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.