A2 Media Studies | Application of Genre Theory to Media Texts

Documentary

Whilst me and Tom are still continuing work on the documentary I decided to apply Rick Altman's genre theory from 1999 of the different pleasures in a viewer, something I've already looked at in this post. The purpose of this is to inform people on what kind of pleasures the documentary that me and Tom are making offers to those who will be viewing the documentary after it's complete and ready to be published.

From what I currently remember from the documentary, I think the documentary is more likely to provoke an emotional pleasure (audience emotional response) and a visceral pleasure (mental reaction). This is because from what me and Tom have got so far, I don't think it would really offer intellectual puzzles (unravelling a mystery or puzzle throughout) for the audience because there isn't anything mysterious about it, it's very easy to understand the point of the documentary which goes along the lines of this:

Introduction of the school > Interview with a teacher > Teacher doing his job sorting out a misbehaving student > Other shots of the school throughout

The documentary provokes an emotional and visceral pleasure because of firstly the calming music at the beginning showing a positive light on the school, the teacher's attitude to the interview which is very positive and the tension that's created when the teacher has to stop a student from interrupting his lesson further. I think from a director's point of view, the viewers would have a preferred readings showing their satisfaction as the documentary may be their overall representation of secondary schools across the United Kingdom whilst some people could negotiate their reading on the documentary showing their dissatisfaction from a student misbehaving in class.

Ancillary task (magazine advert)

Illustrated below is the ancillary task as of 26/02/2016 and there's not much to say about the pleasures that it offers to the audience.

Ancillary task as of 26/02/2016

I say this because it only really offers a visceral pleasure as it's not a moving image which would be more likely to provoke an emotional pleasure. It could offer a preferred reading, indicating to the viewer of the image that it's professional to an extent like Channel 4's posters.

A2 Media Studies | Further Documentary Planning

In preparation for the documentary which me and Tom are currently filming, we have decided to show a development in our documentary with the creation of a permission letter that we had to write in order to film in the school and a set of questions that we'll be asking students and the teacher that we have been able to get to film for our documentary as illustrated below:

Our intentions with this now in the next steps of the planning is to successfully film the interviews being done and the classroom so that we have scenes from inside the school as well, which will make us ready for finalising the documentary through the editing process.

(26/02/2016) - Narrative Structure

As the documentary nears its final touches at this stage, I have decided to explain what the narrative is in a chronological order as listed below:

• The documentary starts out by introducing the school to the viewer showing an establishing shot of the school entrance sign and a building in the background, with a pull focus introducing "Inside Britain's Schools" afterwards, this is also when the '8V' logo appears just after the frame focuses again.
• Several shots of the school are shown in the frame including pans and establishing shots.
• Mr Preston is interviewed and the viewer gets his reflection on the school on what he thinks of it, whether the students are challenging or not and what his passion for English is. This also includes shots which reflect on the school showing shots of other areas in the school as well as action inside the class when Mr Preston is teaching.
• Soon after this comes a scenario where Mr Preston is handling a child who is misbehaving by talking over people and the teacher who is then sent outside to be dealt with, linking to binary opposites as this could be viewed as good/bad due to a misbehaving student and a teacher shouting at the student as a result of him trying to do his job. Whilst this could be putting the school in a negative light which is something me and Tom assured that we wouldn't be doing, we've come to the agreement that it's showing the viewer that the teacher is doing his job properly and is able to handle students in a professional manner.

This is all I can quite remember for the chronological order of the narrative as well as the documentary itself, I also recall that there are other shots after these points and then after the credits roll there's a preview for another documentary which is something Channel 4 also do on the end of their documentaries which me and Tom got the idea from.

Me and Tom picked this narrative structure because we wanted to have a documentary where it begins with showing the school as a whole including an interview with someone which is around the time that tension occurs (relative to a Channel 4 documentary as tension occurs and then the problem is resolved later into the documentary e.g. Educating Yorkshire) and after the tension occurs, as mentioned before, the problem is eventually solved. We both think that it's a narrative structure that a Channel 4 documentary would go along with and that it's also a suitable narrative structure for showing the school in a positive light and informing the viewer that the teachers do their jobs properly at the school alongside facts about what an English teacher thinks of the school (Blumler and Katz, 1974).