Scripted Documentary Voice Over

Documentary Narration

1.      From intro until first interview clip (approx. 7 seconds)

“Takeaways – Britain loves them! These quick and easy meals are a huge hit with teenagers and adults alike as they provide a simple alternative to a normal meal – but what is it that makes them so appealing? “

2.      From first interview to first vox pops clip (approx. 8 seconds)

“Takeaway meals are the first choice for thousands when they need a meal in a hurry, and they suit teenagers for their practicality. There are many different types of takeaway heralding from many cultures including Indian and Thai, but what’s the public’s favourite?”

3.      From first vox pops clip to interview with Heather (approx. 19 seconds)

“While a takeaway may be a quicker and less time consuming way of getting a meal, cooking your own meal does have many advantages: home cooked meals are much cheaper – we compared a supermarket ready meal to a similar takeaway and found that it was over £5 cheaper with a lower content of unhealthy additives such as fat, sugar and salt. All of this considered, why are takeaways still so popular, especially with teenagers?”

4.      From second clip of Janet to second vox pops (approx. 15 seconds)

“The simplicity and convenience of takeaways would appear to be the most justifiable reason for people ordering them, with takeaways seemingly being a lazy excuse due to factors such as cost and health. This considered, do teens prefer to order takeaways over cooking their own meals?”

5.      From vox pops to next clip of Heather (approx. 6 seconds)

“So do the youth of today really not consider the financial and diet issues associated with takeaways when they order one?”

6.      From clip of Heather to Just Eat advert (approx. 5 seconds)

“Takeaways are becoming increasingly easier to order in the modern day, with takeaway websites such as JustEat.com allowing people to order a takeaway online in just a few clicks.”

7.      From Just Eat advert to first clip of Anhar (approx. 2 seconds)

“It’s not just the simplicity that attracts thousands either – many takeaways offer special deals.”

8.      From clip of Anhar to next vox pops (approx. 5 seconds)

“So despite their flaws, takeaway meals also have many advantages that make them so popular to so many people – but how frequently do they have a takeaway?”

9.      From next clip of Janet to next clip of Anhar (approx. 9 seconds)

“Takeaways are now a main feature of modern society, providing meals and jobs for millions worldwide. We caught up with Anhar Miah, owner of The Raj restaurant, to get an insight onto working in the industry as well as his opinions on takeaways.”

10.   In between Anhar interview (approx. 7 seconds)

“Keeping customer service good is certainly a key part of the takeaway business, to keep customers coming back for more. We also asked Anhar about The Raj’s most popular meals, and how they promote their business.”   

11.  From Anhar interview to Burger King advert (approx. 4 seconds)

“The promotion of takeaway meals is an important part of the industry, with mainstream restaurants such as McDonald’s and Pizza Hut relying heavily on advertisement – bus does this sort of promotion attract the public?”

12.  Over Burger King advert (approx. 4 seconds)

“Takeaway companies want advertisement to play a pivotal role in the decision to buy takeaway, with restaurants advertising new meals and special offers to encourage people to shop there”.

13.  From Burger King advert to ending montage (approx. 5 seconds)

“The vast variation of the takeaway industry is what keeps people coming back for more – there are so many different types of meal with a variety of ways to get them.”

Scripted Radio Voice Over

So that the narrator had something read when we were recording our advertisement, we wrote out a script. We told the narrator to pause in between each part we recorded. This was to make it easier whilst we were editing. The advertisement is supposed to be 30 seconds long.

VOX POPS: Chinese, Indian, Errr... Chinese?

Voice Over: "We are all familiar with the idea of a takeaway, but what impact is this having on teenagers?"
Interview with Anhar Miah: Most of our food is freshly cooked by fresh ingrediants.

Voice Over: "And what do adults think about it?"

Janet Orr: I'd say that it is acceptable to have a takeaway maybe once a month.

Voice Over: "To find out more, tune in to watch Tasty Takeaways on Thursday at 8pm. Only on Channel 4.

Music Level bed raised: Eat it, Eat it! If it's getting cold reheat it.

Logging Sheets



I have logged all of the footage which we have filmed.



Editing Diary

• We began by opening up the program software, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

• Our group decided upon a project name "Tasty Takeaways".
• We used a deck to capture all of our footage we had filmed then assorted them with appropriate titles.

• We had to watch a clip to decide which parts of it we wanted to use and which parts we didn't. In all of our interviews, we cut out parts of the footage where the interviewer asks the questions. This is because it is against the codes and conventions of documentaries.

Cutting out the questions in our interviews.

• Once we did this we edited that specific shot to a precise timing of what is needed. Sometimes, parts of the answers which our subjects gave were irrelevant to the question. Therefore, these parts were cut out.
• After doing this with each shot we began to order the documentary on our timeline.

This photograph with me was taken when we were just beginning to order the documentary.

• We added titles to our opening sequence and interviews so each subject can be introduced to the audience. We were consistant by always using the same font. For our interviews, the name appeared on the top line and their relation to the exposition on the line below.

When we began adding titles to our documentary, we were indecisive as to what they should look like and the transitions in and out. 

• We included cutaways of takeaways and menus when they were relevant to what the interview subject was saying.
• Sometimes, we did not film enough footage that was relevent to what the interviewee was saying. Therefore, we needed to take some archive footage from YouTube. 
• We edited this footage and placed it in a suitable position on the timeline.

Adding some archive footage to our documentary.

• We decided to swap a few clips of cutaways to make it even easier for the audience to comprehend watching.
• Once we were satisfied with the order of the narrative, our next step was to edit the sound. 

Editing the sound of 'Tasty Takeaways'

• We had to change a lot of our background noise to make sure it was silent or if not that, then at a minimal level. We altered the volume levels in our longer interviews and our Vox Pops so that they were much louder and audible than before.
• It was now important for us to utilise the fact that we have used a blue screen for our Vox Pops. It was now time to add in the chroma key to our blue screens so we could add images relevant to the answers our interviews gave. To add the chroma key, we clicked on the video effects folder, then the keying folder which was inside it. From there, we dragged and dropped the chroma key over all of the vox pops. Now that chroma key has been added, we chose an image to replace the blue from the screen. We had to make sure the image was colourful for the blend to be effective. The opacity was then corrected. 

If an interviewee gave "Chinese" as an answer to their favourite kind of takeaway, we would use an image of Chinese cuisine in the chroma key because it is relevant. 

• Our next job was to find a suitable soundtrack for our documentary. We had some ideas of what the song could be. Among our ideas were Nirvana's 'Smell's Like Teen Spirit' (this was a conditional choice if we had chosen for our documentary to be called 'Taste's Like Teen Spirit') and Lionel Bart's 'Food, Glorious Food' from the musical 'Oliver!'. Eventually, we decided on the song 'Eat It' by "Weird Al" Yankovic. Usually, we would use the parts of the song where there were no vocals at all because to an audience, this song is catchy and we knew that it would work well if we edited our footage to be in time with the fast beat of the song. This is what we did. Sometimes, we needed to introduce fades in the song to lower the volume if the narrator, someone in an interview was speaking or when we were showing an advert in the archive footage. We wanted the song to set a positive mood on our audience.

Our chosen soundtrack was placed on the 'Audio 2' part of the timeline. We used the 'Constant Power' Audio transition so that the part of our soundtrack which we chose to loop sounded much smoother compared with if we chose not to use one at all. 

• In our interviews, we included audio transitions to make sure the sound was not incorrect for each cutaway. Audio transitions helped to make our movements from one sound byte to another much smoother. If we did not include them, our documentary's sound would have been much more jittery in comparison. 
• Our next objective was to script some narration for our documentary because the group felt pleased with what we had done so far. We stuck to our feedback from our target audience research in the planning phase and chose a male narrator who had a powerful voice. Initially, we thought he would mix in well with the theme of the documentary. 
• Once we recorded our narration, we placed it on the timeline and cut out the silient gaps which we deliberately left in between parts of when we we recording. Commonly, the narrator spoke just before and after our interviews. 
• We rewatched the documentary several times to ensure we had done all of our editing correctly. There were some small adjustments that needed to be made involving where the sound fades, volume levels and the order of the clips. Once these minor modifications had been made, we became happy with our Documentary on Takeaways.
• Our final step was to render all the footage together and export it as an AVI file.

Edit Decision List

Below is a list of decisions I made which were related to our editing. It was always important for us to keep adding to this list so we know where we are up to and how our film has changed since we first shot our footage. The sheet includes sections for the Shot Numbers, Shot Desription/Other Essential information and the the type of editing that we used.



Audience Feedback

We got people from our target audience to view our documentary and print advert and listen to our radio advert to provide feedback, so that we could assess the success of our work. We produced another questionnaire of fifteen questions; five questions on each of the three arctefacts that we had produced and distributed the questionnaire to people that had seen or heard them to recieve a wide spread of feedback. The audience feedback questionnaire can be seen above. 

For the documentary video, people said that the narration was clear and suitable enough, although there were some comments about there being too much narration but otherwise there was not much criticism and people thought that overall the documentary had a good flow with a clear narrative. Our earlier questionnaire had shown that our target audience would've preferred a male narrator to a female one and we took this into consideration when selecting our narrator; something that was praised in our audience feedback. Nobody thought that the documentary was particularly biased and understood that we focused more on takeaways such as Chinese and Indian over ones like Thai and Mexican as they were more popular as seen in our earlier questionnaire results. People thought that the font was clear and relevant and that the music fitted the theme of the documentary.  

Feedback on our radio advert was mixed, with most people saying that they could hear and understand the narration but that the music was louder than it in some cases and gave them some difficulties. People said that the radio advert conveyed the desired message of the scheduling and did make them more interested to watch the actual documentary, rendering it a success.

People thought that the print advert was effective, and despite many people saying that it was quite plain that they said the use of a single image was effective and eyecatching and that it made them want to watch the documentary. People said that the font and its colour scheme were relevant, but after some criticsm of our original tagline for being too misleading we changed it to something more suitable. 

Draft of Print Advert

After some discussion, we decided that the best magazines and newspapers to include our print advert inside would be: Heat, The Sun, NME, The Metro and Kerrang. This is because we felt as though our demographic target audience of Teenagers and Young Adults are more likely to read these forms of print media than The Daily Telegraph, Grazia, Land Rover Monthly Magazine and Auto Trader because these tend to attract older audiences.