way, film makers make people think about the issue. In my documentary the act of girl cutting her hair with a scissor is a very strong way of describing her feelings about the discrimination of rights between her brother and herself. In this way my documentary relates to some codes and conventions of a documentary.

In my documentary I have described the contrast between the rights of males and females. I am conveying a message that girls do not get equal rights similar to the boys. In our society girls get a very limited chance of exposure and education. Inequality of rights in education is the basic and main concern represented in my documentary. I show how the girl expresses her feelings and point of view about her rights of education. The divergence between the rights of girls and boys is clearly visible in my documentary. The girl is lack of the exposure her brother is getting. Her brother is being educated but she does not have an opportunity to avail the same rights. My story is based on a family of lower, social class who has very limited expenditures and income. They have a highly conservative mindset. 

It makes people aware about the rights which are not granted to girls in our society. Males are still dominant and powerful than females are. Every girl wants and deserves to go to school and get educated and in our society they are not given their rights to study. The most highlighted topic in my production is women empowerment. Gender discrimination and lack of rights of girls is very obvious in my documentary. I also show that the girl is bound to work as a servant at different homes as a source of income due to her parents forcing her. It describes child labor and how she is working at such a young age, another element of lack of rights of girls. In this way my documentary conveys its representation.

2. How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘Branding’?

Branding is one of the key elements found in almost all the media product. Branding does not limit to the logo of the product, however the postcard, website, social experiences and also its online store can be categorized under ‘Branding’.

To begin with my project , I planned the production process before hand by making a shooting schedule that helped us divide our work between me and my partner Rabiya in a proper way. We had first decided to create a short film but both of us produced different ideas and plans for the advance portfolio and ended up creating a documentary on women empowerment. This is how we finalized our Synopsis. Our product mainly focuses on the concept of lack of rights of women to get education. It highlights how she is not granted with her basic rights unlike her brother; a contrast between genders is shown. As it is a topic not discussed by mainstream media, it has an impact on everyone watching it. It does not have a specific target audience but captures a wide range of audience. It targets the whole humanity. It is completely close to reality and very natural so more audience relates to it.

 We did all our research and planning, creating storyboard and shot list before the shooting so it made the process easier for us and carry out production without wasting anytime on what to do at the time of shooting. The shooting for our documentary took place in three different locations, a school, a village representing the girl’s house and a house where she works as a servant. On the day of shooting we took various Camera angles, shots and movements as planned according to the shot list.

At the beginning of the documentary, the girl who is our main character, is cutting her hair using a scissor, this scene creates a sense of curiosity and suspense and makes people think that why she is cutting her hair. This keeps the audience interested in the documentary. After this scene the dialogue she speaks is also very powerful. It has a high impact on the people listening. It gives a very emotional and sentimental theme to our documentary which grabs attention of the people. The background music and the Urdu poetry part also help making audience get emotionally attached to it.

In order to attract audience and create a sense of branding, making of Postcard plays a very important role in it. It is a direct way of making your product popular. It is a way of inviting the audience to come and watch it. Posters are captivating and intriguing in order to attract audience. Creating a website for my documentary was the most suitable way of branding our product. We created our website on which our documentary was available for audiences to watch.

Location of shoot plays a very important role in creating a sense of branding. My package is a documentary which is completely based on reality, so I was supposed to shoot my production at a realistic and natural set. Artificial setting or studios were not suitable for a documentary. Choosing such realistic and natural locations helped us creating a more effective and strong documentary. Keeping in mind the codes and conventions of a documentary, we also used non-professional actors to people can relate to them. Using professional and known actors might have not created the sense of reality. Acting had to be natural.

3. How do your products engage with the audience and how would they be distributed as real media products?

Audience in the present time is very active on all the platforms, they are no more passive and are able to accept or reject any media text they consume. It is very important for me that our target audiences are able to engage and relate to our media text. In order to ensure this we conducted a questionnaire survey to get into the mind of our audience and understand what they want to see or like to see in our documentary.  A media text has to be successful to make money.

Other ways to engage with the audience is social media, nowadays social media is accessible and available almost everywhere. It is an informal way of staying in touch with the audiences. Any worthy production becomes popular and viral on these social hubs rapidly. Twitter and Facebook are very widely used and are most suitable for this purpose. Twitter has a trending page through which people can see what the latest craze is, and what people from all over the world are talking about. Creating Hashtags is also a very successful way of making your product available for the maximum audience. We are also starting tweeting under the name @educateme and creating our own Hashtag #EducateMe in order to attract audiences. We are using facilities like ‘Retweet’ and ‘Favourite’ to share @educateme tweets on our own accounts so that our friends and followers may read about it.

Facebook has the facility to ‘Like’ page and receive update , and share posts with friends as well as publicly. Facebook pages also allow you to sponsor your posts and build an audience, which also helps in marketing certain products in an effective way. When one person likes or shares something it automatically appears on either their friend’s and follower’s newsfeeds. Some people may get intrigued and share those posts which starts a chain reaction thus promoting the post even further.

I have chosen “Geo Films” as the distributor of my media product. As it is one of the most well known media institutions in my country Pakistan, owned by Geo Television Network which is based in Karachi. Popular movies like Bol, Dukhtar and Khuda ke liye, that are based on social issues that surround us in our everyday life are commonly distributed by this company. So it is even more suitable for me as my documentary is also based on reality and a social issue. In this way I will be engaging with my audiences and will be distributing my documentary.

4. How did you integrate technologies- software, hardware and online- in this project?

At the beginning of my advance portfolio I wasn’t aware of the technologies the way I am now at the end of it. Due to my foundation portfolio I had some information about adobe photoshop and how to use it. It was just the basic knowledge I had. Advance portfolio was the first time I experienced and learned to edit videos. For this project I chose the documentary package. The main search engine throughout our project was Google.com. To do all the research for the documentary I watched different short documentaries on YouTube and DailyMotion. These two were the basic sites to provide me with films and videos. While surfing through YouTube I came up with an Indian advertisement based on women education which gave me the basic idea of my documentary. This ad was the major inspiration we carried out in our documentary. Other research work was done on different blog searches, I went through various media blogs. Websites such as slideshare.com, prezi.com and emaze.com also provided me with the most of information and content for my research and planning and the complete project.

To learn all the basic editing techniques I watched editing tutorials on YouTube. I also learned how to shoot and film videos with the use of different camera angles and movements and identified which ones were the most suitable for my project. All the research and planning was done using my HP Pavilion laptop.

I used professional DSLR’s to shoot the scenes. There were two cameras used to produce different angles of a similar act. (models of dslr). I used DSLR because they provide you with a cinematic coverage, high definition and quality, functions such as shutter speed, focus pull and aperture. It gives you an overall pre defined control. I also used a tripod stand to fix my camera on, it provided me with stability and the desired angle. The voiceover was also recorded for one scene where the girl speaks a dialogue, it was recorded on Samsung Galaxy Note 5 voice recorder using an external microphone to reduce the ambient or surrounding noise and echo. I muted all the clips as the documentary was supposed to have a non-diegetic, fluent background music. The music I used throughout my video was a random downloaded file named as “Marvel”. Another poetry audio was also downloaded using a mobile application “Vidmate”. There was no music cover available online or on SoundCloud.com so I had to use the original soundtrack of HUMTV’s drama serial (kitni girhain baqi hain) “How many knots are left?” OST by singer Gulzar. The lyrics and Urdu to English translation of this poetry was taken from Krithya.wordpress.com. While editing I used Audio WAV so it does not require Render.

For the final editing of my documentary I used Adobe Premier Pro as it has the latest and professional features.  It provides you with functions like color correction and makes clips transitions easier. The Cross-dissolve editing tool was used the most throughout my project while scene shifting. It gave a very fluent and on-going effect to the documentary. It represented the sadness and gloominess of the storyline. As it is a slow pace product so no complicated editing tools were used.  It creates a sense of realism in it. Other than Cross-dissolve I also used simple cut edits. In the slides consisting the statistics I applied the Zoom in and Zoom out fx to the text. The font style for the text was Kino MT. As the dialogues were all in Urdu, I had to apply Subtitles to it. The subtitles were given in the font style Arial in bold with black background in 50% opacity. At the end of my documentary I have added a quotation which is in font style Cambria. In the split screen scene I used the crop effect and then centralized both the screens moving them to the left. I also applied Fast color correction effect and increased the saturation of the whole project. In this way I have integrated software, hardware and online technologies in my advance portfolio.