Billboard Examples

After we had created our final billboards, i had experimented what they may look like using a website called http://www.photofunia.com/ and these pictures were the result. If you can't see the image clearly then simply click on the image to enlarge...

Initial Storyboard Photos

When we were planning our documentary we created a storyboard whilst brainstorming at my house, earlier this year. I had forgotten to upload these photos and the photos can now be found below. If you cannot see these images clearly then simply click on the image to enlarge you may then click on the image again to enlarge further...

Audience Feedback

As part of our evaluation we produced a video of a few people watching our final documentary piece before giving us their views on it. This video is shown below...

Final Evaluation PowerPoint

Below is my final evaluation presentation. Unfortunately the videos that I had put into the presentation do not work as I have embeded the presentation through SlideShare. I have however made sure that the presentation works for when I send off my work to the examiner.

Amir's A2 Media Studies Evaluation

View more presentations from 4achoudhury.

Starting the Evaluation

Just like lat year, we are required to create a PowerPoint presentation exploring what we have accomplished with regards to the construction of our documentary. Instead of answering seven questions however, this year we were required to explore four questions. These questions were:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?


2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?


3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?


4. How did you use your media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Here are two screenshots of my first attempt at the presentation. If you can't see the images clarly then simply click on the image to enlarge...

Here are the Youtube comments received from our final documentary video. If you can't see the image clearly then simply click on the image to enlarge, you may then click on the image again to enlarge further...

The Final Documentary - "Roots to Success - Making of a Mogul"

Here is a copy of our final documentary. The video is posted below and is from Youtube. We tried to upload the video file directly however we encountered problem, every time we tried. We wanted to put the raw video file onto the blog directly as the image quality is good. The image quality on the youtube video however is very poor. The video is shown below...

Editing the Documentary

We began putting the documentary opening together using these archive video clips and pictures. Here are the cropped images from the title page that we had decided to include for the documentary opening...

We also used some images of various online newspaper articles from the internet. Instead of using the image straight from the internet we decided to edit them giving them all a "flashlight" lighting effect on Adobe Photoshop. These are the images we used for our introduction...

These pictures, we found on the internet and put them straight into the opening of our documentary, without editing them first...

Finally for the opening of our documentary we used these pictures that we took ourselves on the day of the interview...

We then began looking for upbeat reggae music which we could sync our pictures to for the opening of our documentary and chose one. We wanted something with a repetitive beat that was also instrumental, as opposed to having someone singing in it. We used the song used in the video below...

To break up the interview, we decided to include clips from Levi Roots in the Den pitching to get the £50,000 he was after. We also used a clip from the music video shown below...

Here is the final product, of our documentary opening using the pictures...

Further Ideas For The Documentary

Now that we had finished all of our supporting pieces to go with the documentary, we knew we had time to look back over the documentary piece itself to see if anything should be changed or added. Looking back at it the interview was actually quite boring with regards to the way it had been edited. The questions and answers were very straight forward, one after the other with nothing in between to break it up. We thought it would be good idea to put in pictures in the interview relating to what Levi is saying, to help break-up the interview making the interview more engaging for the audience. Looking back at it, we were not too impressed with the introduction either. This was because although the archive footage with the narrative is describing how Levi made his fortune, it is again very repetitive and boring. Again we needed something to break it up a bit and perhaps have some upbeat reggae music playing in the background to liven it up! We looked into videos on the internet which we could use in between the archive footage at the beginning and liked a particullar video on a BBC website. However the video was not on iPlayer and there was no way of downloading the video. Here is a link to the video. Click on the link below to visit the website... http://www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/entrepreneurs/leviroots.shtml We also liked a Youtube video called reggae reggae catchup. There is a scene where Levi Roots accepts the offers from the Dragons' in the Den and shakes hand with them as there is a narrative saying "Levi has done it! After a rollercoaster ride in the den, and giving away 40% in his company, having gained £50,000 and two extremely influential business partners, now he really has got something to sing about!" This can be found on the video below at 8:48 onwards... We thought that instead of having a narrative, we would use extracts of the interview and archive footage talking about levi roots followed by upbeat reggae music. We managed to download a piece of screen recording software called, CamStudio. This enabled us to obtain the video to use as part of our archive footage. We also liked this video as the music is in sync with the clips... After putting some of the archive footage together we thought it would also be a good idea to replicate the tachnique used in the video above of having music in sync with pictures. We thought to have archive footage at first then have the next scene with upbeat reggae muic fading in and getting louder then having a series of pictures followed by our title page which we created a while back and used for the previous version of our documentary. Whilst developing these ideas we then thought to use sections of the title page in conjunction with pictures from the internet, slowly building up the title for the documentary.

The Final Ancillary Pieces

Below are our final ancillary pieces. If you cannot see any of the images clearly then simply click on the image to enlarge. You may then click again to enlarge the image further...


Advertising Campaign:

Final Magazine Article:

Finishing Off The Magazine Article

We knew what we had to do for the magazine article. We knew that we wanted to have a picture of a money tree blended in with the bottle of Reggae Reggae Sauce as the tree trunk. We thought to have the tree in the middle of our double page with the tree going over both sides of the page. Instead of doing it one page at a time, like we did last time, we decided to find a template of a double page which we could work on. Here is the picture of the double page that we found. If you cannot see the image clearly then simply click on the image to enalrge, you may then click on the image again to enlarge further...

After putting the money tree on the middle of our page, we needed a magazine title, and page numbers at the top, as expected with virtually all magazines. We didnt know what to call it as this interview could fit into many genres such as, business, entrepreneurs, cookery etc. In the end we decided to go with the business theme and called the magazine, "BusinessNow". We then inserted the date and page numbers. Then we needed a title and decided to call it "From Rags, To Riches", which was the same title as our previous magazine article. We decided to have the words "From Rags" on the left side of the page and on one side of the bottle, and have "To Riches" on the other. Here is what the Magazine article looked like so far. You may click on the image to enlarge and then click again to enlarge futher...

As we were putting down our questions and answers from the interview, we realised that in our previous attempt at the magazine article the questions did not stand out very much as they were in the same font aand size, only made bold. We decided to make the questions stand out by having them in different colours, the same colours as the on his Reggae Reggae sauce bottle. We then thought to have the questions in the font used in the title to make the text sand out and have the answers in a much more simple font in plain black. We then inserted a picture that we found on the internet and put an effect around the edges to make the image blend in with the article. We then edited the picture of the advert to win Levi's Reggae Reggae Bus, by croping it and changing the text in the yellow box. We thought we were done but we both looked at it thinking if there was any way we could add to it making it more conventional of a magazine which gave us the idea to use pull quotes. We used two of these quotes from the interview answers, in a simple black font but made bold and enlarged. Here is the final product of our magazine article. If you cannot see the image clearly, then simply click on the image to enlarge, you may then click on the image again to enlarge further...

Advertising Campaign - Final Part

We used Google Images to find a picture of a money tree. We liked this picture and decided to use it for both our advertising campaign as well as our magazine article...

We then got a picture of the bottle with our own label on it that we used for our previous advertisiments. Here is a screenshot of us merging the picture of the bottle with the tree...

Here is what our poster looked like so far...

We didnt think that the lighting effect we used was strong enough, although you can tell that the areas around the bottle and text are lighter, we wanted something more bold. We also thought that we wanted a difefrent caption for the poster that relates to the image, we wanted to keep the caption short, sweet and simple and in the end we decided for the caption to be "Levi Roots: An Overnight Success?" We thought that this relates to the poster as the word "Success" is illustrated by the money. Also the fact that its a question keeps the audience engaged, making them want to know more. We also noticed that there are branches coming out of the tree making the image look more unprofessional. To eradicate this issue we used a "healing tool" on Photoshop which helped to patch the money over the areas with the branches. Overall our final poster with all the amendments. If you cannot see the image clearly, then simply click on the image to enlarge. You may then click on the image again to enlarge further...

Making A Start On The Final Supporting Piece

For our final supporting piece we thought it would be relevant to produce a double page magazine spread. This would include the exclusive interview that we had with Levi Roots. In order to produce this magazine article we decided to use the program, Microsoft Publisher. Here is a screenshot of us starting to produce the article. If you cannot see the image clearly, then simply click on the image to enlarge. You may then click on the image again to enlarge further...

We listed the questions asked in the interview and then copied down the answers throughout the first page of the article. We then researched into other content we could put on to the article and stumbled on this picture...

We thought we could perhaps use the advert on our magazine spread. Again we knew that we would need to seek permission to do so and i called Natasha (Levi's Personal Agent) and verified that this was OK.

We Showed our Media Studies teacher what we had come up with so far, however she was not too impressed. She thought that the layout of the spread was too "boxy" and too neatly structured. What we needed was something a little more "quirky" that mixes up the content, rather than having everything in boxes that fits into the genre of a conventional magazine for an interview.

Whilst researching into double spread magazine articles we came accross this picture...

We liked the fact that instead of having several images all across the magazine article, theres one main picture to go with the title of the article. We liked the tree, but obviously knew that it would not make any sense to have one in our own article. That's when it hit us. We thought it would be a fantastic idea to have a picture of a money tree which would illustrate Levi's fortune. Although we were both set on this idea, we both knew that we wanted to something a little different as it doesn't show much effort in copying and pasting in a picture of a money tree from the internet. We brainstormed to try and develop our Ideas further. We then thought to have the top half as a money tree but have the trunk of the tree as the bottle of the sauce. We then thought it would also be a good idea to use this money tree as part of our advertising campaign but instead to use the bottle with our own label on.

Further Editing For Advertising Campaign

After reviewing the pictures from Tesco to other media students, as well as our Media Studies teacher, myself and Lauren had established that we had further editing to do on our last piece for the advertising campaign. Although the concept was good of having a picture of the modified bottle on a supermarket shelf, others were not convinced that having the blurred out effect was a good idea. Lauren and I then began to edit the lighting on the photos emphasising the writing on the bottle. Here is what we had produced. To enlarge the image, simply click on the image and to enlarge further, simply click on the image again...

Advertising Campaign - Last Part

Using the same method as the test run, shown in the previous post, Lauren and myself had decided to definately use this blurring technique for the last part of our advertising campaign. Our classmates as well as our Media Studies teacher were impressed with this effect. We thought the best place to use this effect would be at a supermarket along side other bottles of Reggae Reggae Sauce. This would be good as a poster because it shows the audience that the product is already well established and has made the shelves of a supermarket. Lauren and myself went to Tesco in Brooklands, Surrey, where we had filmed for part of our documentary before. We went in and asked to speak to Darren who is the head of security, as he was the person who gave us permission to film in Tesco last time. When we went to see him he immediately remembered who we were and allowed us to take photos in the store. When we got to the Reggae Reggae Sauce section, we both alternated in taking photos. We took between fifty and a hundred photos, making the sorting process extremely difficult. The best four pictures that we had found are shown below. The picture on the top is the original, unedited picture and the picture below is the same picture, but an edited version. If you cannot see any of the images clearly, simply click on the image to enlarge, you may then click again to enlarge further:

We were both impressed with all of the images and are currently in the process of choosing which one to use for the final piece of our advertising campaign.