Documentary Unit: Filming Workshop

On Friday we went out on location as a group of 6 (in the end) and had a day of filming in Rochester. As a group of three, Mary, Dannie and I filmed in the Guildhall Museum. As there was a school trip, we were assigned to the meeting room where we filmed children taking part in activities with the staff.

Before filming, Mary and I came up with a shot list consisting of sequences, establishing shots and actuality shots and filled out a risk assessment form. We then decided that Mary would be director/producer, I would be the camera operator and Dannie would be the sound technician. For filming we used the Sony EX2, a clip on mic for Jeremy (staff) and a rode mic to pick up the rest of the sound in the room.

We later moved on to filming outside of Rochester Castle and Cathedral. I thoroughly enjoyed this as we were able to get many beautiful establishing/sequence shots of places such as the river, bridge, and building exteriors. We also used the rode mic for this, so that we could pick up ambient sounds.

I found the workshop very helpful as it was great practice for finding impressive establishing, actuality and sequence shots. I also found it helpful that Mary and I decided to work together. Because it gave me a good insight to how filming with her will be. We both had a lot of ideas and worked extremely well as a team, so I feel confident when it comes to filming our documentary as a pair.

Above: Internet images of the museum, castle and cathedral.

Documentary Unit: Draft Script

Yesterday I started a draft script for the documentary using the ordering and features that Mary and I had previously discussed. I found this template that our tutor had presented to us very helpful...

Using this as a guideline, we managed to present an impressive draft script to our tutor...

First page

She found the script very professional and well laid out, especially considering we had never created a documentary script before. So we're very happy with the result. The feedback we received for our draft was also extremely helpful. With suggestions of statistics to explore, contacts to try and talk to for potential interviews or extra information and tips on our set shots and sequences, I think we're already really starting to make a lot of progress in our work. Another noticeable suggestion that was made was to bring our central character and our minor character together, so I think that we'll make this addition to the script.

However, the biggest change we've made today was beginning to write our commentary, as the original draft only focused on visuals and a brief outline of the commentary. I think our scripting over the voice over lines will be very effective in editing...

New first page

We still have a lot of work to do, but I think we already have a very strong script.

Documentary Unit: Update

Unfortunately, Mary and I have run into a problem. Originally we thought our problem was that as the LGBT support group we were planning on interviewing and filming only took place once in our filming dates, we would be unable to involve our central character in the group session due to him having to work at the same time.

But now our problem seems to be larger, as the support group leader has backed out of being involved altogether. So we currently do not have an LGBT support group to involve in our documentary. This is a big problem for us as that feature of the documentary is an important one, but we plan to do everything we can to find a new group to film as soon as possible. And if possible, it could turn into a positive and we could end up with an even better group who's dates don't clash with our central character's - meaning we could potentially film him attending the group! I'm confident that we can solve this issue.

Documentary Unit: Pitch Feedback

Today Mary and I gave our pitch presentation to our tutors. It went very well due to our being organised and very detailed in each aspect of our documentary. Our tutor's only concern was that it may be too interview heavy, so we will need to make sure that we can get hold of gay pride footage, get lots of cutaway shots and hopefully include our central character attending an LGBT group for the first time for an exciting new experience (rather than him just telling a story of his life).

Here is our proposal that was given to our tutors, this summarises our pitch...

Title: Teen Spirit (Working Title)

Topic: Homosexuality

USP: Reflecting and comparing what it is like to grow up as gay in today’s society, to how it used to be in the past, to the older generations.

Genre:  Community – constructed.

Treatment:  Our documentary will provide an insightful look into what life is like for gay teenagers and will reveal surprising facts about society’s perception of the gay community today, taking the audience on an informative journey to open their eyes to the reality of the society we live in. Amongst the main storyline about our central character, Carl Kitto, we will explore areas of gay pride, other gay teenagers, LGBT groups and older generations points of view on homosexuality.

With the information and stories we’ll provide in our documentary, we will be able to answer our hypothesis question of “Do we really live in an evolved society, or is prejudice still an issue?” with the answer that our society has clearly come a long way with it’s opinion of homosexuals, but we still have a way to go. We think that this documentary will be a very effective one. By combining facts, statistics, upbeat and downbeat footage, emotional stories and helpful, supportive information to a teenage audience, it will have everything we need for it to be a strong piece of work.

TV Listing: “Do we really live in an evolved society, or is prejudice still an issue?” In this documentary we take a look into the life of a homosexual teenager and his experience of coming out, discrimination and finding love. Does his generation really live in an improved, more excepting Britain?”

Documentary Unit: Channel 4 Documentary 'Underage and Gay'

From left to right: Mykyla/Kyle, Beckham, Tamika, Alex & Cariad

To help with our research and planning, I decided to watch an 11pm Channel 4 documentary that Mary and I found when looking at TV listings. With the title being 'Underage and Gay' it immediately stood out to us, and with the description being "British teenagers are coming out younger than ever before. But in an age of internet trolls, this documentary meets five teenagers to find out what it's like to be underage and gay today." we decided that this could be of a lot of help to us.

I found that the central character of the documentary is Beckham, a 15 year old who came out as gay when he was 14 (where the documentary starts). The other characters are Mykyla (lesbian, 14), Tamika (bisexual, 16), Alex (transsexual, 17) and Cariad (lesbian, 14). While Beckham seems to be the central character, due to the documentary beginning and ending with him, all five of the teenagers bring a unique story.

I found this documentary very helpful for the unit as it managed to explore a lot of different areas just within 45 minutes. We got to see how strong Beckham is in dealing with his current bullies and not letting them get to him as well as moving forward and thinking of his future, the emotion of Mykyla's story and how she goes through a big change and by the end wants to be referred to as a boy, Kyle, Tamika realising who she really is and becoming more feminine and possibly being bisexual instead of gay, Alex deciding to move on with his life and starting over in a new part of the country, and Cariad also becoming more feminine and realising what a huge influence she's been on other teenagers at her school who decided to come out since she did.

I think that this documentary had a lot of the things that Mary and I are looking for. While we don't have the same amount of time, characters or locations to play with, we can certainly use a lot of topics and story-lines. For instance, Underage and Gay touched on so many subjects including bullying, discrimination, coming out, finding your sexuality, simply growing up, friends, family, LGBT groups, YMCA youth groups and gay pride. It also had a good mix of past stories and current stories, a lot of tension in places, such as 'Kyle' being briefly taken into police custody after attacking a friend with broken glass (off camera) as well as the comic relief of Beckham's personality, the inspiration that comes from all three of Tamika, Alex and Cariad's stories and a resolution for every character at the end, giving the audience something to route for.

I've found this research extremely helpful, the documentary kept me entertained and intrigued throughout and I hope that Mary and I can do the same for our audience.

Documentary Unit: BAFTA Podcast Review

I've just finished listening to a podcast on the BAFTA website titled 'Is Structured Reality Corrupting Documentary?'. To start, I personally think that the debate that's had between the five people goes off the point very often. Even the presenter, Simon Dickson says towards the end of the debate that he thinks they've gone off topic from the original question and the issue has become "Is structured reality a type of documentary?". And there didn't seem to be much of a conclusion as they all said by the end that they argued about the wrong thing.

That being said, I did pick out quite a few interesting key points about the difference between structured reality and documentaries throughout the podcast...

Claire Faragher started by telling us that the people on TOWIE were already very film ready and 'LA-ish' with interesting and unusual lives and said "We thought we could chart it, make it funny and slightly enhance it...and possibly manipulate it a little bit."

Richard McKerrow then gave his view on structured reality shows by saying "[these shows] should be more purposeful...I can find nothing of interest" and "The one good thing I can say about TOWIE is compared to Made in Chelsea, it's a work of genius...it's populated by lifeless, awful people who can't even portray themselves convincingly. It's not drama or documentary."

Giving a bit of support to the structured reality genre, Simon Dickson said that "Documentaries used to be the TV equivalent of vegetables, like eat your greens. And it's okay for them to be more fun and engaging."

Brian Hill also later stated that "Some young people feel that structured reality is actually more honest than documentaries as it draws attention to the fact that it's structured and artificial. Whereas observational documentaries like to pretend that it's all real when we know it's not and the stories are created in the edit."

I personally think that Molly Dineen was the only person that really tried to stick to the original topic at hand...

She thinks that structured documentaries/reality are kind of pushing out unstructured programmes. For example broadcasters will commission a documentary on a man who goes to Liverpool and experiences what it's like to live as a single mum, but they won't commission one that simply focuses on a single mum's life in Liverpool. She stated that the more entertaining 'documentaries' are coming out on top and she thinks there should be room for both.

She also stated that structured reality shows are "taking up the space they should be sharing" and "it's because documentaries can't always guarantee that there'll be drama...Real life is messy and slow and that's why it's not commissioned as much."

Simon loosely agreed with Molly, saying that structured reality is bringing about a creep in broadcasting, commissioners are pushing other things out in their place.

Where as Richard argued that "Channel 4 airtime has been more focused on rig shows like 24 hours in A&E, which considers itself to be contemporary documentary and there's actually been more of those shows than structured reality coming out of Channel 4."

The most conclusive statement I took from the debate when it comes to answering the question of 'is structured reality a type of documentary?' that the debate became about, is this statement from Richard...

"Documentary is the creative treatment of actuality."

I think that kind of sums it up. As if it's a creative treatment, then technically you can do whatever you want when it comes to filming actuality/reality. Even if it's as extreme as structured reality programmes like TOWIE or Made In Chelsea.

If answering the question 'Is Structured Reality Corrupting Documentary?', which wasn't touched on enough to get a real conclusion, then I would have to say no. Because I personally think, like Richard, that there are plenty more contemporary documentaries on TV than there are structured reality. So I don't think that documentaries are being corrupted or brushed aside.

Documentary Unit: Pitch Planning & Research

After getting to have a full day of work together yesterday, Mary and I managed to get almost all of our work on our pitch done. Yesterday was very productive as we've known what we want our documentary to focus on and what it will feature, but this allowed us to get everything written down and come up with a step by step of how it will be presented from start to end.

One of the big issues we discussed was that perhaps the entire subject of LGBT is too large for a ten minute documentary. As it focuses on four different kinds of people and such a large variety of topics, we didn't want to risk only being able to present a very small amount of information on each one. So to avoid this we've decided to change our documentary's focus to homosexuality. This way we can go into a lot of detail on gay men and women rather than just touching on the subject.

Back to our pitch planning, throughout the day we found out a lot of interesting and actually very surprising information from researching the topic. We actually thought that society had become a lot more accepting of homosexuality in the last decade or two, but even as recently as 2009 "a significant minority of mental health professionals [were] attempting to help lesbian, gay and bisexual clients to become heterosexual." We think surprising facts like this will be very useful in our documentary as it could add shock value.

We decided that we want our pitch to be presented mostly orally, but with the addition of bullet points and images in a powerpoint presentation to summarise each part as we talk. I thought the best way to plan this would be to create a Word document that lists the name of each powerpoint slide/subject, what it's about, what the slide will have on it, and what Mary and I will say. We jointly discussed what we wanted each slide to inform people about and then wrote our ideas out in a sort of script form. I think this way of planning our pitch was very effective as we completed the whole document and we now know exactly what we want to talk about.

Above: A screenshot of the first page of the pitch planning document

Our tutor gave us feedback on our documentary ideas at the end of the day. While she thinks we have a very strong story and likes our central character, she wants us to show more about him, such as his hobbies. The main thing she touched on was that we need to give the audience something to be waiting for at the end of the documentary. So we need more current tension in his story (rather than just talking about the past) and a big conclusion/resolution to create more excitement. We plan to think about and research what we could use for current tension and excitement. Her suggestions included trying to contact Gay Pride and gay charity organisers and possibly looking into current news articles on the topic of homosexuality. We found this feedback very helpful and are hoping that we can find as much information and/or more contacts that can make our documentary more exciting.

Documentary Unit: Idea

We've started out documentary unit and I've already learnt a lot. Including what we expect from a documentary, what considerations to have and what details will keep an audience interested.

The 10 minute documentary's working title is 'Teen Spirit' and needs to be made in a style that would be broadcast at 9pm on Channel 4. It needs to "seek to inspire and empower the teen audience - think of positive role models and emphasise diversity" and should "be a ‘teen’s eye view’ and engage the audience with consideration of multi-platform applications".

In a pair with Mary, we considered all of the above and have decided that our documentary will be about LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) teens. To explain why we think this subject will make a strong documentary, below are my answers (factoring in Mary's answers) to questions our course leader asked...

Q: Does this subject resonate with me? Will it do so with others? Who?

A: Being L/G/B/T is a lot more commonly ‘out there’ now days. So many teenagers who have come out, are thinking about coming out or are afraid to come out could relate to the documentary and feel less alone. It could also help both teenagers and older generations who don’t have much of an understanding about LGBT to learn more and possibly become more considerate.

Q: What can I show people about this which is new?

A: The new part is that society is becoming more and more excepting of this topic over time, so what we could show is the change from then and now (e.g. decades ago, even a few years ago and now). This topic allows for a modern spin.

Q: What would I and others like to know more about?

A: I would like to know more about LGBT organisations as I’m not aware of how popular they are and what they consist of. I’d also like to hear about the topic from someone who is L/G/B/T to get their insight. I think audiences who want to be drawn into the documentary may want to see the above, as well the ups and downs. For example, parades, the culture, positive personal stories, emotional stories.

Q: What is unique?

A: This topic itself is unique. There are so many ups and downs to LGBT due to people who embrace it and people who discriminate against LGBT people that the documentary can go anywhere.

Q: Where is the best focus for this film?

A: The best focus in the film is most likely capturing emotion. From talking to teenagers of today who are dealing with their sexuality as well as older generations who are trying to get an understanding of the topic. The best way to keep an audience watching is to play on emotions and this topic can really do that, in the most sensitive way possible.

Q: What can I film? Remember it is a visual medium – the rule is always "show me, don't tell me"

A: What could be filmed: Organisation meetings, organisation activities, LGBT events (parades, parties), older generation interviews, teenager’s interviews, re-enactments of personal experiences, and a day in the life of someone who is L/G/B/T.