Documentary Unit: 'Katie Piper: My Beautiful Face'

Today I have watched the documentary 'Katie Piper: My Beautiful Face'. I for some reason had never heard of Katie Piper and her story, until I saw an episode of Body Shockers (which she presents) and was intrigued, so I decided to research her. I found out that she was an up and coming model, until she had acid thrown in her face - orchestrated by her ex boyfriend. I was so shocked and disgusted when I learned this, and so was even more intrigued when I found out there was a 2009 documentary on this.

For the most part, the documentary was very shocking and emotional. It begins with her showing us her pictures on TV, with her back to us, telling us about her past, then the first shocking moment is revealed when she shows us CCTV footage, tells us she had acid thrown in her face and shows us herself now, with a scarred face and a plastic protective mask. After this first shocking and upsetting moment, more follow with her revealing that she's so afraid, of her attacker being at the door every time she hears the door bell, of hot drinks and candles. There are then incredibly sudden and shocking pictures of her in hospital, first with plaster over her face, but then gruesome images of her burnt face, having surgery and her skin graft. Shocking for the audience in general, but this upset me very much - which obviously achieves having an extreme amount of sympathy for her as well as anger toward her attacker.

Accompanying this, her voice overlays with "they removed my entire face, I guess it just ended up in a medical waste bin" - which is devastating. The final most shocking moment followed, with a family video of her struggling in her early recovery days at hospital, unable to talk, along with an interview with her parents, who get emotional talking about her not being able to talk and writing questions like 'am I dead?', 'help me' and "the worst of all" ...'kill me'.

The biggest break through moments were when she and the audience experience a suspenseful await the verdict of her ex boyfriend and her attacker, who both received two life sentences. The lead to the second breakthrough, of her no longer needing to live in as much fear, and deciding to finally leave the house and go shopping. Although it's emotional as she is so self conscious, it's also a turn around moment as it's the beginning of her new life, and her being able to be more like herself again.

The most uplifting moment is when she, her family and friends go out to celebrate her birthday. For the first time since her attack, she got dressed up and went out in public to celebrate, finally feeling like she had her life back. With this being one of the final moments of the documentary, it gives a very upbeat and inspirational vibe.

It was extremely uplifting for me to watch now, as in the documentary she says that she wanted kids and a husband and wasn't sure if she could have that anymore, and she now has a baby and a husband. She also thought her career was over, and she is still an active presenter today. While the documentary had very gruesome, unsettling and devastating moments, it gives off a very positive message that you can truly overcome anything.

Above: Katie before the attack

Above: Katie in 2009, at the time of the documentary

Above: How Katie looks now

Documentary Unit: Final Cut & Critical Reflections

As of today, Mary and I have completely finished our film and the documents supporting it. Today, Mary viewed the editing changes that I'd made and agreed that everything looked great and was almost ready to submit. The only task we had left was to add the closing credits, so we viewed two Channel 4 documentaries' credits (Skint & Educating Essex) to use as a reference on how we should display and order our own. We finished with very neat credits with the upbeat acoustic music that's used throughout to accompany it.

Once finished, we showed our documentary to our tutor. And thankfully, she couldn't find fault with it. Thanks to her advice in previous viewings, our final cut needed no further changes.

We've ran into a few issues along the way, with the LGBT support group dropping out, struggling to collect rights-free Gay Pride footage and smaller details such as on-set lighting issues and a faulty battery. But due to being very organised and co-operative, along with our characters also being so, we've had great success in this unit. I think that our central character is perfect, due to wanting our documentary to be touching and emotional, but not depressing, he's ideal. He has sad stories of his past and has had struggles with his sexuality and the discrimination he's faced, but due to his bubbly and extremely likeable personality, he's perfect for being our main focus, drawing the audience in, and ending the documentary on a positive note.

Our other characters of Michelle, Vicki and Kristian make up the rest of the documentary in a very contributive way. Rather than being add-ons to Carl's story, they each bring their own very informative and personal touch. I think that Michelle is very useful for relating to the past and how things are changing, as well as getting an insight into gay people in an older generation. Vicki is the least personal aspect of the documentary but the most informative, as any young gay people can find her information extremely helpful. Lastly, Kristian is both great support for Carl's story as well as bringing a second experience of a young gay person coming out in today's society.

The visual's of our documentary are of course a large part of what makes it so interesting. Being made up of active sequences of the characters and their surroundings to support what they're saying, and vibrant Gay Pride footage, I think it makes the documentary a lot more eye-catching than one that is filled with nothing but interviews.

However, we didn't solely rely on visuals. I think that the questions we had each character answer provided us with great interviews full of helpful and very touching stories. We also added statistics to our documentary based on previous research about the discrimination of homosexuals and how homosexual teenagers are dealing with their sexuality. Give the documentary a lot of factual support.

I'm also very happy with our choice in music. We searched a few royalty-free music websites and eventually decided on Acoustic Breeze by Bensound. It's a very low-key soundtrack, allowing it to fit with the emotional side of the documentary, but due to being an acoustic guitar track, it also has an upbeat feel. I think it really strengthens the ending to the entire documentary.

I'm incredibly happy with the outcome of all of our hard work. I think the documentary fits very well with the Channel 4 style, due to the overall subject and it's visuals. I also think it's very inspirational for any teenagers struggling with their sexuality or homosexual people in general. It's a very touching film and we've achieved exactly what we set out to.

Being Gay Today - Final Cut

Documentary Unit: Finalised Script

Now that everything is complete, we have updated our script. As our draft script differed to our end result due to original plans falling through and deciding to set up different situations. We originally planned to interview and observe an LGBT support group, then have our central character, Carl take part in a group session. However, luckily in the early stages of planning rather than later, the group dropped out. So the LGBT group became an interview with the Kent Pride organiser, even though Carl couldn't join in with this, I think the Pride group is even stronger than our original idea.

Everything else in our script remained the same throughout, just with different cutaways, sequences, ordering and commentary. So we've been able to keep the same vision for the documentary the entire time.

So we now have a finalised script, based on the ordering and features of our final film. I think it's a very strong script that perfectly captures our documentary.

Our script from start to finish

Documentary Unit: A Lot of Editing

Today I spent approximately 7 and a half hours of straight editing. To have everything neat and ready for our last fine cut viewing tomorrow and submission the day after, I edited as many things as possible. I firstly needed to cut our time down, it's been tough to cut down mine and Mary's work - which is why our original cut from our transcript was 23 minutes long - but today I managed to cut it down from 12 minutes to 10 minutes and 20 seconds.

I then spent a lot of time changing some cutaways all including pride footage, shots of Carl and images, due to feeling that the new ones I've added are stronger to the story. But the two things that have taken the most time and detail have been fine tuning the sound and colour correction. 

Due to an error on our mic, all of our sound was only coming out of one speaker, so I firstly needed to correct that, I then moved on to changing the volume on all of the clips, as they varied in volume to each other. There were also a lot of glitches in the sound and certain sentences that had been cut together didn't flow, so I removed all glitch sounds and created gaps in the sentences to tidy them up.

After this, I colour corrected every clip. As they were all slightly lacking in vibrance and colour (which I think can be the obvious difference between an amateur looking film and a professional one). Now that I've done this, I think the documentary looks a lot more fresh and eye-catching. The only issue that I ran into with colour correcting was with Michelle's interview, as the light from outside continues to change dramatically throughout. It's quite noticeable but I don't know how to fix it in a smooth looking way, so I'll ask for both Mary and our tech support's opinions tomorrow.

The last thing I did was add a soundtrack to the documentary. Mary and I both liked a royalty free acoustic track that we tested so I used it for the remainder of the documentary. I didn't want it run throughout as I think it takes away from what the characters are saying. So I added it to sequence clips with commentary and for the introduction and closing credits.

I think with all of the progress Mary and I have made in the last few weeks, and the fine touches that have been put into place today, our documentary looks great. I think I'm going to feel very positive when submitting it.

Our almost completed timeline

Documentary Unit: Pride Footage & Title

We'd originally struggled to receive any answers about using people's YouTube pride footage. But finally, we got replies this week and have now been able to add it to the documentary. It's been extremely helpful for our sequences and cutaways, as well as bringing a lot of vibrancy and excitement. We've now also been able to have our statistics and questions written on screen at the same time as they're said in the commentary, as I liked the idea of having slowed down, slightly blurred, black and white Pride footage in the background. We both think it looks great.

We also decided on our title yesterday: Being Gay Today. As our tutor suggested that we either using a pun for a title or something very straight forward, we opted for the latter, due to this being a sensitive topic. I think our title works really well with the documentary as it describes exactly what it's about - dealing with being gay in this time.

One of our on-screen statistics

Documentary Unit: 'Teens'

Today I watched the third (and only available on demand) episode of the Channel 4 documentary 'Teens'. The episode follows the lives of four teenagers, three of which are connected and one has her own story. The story of Shauna, James and Peter focuses on a bit of a love triangle, due to the fact that best friends James and Peter are both interested in Shauna. Whereas Melissa's story focuses more on sex/teenagers losing their virginity, and a love interest between her and her best friend, Shane.

I found the documentary to be very honest, it didn't ignore the obvious that most teenagers have sex, go to house parties and drink alcohol. In fact it even began by introducing each character at a drunken New Years Eve party. There's minimal interviews with the central characters throughout, for the most part they give their opinions on an issue or talk about their feelings in actuality scenes with friends. However, more documentary styled interviews do take place, but with disconnected couples sharing their relationship stories and friends of the central characters talking about them.

The unique part of the documentary is that throughout, the teen's texts, social network posts, internet searches and calls are often written out on screen. This has been seen before, for example in Sherlock Holmes, but I personally haven't ever seen such an interesting feature in a documentary and not to such an extent in any programme.

I found this documentary to have a very personal touch, with the commentary being done by Craig Roberts, he's rather young himself, so it felt like a documentary made for young adults, by young adults. It's also very easy to get invested in the characters, as the topics include sex, love and friendship, anyone can relate to it and sympathise with their issues.

Shuana, Melissa and James

Documentary Unit: Commentary

We recently dedicated a day to commentary. At times when I'd been doing some editing, Mary had been planning our commentary while watching to figure out the best things to say. We then came together and typed it all up, we then looked back at the commentary from our original script and mixed them together. I think we have great commentary as it's very descriptive of what our subject and question of 'what's it like being gay today?' is, as well as introducing each character and including important and supportive facts.

We decided that Mary is the best choice out of the two of us for commentary, as she's very close to our central character Carl, Michelle is a close friend of her family and she has a great speaking voice. So, we moved on to getting it recorded. We used the mic in the recording room and recorded it onto the Zoom. We ran into a couple of problems as we weren't too familiar with the technology, but as nothing was too major, we managed to record our commentary with ease.

We then proceeded to add it to Final Cut. Once we split each section up and placed things such as the introduction and introducing Carl, it made the documentary really come to life and feel professional.

Above: Our first page of commentary

Above: Our timeline, showing the newly placed commentary

Documentary Unit: Further Editing

Mary and I were able to get a lot of work done today. We added all of our intro and end shots, and all of our establishing, actuality, sequence and cutaway shots to the entire documentary, as well as cutting further clips that weren't needed. We also fine tuned everyone's dialogue by cutting out the glitches and making the cut together sentences flow a lot better. Our documentary now feels a lot more professional, sentimental and takes us a big step further in the editing process. The only issue we're having is getting approval from anyone to use gay pride footage, but we continue to contact people.

As writing the commentary has begun, our next task will be to finely structure the commentary and get it recorded and added to final cut.

An actuality shot added to Vicki's interview

Documentary Unit: Editing

Our work is really starting to come together now that our documentary is under 10 minutes long. When it totalled at 23 minutes it all felt a bit messy and unorganised. Now that Mary and I have spent the day cutting each section of the documentary down dramatically - taking out the lesser needed discussions - we've taken roughly 14 minutes away, which feels like great progress.

Our tutor then watched our sync assembly and thankfully, was impressed. Having loved our central character's personality, story and part in the documentary, as well as our other characters consisting of his boyfriend Kristian, Michelle, and Vicki, she only felt the need to give us a few notes so far. These being that we should...

- Rearrange the order of central character Carl's introduction

- Slow down his fast storytelling with cutaways

- Remove his introduction to his name, age and sexuality, and replace it with commentary on this

- Add travelling shots when Carl visits places

- Build up Carl and Kristian as a couple with shots of them in their life

- Make sure to leave from one thing to another in the commentary and turn a corner - for example "When comparing Michelle's experience in the 90s to Carl's experiences today, we can see that society isn't quite as accepting of gay people as we may have thought. However there are supportive services available..." [cut to Vicki]

We've already began adding introductory shots and sequences to the documentary, as well as making the changes that our tutor suggested. As you can see in the picture below, we've began covering Carl's first interview/introduction with personal sequences and cutaways. We should make even more progress on this when editing tomorrow.

Documentary Unit: Sync Assembly

Mary and I have made a lot of progress recently. Once we'd finished transcribing, we took to highlighting the most important parts of everyone's dialogue. This took some time as we needed to be thorough, but once it was done it made it incredibly easy to begin editing. By splitting the workload again, we each edited every individual clip, making sure to keep our highlighted parts and cut out anything unnecessary. Once this was completed, we put our work together on the Final Cut timeline and reviewed it. While our sync assembly is currently far too long (approx. 23 minutes!) it's a great start for our editing process. We can now begin to add cutaways, actuality shots and sequences and fine tune the documentary - and of course shorten it to 10 minutes!

I think that Mary and I managing our workload very well and making a lot of good progress on our documentary every day. I already feel like the documentary is off to a very good start.

A page of our highlighted transcript

Documentary Unit: Transcript

Today Mary and I went through our footage and began to transcript it. There was a lot to do as luckily we have a lot of footage as well as a big variety of footage to work with. So we split the workload and got everything down in detail. We did run into the problem of the entirety of Carl and Michelle's transcript (the biggest one) that Mary was working on not saving properly and vanishing! So luckily, as everything else we did is complete, we had to split the transcript for that and complete it separately.

Now that the transcript is finished it will be a lot easier for us to start editing, as it will allow our sync assembly to flow nicely and we can cut out the unneeded parts of the documentary in a very organised and timely way.

A page of the transcript

Documentary Unit: Editing Workshop

Today we had an editing workshop with a BBC editor. It began with him telling us of his editing experiences and his process. He followed this by giving us advice on the best ways to edit our work.

We then moved on to editing individually. We were given a transcript from a documentary shoot that our tutor filmed and were told to cut down each clip so that we were left with the most useful lines from the interview transcript. After this we were given the freedom to cover the interview how we liked with the provided cutaway/actuality clips.

With the footage we were given, I think I was able to make quite a smooth piece of work. Some of the clips were a bit hard to work with due things such us out-of-focus shots and camera shake. And I have to admit that the interviewees weren't particularly entertaining to watch, but I think with the actuality and sequences, it makes the short 'documentary' piece rather interesting.

I think that today was helpful practice for beginning to edit mine and Mary's work in an effective way.

Here's my work from today...

Documentary Unit: Kent Pride Shoot

The last bit of filming Mary and I had left to do was an interview with Vicki, the organiser of Kent Pride. So we travelled to Canterbury where she allowed us to film her in her office. I found that she was very easy to interview, every question we asked her was followed but very detailed answers. Such as asking her about what Kent Pride does for homosexual teenagers, and her saying very inspiring words about her life when she was a teenager and how she wants teenagers today to have more help.

While the interview was great, we did struggle to get a lot of coverage, due to her office being very small and limited on space, and our battery being faulty. This meant that we had to have the battery on charge while filming, and couldn't move very far. However, her office being small worked to our advantage when it came to our battery issue, as we were able to film almost everything from one position. We picked out useful and interesting sequence shots from her office including Kent Pride posters and Vicki's fundraising chart, as well an actuality shot of Vicki writing a Kent Pride blog post on her computer.

I think that the Kent Pride section of our documentary will be really helpful and informative for the audience. I think that with the limitations that we had, we did a very good job of covering her interview and the cutaway shots.

Vicki's interview

Sequence shot

Actuality shot

Documentary Unit: Easter Work

Over the Easter break, we've gotten a lot further in our work. We now have three shoots completed with one remaining (assuming we don't decide that we need extra coverage).

Completed shoots...

- Central character Carl's interview
- Carl meeting Michelle - a middle aged lesbian who discussed the topic with him
- Carl and his boyfriend, Kristian

I have to give a lot of credit to Mary where it's due, as she had to film the meeting with Michelle and the coverage of Carl and Kristian on her own. However, having decided exactly what would be discussed and filmed when planning our documentary before Easter, we can agree that the ideas for both shoots are joint.

As Mary and I filmed Carl's interview together, I can discuss our central character's shoot. We made sure to work off of our script beforehand, by deciding what Carl would talk about and act out in advance, we were able to be very well organised and schedule everything perfectly. We had him introduce himself and discuss things such as his childhood, coming out to his family, his time at school and what he looks forward to in the future. We encouraged him to be himself and try not worry about saying everything exactly the same each time we filmed a topic that he discussed. Luckily Carl's a very naturally confident and upbeat person, so he was very good at being interviewed.

We filmed this in his bedroom, as it's the most personal place he could be. I think it will make the audience feel closer to him and his story. As well as filming the interview in his room, we had him act out one of his hobbies of playing the piano and singing and looking through family photos, these will make very good sequence/cutaway shots. We've also got scanned copies of his family photos to use in the documentary. Our other sequence shots involved wide shots of his street and close-ups of items in his room such as his artwork and stuffed animals.

And lastly we filmed a more emotional part of his story. We took him back to his old secondary school. We've been told that we don't have permission to use the school's name in our film, so we were only able to get the one shot of the school that didn't have the school name/logo in it. We had a short interview with Carl in front of the building (as he was very uncomfortable being there) and he discussed how it felt to be back outside of the school.

I think this shoot went very well. From the material that we've got of Carl, the audience will really get to know him. With the addition of his meeting with Michelle and introducing his boyfriend, we've got a lot to work with now. We will next be interviewing Vicki from Kent Pride, and will gather archived footage from her.

Screenshots of Carl's shoot

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.