Consumer Society (Pardeep)

The text is a documentary named 'The Consumer Society' produced by media students (don't no where from though) and I think the target audience is the same as ours- females mainly- as most commercial target them more, yet also a male audience. The age group is about 16 onwards. This can be seen via the type of adverts used (e.g. the shampoo advert, the drink advert) and although it features a advert for children, I doubt its targeting kids as they don't understand the media and the issue being raised is beyond their understanding. This documentary will probably be shown on the BBC,, as channel 4 is a commercial channel, therefore, it may feel threatened by this and so will the people who want their adverts appearing on channel 4. BBC doesn't advertise, so therefore it will most likely appear on that channel. As this documentary challenges people, the audience it's trying to attract usually watch TV from 8:00 onward- as this is when they come back form work of school etc. Therefore, it will be shown about 9ish. ‘The Consumer Society’ uses fade outs to move from one advert to another and it uses a variety of adverts- from hair shampoo to drinks to chocolate or whatever. It mainly just uses a lot of archive footage and it uses captions to pose questions. A montage is used (cuts are used) to summarise the point at the end and this helps to pull together what the filmmakers are trying to point out. This is then further reinforced by the question which appears on the screen: ‘Are you part of the consumer society?’ I think this is very effective as in a sense it forces the audience to think and become less passive. The sound used in the beginning is rock, which can be seen as parallel, as it helps to reflect society’s attitude toward consumerism, (how everyone is crazily consuming without pausing to think about the consequences). This is used in the beginning and in the end. The rest of the music comes from the adverts. Personally, I don’t think this documentary was that good, as it only uses archive footage and misses out on sooooooo much like: interviews, vox pops, a proper montage etc, (i think that our documentary is gonna be sooooo much better:) However, we will borrow the idea of posing a serious question to make the audience think and question themselves.