Our documentary seemed like it would attract teenagers themselves, as well as the parents or teachers of these teenagers. We researched into 'Wall to Wall' which is a production company in itself which produces factual documentaries about topics that are similar to the one we chose. Their documentaries are shown on BBC channels and Channel 4. We thought that our documentary would probably be shown on Channel 4, as it conforms to many of the conventions of a typical 'Dispatches' documentary.
(http://www.walltowall.co.uk/)
Using this production company as research into our documentary, we thought that ours would probably be shown on a channel like Channel 4, and be shown at around 8:00pm as this is a typical time that a Channel 4 documentary would be shown.
As documentaries were slightly harder in terms of research than music videos, we decided to research as much as possible into production companies of documentaries, and some directors. One director of documentaries who is well known is Nick Broomfield. Broomfield is an english documentary-film maker. Broomfield films with a small crew, usually just himself and one or two camera operators. This gives his documentaries a distinctive style; and he is often in shot holding the sound broom, this style shows him as quite relaxed yet straight to the point that he is trying to get.
Broomfield was awared the BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to Documentary, and was also given honorary doctorates from Essex and Surrey University. This shows his incredible commitment to the world of documentary making.
We watched snippets of some of his most famous work. We watched Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer, and the documentary he created on Heidi Fleiss when she was a major figure in the media; named Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam. As said previously, Broomfield emits a certain style through his work, it is professional, yet he befriends the subjects, becomes their friend and through this, allows a relaxed atmosphere show through his work.
We wanted too, for our documentary to be professional yet stylish and relaxed, so we attempted to try to mimic some of the ways in which he achieved this. These being; being relaxed with the interviewees and asking straightforward questions that needed simple answers that were straight to the point.
Here is a clip of Broomfield's work:
(Embed code has been disabled due to copyright.)
The work of Nick Broomfield influenced us in the way we made decisions and the way in which we created our documentary. Broomfield has a specific style that comes across strongly in his work. One of the ways in which we wanted to make our work similar is the way in which he introduces people as they come on screen, there is action shots and establishing shots showing them and there is a voiceover that explains who they are. This is what we did with all of our interviewees. I think this worked well as it allowed us to include some different shots and introduce a voiceover that is a typical convention of a real life documentary.
Another aspect of Broomfield's documentaries that attracted us was how friendly he is to his interviewees. We also wanted to include this aspect into our documentary. We constructed a simple and relaxed set of questions and asked them as if in a discussion. However, where Broomfield includes his speech in his footage, we decided to cut it out, because we were also relating to the conventions of the Dispatches documentaries, which cuts out the interviewers voice, however, the concept of the questions and the way it was done was influenced by Broomfield and his documentary on Aileen, especially.
We decided as a group to produce a questionnaire, that would create audience feedback on some ideas and questions we had about the genre and our ideas, and would contribute to the target audience we would choose. This is the questionnaire we came up with:
The feedback was very useful in developing our ideas for our documentary. We distributed them to a number of teenagers ranging from the age of 15 to 18. The majority of the students said they watched documentaries and found them factual. We wanted to gain this audience feedback to get some ideas and research on the background of documentaries. We found out that a lot of teenagers enjoyed the documentaries they could relate to more, this encouraged us further to stick with a topic that would focus around teenagers and relate to them.
Although this questionnaire was quite simple and to let us know if we were on the right track to producing something that teenagers would find interesting, we did not know a lot about what to put into the documentary and if teenagers would be interested in this.
So further on from the questionnaire, we showed a group of 8 people the documentary, and asked them what they thought.
Our first version of the documentary was mostly full of just the interviewees, and although we had talked about putting some establishing shots in and some moving shots to make it more interesting, we hadn't put this into action yet. However, we got the confidence and motivation to do this as 6 out of the 8 people who watched the documentary said that there needed to be a lot of establishing shots to make it more interesting and to allow them to stay focused on the documentary they were watching.
All 8 people also mentioned that the establishing shots should be while the interviewee was speaking, to break up the blocks of speaking.
4 out of the 8 people who watched the documentary also said they thought some screen freezes or pictures should be shown, but nothing specific was mentioned. This is when we thought of the idea of the statistic magazine pages. We thought this would fit well into the description of the freeze frame shots, with interesting information that would enable the people to decode the information and become an active viewing audience.
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