Is TV News a Window on the World?

There are probably many arguments to whether or not TV News is a Window on the World. but as much as the News try and be unbiased, I feel that the interpretations of the news are definitely structured and biased. Why might I say this, well lets's take a look at why the news things that they are truthful. Though when you think of news, you think that it's being told to you exactly how it is or was or in a balanced way, like looking through a window, seeing the transparency, the news, the connection between us and what happened. Well you see how it may be asking is TV News a Window on the World, yet you wonder how true that may be. Of course the news wants to tell you that it is true, which is why the question is there, is it true, and unbiased, does the news tell you everything, it's a window on the world.

I mean, the news has certain representations to keep it neutral and truthful as they show you the intro and the newsreaders portray the neutrality, but all of this is written about in my other post where I have analysed the introduction of BBC news and newsreaders to how they are truthful and honest about their window on the world. On the other hand though, there are laws that back up points where even though the news is meant to be truthful Ofcom states that the news has to be impartial (the link to this statement can be found here). I think that this makes it obligatory to be a window on the world as they have to be impartial, giving a neutral view upon all matters. Not only that but looking at the BBC guidelines for impartiality, it;s rules are quite similar.  

As you can see in the image beside it states that the news has to be impartial, but furthermore they've extended it to be impartial on all subject matters, this means that everything has to be neutral and no matter what the news will be seen transparent and balanced. These codes of practice are linked in with each other to make it so that the news is impartial. Although this may be the case there are still problems as there are cases where the BBC has been seen to be unbiased, the example of this is when Margaret Thatcher died and there were over 700 complaints that the coverage was biased.  There were various coverage's about this and here is a link to one (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2307211/Margaret-Thatcher-dead-Readers-fury-biased-BBC-website-articles.html) where this was said that they covered it without the neutrality. Though it wasn't and then it went further into the radio where a song went into the chart 'Ding Dong the Witch is Dead' but they only aired five seconds of the song. This was a huge bias situation where the BBC were not neutral about the situation at all. Although this may be in a bolder matter, and not to the selective stories, it was down to the newsreaders and how they presented the matter.

However, saying that the news is a window on the world is a mistake because it isn't. Although I just mentioned a story of the news being biased, there are other factors that enforce that news can't simply show reality, for many reasons, there is a gatekeeping process which is processed on a piece of news even before it makes its way onto the TV, so things are already being narrowed down. If you look at the image below you can see the drawn version of the gatekeeping process.

After looking at that, you can see that there are various ways of getting out of the TV News, in fact, there's more chance to have a story go into the 'dustbin' rather than actually make it on the TV. All of these factors are really important to how a new story is determined to whether or not it is screened, I find this to be quite interesting to know the features that come into play to whether a story is 'worthy' or not to be shown and that there are certain people who feel that other stories have priority. Looking back on these points that determine what gets to go on TV or not, firstly with the news sources, there are always certain terms that have higher importance, such as; police stations, other news companions, social media, court houses, Parliament, other political buildings and more, these will be monitored more than many other things and will always have priority over other stories. Having such a wide amount of stories in the news, how do you pick and chose what actually makes it onto the news?

Looking at the process of this, firstly the routinely monitored sources are only in certain areas, such as the parliament or in police, therefore there are usually news reporters standing by ready to get the story, whereas if a huge story breaks out in New Guinea, it's likely that the story won;t be covered because it's not somewhere news reporters are on stand by. So there are no sources and the story goes into the 'dustbin'. After that is the news values, the higher the importance the more likely the news story will be in the news, if the story has no values then there is no point in showing it because there are better stories out there. After selecting the stories with the most values they are then 'packaged' together in time slots with everything prepared, so you can't pick a 'package' apart. If there is a late breaking story, you can't shave time off of each story, you just cut one out entirely and that story is lost forever. Also, the Ministery of Defence may not allow a story to be shown for national security reasons and the law. Leading onto the next point of cost where the more expensive the story, the less likely it is to show it. An occurrence has happened before where the ITV couldn't afford the costs and therefore couldn't show it, but the BBC covered it, making it a competitive world with the news stories and because of the competition, if you are filming on story and there are a group of others filming somewhere near-by you're going to want to see what they are filming and try and get the better story out of it, this competition makes the window narrower because everyone can be fighting for the same story. Finally, if there is a technical problem and something happens then this could lead to the story just being dropped completely.

Two psychologists, Galtung and Ruge created a list of twelve values which they identified and use to justify what they found to be the occurring themes in news. A fair few of these values can be compared with the Rolf Harris case, the reason I'm using this story is because he definitely fits in with the values, a main one being elite persons, as he is considered an important person, not only that but the negativity of the incident has lead to it being searched into for an ongoing time, which then links into the threshold and continuity and this story is already in the news, as it started back last year and then it went on and the story got bigger as it continued, as the BBC reported more stories, which can be found here and here and I think that this story has been so big in news purely because even though he is seen as an elite person he is also a really meaningful individual to a lot of people, purely because he's been such a role model and he relates to a lot of the audience.

Not only is there the gatekeeping process but there is also another way that news goes about telling their stories, and they do this by making a fictional narrative alongside the story, this is where continuity editing is used and there is a kind of 'quest' in the little news story. There is a prime example of this when we watched an interview about a man who was about to be evicted from his home and he went on a little quest about the whole issue, although this is seen to be real life and actually happening, if there are such continuity techniques being used then that means the whole clip had to be staged and makes the story fake (in terms of the quest happening there and then). The reason these narratives are done is to make a little background and pull out the heartstrings on the audience as there is a little emotional heartfelt for the guy in this situation.

Also news tends to use a lot of actuality footage, which is real footage but the problem is that this footage that is used on a certain news story is not what they went out and filmed specifically for that story, they probably went down to the archive and used something that would fit well. This makes the news story unrealistic and not true to what it could actually be making the clips used, selected ones making the window on the world a little smaller because the news companions are choosing certain clips to pull on those heartstrings a little more.

Overall, it's clear that there is a window on the world, it's just a really tiny window on the world because there are so many processes and values that go on to make a piece of news to finally be selected to then appear on the news. As true and unbiased as the news would like to be, it's really clear that it isn't and then you wonder what if these other stories were shown? There are lots of things to influence the news stories that appear and it's clear that this 'window' is opaque.

Connotations of Newsreaders

News is newly received information about events that have recently occurred or even updating ongoing matters where newsreaders display themselves in a neutral way to tell us about these matters. News is important for everyone and is displayed in a sense of transparency as the news comes directly from the source and is told to its viewers. Before we picked a clip to analyse as a class we went through some iconography features that our found within the news starting sequences; We came up with the following things:

-Clocks and Time
-Rushing Graphics
-Technology
-World from Space
-Transparecy
-Landmarks from cities
-Music
-Voice overs
-Colours (scheme)

Looking at the introduction of BBC and it's news, I will be analysing it's starting sequence. The clip above is what I will be looking at and the first I notice is for a starting sequence sixteen seconds is a good time to try and portray the news in a whole, not only that but BBC have done it with the most obvious thing, the world. Also referring back to the list of features that usually appear, in this, I would say there are six out of the nine that appear and this is clearly of high importance. The first thing about this is the colour scheme as there are a few colours, red, white and black with a few hints of orange and yellow. This is the most basic structure where these colours easily pick up the viewers attention, not only that but it then further captivated by the speed of the world, this is also seen as urgency as the news is meant to be rushing to you fast to get the most recent and new information to you and having this kind of intro means that the sense of urgency is definitely there. Another important feature for news is transparency, as this indicates truthfulness, this motif is emphasised by the fact that the world in the intro is repeatedly seen through and only landmarks are highlighted, yet we know that it is the world, we are just 'seeing through it', the truth that the news what to display. I find this to be quite interesting as the world is see through but there are also other red rings that are circulating the world, showing that the news covers the entire world, every little feature in the sequence is rushed in the sixteen seconds yet it still grabs your attention and draws you in. After grabbing your attention it moves in to a beautiful shot of (usually two) newsreaders who are ready and waiting, with their urgency in the most neutral and unbiased way to tell you the news.

Newsreaders are a very powerful role in the world of news because they are also seen in certain ways, just like the intro, each newsreader is the same. Firstly their are usually two newsreaders, one a male and the other is a significantly younger female, the reason for this is because the man is meant to connotes wisdom, authority and maturity, where as the women is based on physical attraction, a very sexist point, but that's the way that it is. The importance of these two newsreaders who are ready and waiting to deliver the news to us is what draws us in with there sense of urgency shuffling papers and being ready, though they aren't rushing around in a messy state, it's waiting for us as they address us directly to the camera making us feel like the news is coming straight from it's source through them and to us. The newsreaders are a conduit in the way there deliver the news in a neutral way, pronunciation of words is always done with standard English as they use a limited range of facial expressions to deliver the news they always address the camera (well us directly). All of these represent the neutrality of the newsreaders making it more truthful and as unbiased as it can be without their own personalities being inflicted onto the news matter.

Finally there is the mise-en-scene within the studio, and this is also stripped back to the bare minimum, as there is a very large desk situated in the center of the room with a large wide background which is usually plain or has images of the ongoing news or places (depending on what the newsreaders are talking about). Back to the desk, this is the main feature in the room and is always seen as high importance, especially with those two newsreaders behind it, thus making us believe that what the newsreaders are telling is truthful. The room is also highly lit so that there are no shadows in the room, this is to connote the truthfulness even further as there is nothing to hide as the light beams into all cracks into the room leaving nothing hidden. Overall there are many features that make the news seem important, and the BBC definitely follow some of the common themes that occur in all news intros and then the delivery.

Documentary Evaluation

The Nature and Purposes of Research in the Creative Media Industries

Research is an important feature to all areas of creative media as it becomes the starting point of every production, the collection of data that is gathered over time and then analysed to give a further understanding into one (or more) topic or area that are being studying into (such as a production). Being a fundamental point in any production research can be collected in multiple ways and majority of the time all productions will gather the information in a range of ways, the main two ways of gathering information are through primary and secondary sources.

Primary Research is a really reliable way of gathering data as the data is acquired first hand rather than obtaining it from other sources. Primary research is done through various ways such as interviews, questionnaires, observations, focus groups and those kinds of interactive face-to-face bases. For my documentary I gathered primary research by going to Kayla and talking to her family about her, and just getting a little background knowledge, not only that but having an interview with her prior to the documentary was another source of primary research. I also did a survey where I gathered information from the college about self harm and this was done on Smart Survey in which I had a range of questions that were asked to find out more about what I wanted to research and how it affected others. The link to the survey can be found at http://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/107713KWJPH where the questions I asked are.

Secondary Research is then the flip side where this is information that has already been collected from somebody else and you are basically using their results for your knowledge, these can be from books, journals, newspapers, searching the internet forums and others, all of which you just use someones information. The internet was my main form for gathering secondary information as I went across various websites to find information, such as statistics that I would find useful to me, some of these websites were from http://www.youngminds.org.uk/training_services/policy/mental_health_statistics which is a website I found to be very useful as it gave me a lot of information that I didn't know about, and mainly just a little knowledge that has really helped me in understanding the topic a little more. I probably could have further backed my knowledge by going to the library and looking at books and seeing other people's perspectives that had been published and not sourced from the internet.

Moving on from the main two types of ways to collect data, you can then move on to the data you've collected and how well it is, such as in quality and quantity. Sometimes it is difficult to achieve a good balance between the two to get a really thorough and reliable set of results.

Firstly there is Quantitative Data, which is data that is collected in more of a quality, amount or range, such as program ratings, box office figures, sales and other numerical based ways. It's done on a larger scale of gathering a lot of information and just throwing the figures together, it's a way of collecting data and looking at the general overview with the numbers rather than looking into it further for detail. Doing the surveys was my way of collecting a numerical amount of data in which I got a lot of responses which were easy to look at and tell, the numbers which distinguished which answer was more appropriate and also it gave me a chance to see what the opinions of lots of students were.

Qualitative Data is where you then go into more detail and it's more quality rather than quantity realistically. This is where topics are gone into in much more depth and more analysis rather than looking at the figures of something, this is a really good way to get detailed data though it does take a lot more time and effort as the data needs to be detailed and that takes time. This come be done in the sense of film reviews, game reviews, responses to news coverage and discussions. With my work with some of my survey questions instead of clicking yes or no, it was an open ended answer therefore each individual had the chance to right what they thought, this gave me a view of each person and see what the problems were in their situations, but the data was detailed and qualitative.


After looking at the types to collect and the way it's analysed, there are also Data Gathering Agencies which are in place to share the information with people that are searching for certain things, though this data is gathered over time it is then always used to look back onto for later information or for when new things arise, a main data gathering agency is the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB) which is a company that gathers audience measurements and television ratings in the UK. The data that is on there website is gathered from various participants who have a box on top of their TV sets which tracks the programs that they watch, giving BARB a view of what programs are popular. BARB has further companies which then design and measure certain things within the company to make sure that all the viewings are right so that the data gathering is done properly.


There are also various other data gathering agencies which approach different sectors such as IMDb which is an online database for movies, television and online games. This has been an ongoing site for twenty-three years and has over 2,912,553 titles in it;s database. This site has the chance for each individual to submit their own material and also make edits to any existing data that is already on the site, though this has to be checked by higher authorities first, the website has been known to make errors but takes control of situations by making it's data as true as it can possibly be. A subsidiary of IMDb is a smaller company that tracks box office revenue's is Box Office Mojo, a smaller company that has been part of IMDb since 2008.

Audience and Market research is the next step where you have to see if the product you are about to produce is going to be suitable or any good for the public and therefore you need to test the product by reaching out to your target audience, this is classed as audience and market research. For my documentary I had to think about who my documentary would be suitable for in terms of demographics and looking at the age I thought that it would be appropriate for adults, to see this as something to learn from and also if they thought that their child may be suffering or having problems not only that but it could also apply to teenagers of Kayla's age because they could relate or once again learn from her experience. Saying this, the adult is more appropriate also in terms of the times that the documentary would be shown as this would be on around 7:55pm as a three minute wonder I also had to think about the fact that adults are more likely to be watching the TV at this time.

Production Research consists of the identification of the resources you will need to carry out the production, in some way it's the final gathering and analysis of all of the data and information you have already collection. Before filming begun for my documentary I had produce an array of information that would make my documentary doable, such as collecting consent from Kayla's parent and making sure she would sign the location release form and also making sure that I knew what dates I would be filming with the production schedule, these were important pieces of pre-production that not only me but every production no matter how big or small would need to do.

After gathering all the research and assessing it you then need to know how reliable and valid the data is. The reliability is finding out how reliable the data is and is a very important process in all productions. With my work I had to make sure that the results of my survey were reliable but with some of the answers people gave I knew that they were not as reliable as they were being rude and inconsiderate and therefore this made my results less reliable.
Reliability is an important factor, for example if a teacher asks it's class how many hours a week it spends at home working on that subject, it's likely that the student(s) that are asked will exaggerate there answer because they should be spending a lot of time and it's likely they aren't. This makes the results less reliable because they aren't the truth.

On the other hand, I still feel with the outlying answers that my data can still be reliable. This is further backed by how valid the data is, and this is how things are tested. With the survey that I created you can agree that my results are valid, but if I had done this test again or even repeated it on other occasions to get a more general range of answers then it would make my data more valid.
With Validity, you want to see how valid the data is, for example, when testing a method of 'How many Christians go to church' and you count the percentage of how many people went to church that week in various places, that doesn't then mean that the percentage that went to church are the percent of Christians because they may not be all Christians, this makes the method less valid.

Finally, I think that generalising my data is quite difficult, as I can't generalise it to the entire world purely because I only did my surveys on college students, and therefore I can't say that everybody else is the same to what I found out, though I have the change to make my data represent the college or even colleges in general as I have had around one hundred responses, and this is a wide sample which I can generalise.
Represenstativeness is another area of assessing data and with this you have to see if the data can repreent everyone, as in my example above, if you do a study on one class of 16-19 year olds, you can't generalise the results to all students 16-19 because that one single class can't represent the entire load of teenagers and they can't be generalised.

Research

Doing research is a main factor to making the best 3MW that I can, not only that but it gives me a better understanding of what I am trying to do and also trying to understand the person that I am doing the documentary on. I think that when conducting my interview I may also have a better understanding to connect with her and also make myself have facts and more knowledge in general. So I have set out to research a tonne of things to give me more details and factors about the things she suffers with and then to learn some statistics about it all. For the course of this unit I will use the pseudonym 'Kayla' to keep the identity of my friend hidden.

Firstly I went on to research just some general facts about mental health and some statistics behind it all. Not knowing where to search I simply went to Google which is the search engine I wanted to use, I searched for mental health statistics and this is the first search that came up and this was where I fund some statistics about a few topics in the mental health area, I read through and highlighted factors that were important to me, this was quite a useful piece which gave me a few general numbers about it all and they are some pretty big numbers, meaning that there are a lot of issues with mental health within young adults and children. So this to me is a good topic which I feel I will find quite a bit of research in.

After looking into this I went on to ask Kayla briefly what were the main issues in her life that are currently affecting her, this was just so I could prepare more research and know what I could focus on that she was comfortable talking about for when I interviewed her. She said that her main issue was her self harm and this would probably be the main focus that we might talk about, she also said that her ADHD and eating disorders would be other factors that contribute to how she is now, not only that but how it was made worse by the fact she has been bullied.






These would be the main factors that I would look into as these were the points Kayla made about what her issues are now. Firstly, I looked into self harm as I knew this would be the main factor I wanted to focus on and I found out some facts about it, finding a site which gave me some answers to why people self harm, as you can see in the image to the left there are a range of reasons and explanations to why people may self harm, and sometimes it can't be explained. I went back to Kayla and asked her why she self harmed and she couldn't give me an answer straight away other than the need to kill herself. That was quite shocking to hear and I asked her why but she couldn't give me one straight answer to why, as she said there are so many little things and reasons to what's bought her to where she is now. I found she definitely could be like how this page explained as there are a range of answers to why her self harm happens.




After finding research in the issues that are affecting her now I looked a little more into what affected her in her childhood as she had a troubled childhood suffering with child abuse, I feel that this may have affected how she may be now as this could link in with the other research I found saying that experiences from the past can affect you now. Looking at the website there was a little quote which  gave me a definition of mental health, as you can see it can affect a lot of thins in later life, not saying that all or this is how Kayla is now, I'm giving a general definition of what the website told me. The website further went on with some studies that had been conducted and this gave some results of how people were and had issues with, they didn't seem to be as much importance to me as much as the bottom paragraph was, as it gave a list of things that adults feel now (although Kayla may not be classed as an adult yet, this still has a link with how she may feel) These were really interesting things to read and learn about because these are some of the descriptive words that Kayla has told me she feels most of the time, it was also quite shocking to learn.

I have highlighted all of the problems that have and still do affect her, that's a lot of highlighted areas, which is why I feel that looking into her abuse may be a root I could take, though  it might also be a sensitive subject for her to talk about.




Going back to actually making a documentary, I needed to get a little primary research from peers, I made a short five question survey which just asked some questions about if people had watched documentaries, heard of three minute wonders and if they would be interested in my documentary,  after I had made this I then posted it onto Facebook, as you can see in the image, and I also posted it on other social media sites.

After having got a few responses, I then had a look at the results that I got to see if people would be interested in the documentary that I would be making, I found that there were a range of results actually and that the results for wanting to see my documentary were evenly shared, though some people weren't sure whether or not they would want to watch it, I then later specified if they would be interested in learning about self harm and eating disorders, in which to my surprise, people actually did. Even though I only had a small amount of replies, things still look like they could turn out well because people would be interested in watching my documentary and I think that if it was to be a three minute wonder preview then it would get views. I also think that it's definitely an interesting topic to look into, knowing that it's hard to please everyone as I found that all my responses had different tastes in documentary I thought it would also be a challenge trying to get a lot of new people interested in watching this because it's a different subject matter and some people might find it too sensitive, but I'm hoping that my documentary will be powerful and sensitive so that people will be hit by emotions and really enjoy the three minutes.

I also created a second survey which was to be sent to all of the students in college to find out whether or not students aged 16-18 self harmed or had ever self harmed, to do this survey I wanted it to be productive and the best it could be, and therefore I pieced together nine questions that I thought I could ask the I sent the link to the student welfare coordinator (Lisa Osborne) and (Anita Hartley) the email just asked for help and to make sure that it would be okay to send this questionnaire out to students.

A day later I had a response from Lisa and as you can see in the image that was her response, after reading that I made alterations to my questionnaire to make sure that it was suitable and to what Lisa had requested. After having done that I then sent the email out to all students in the college, I didn't personally do that, I took the link to IT who then sorted it out for me. I then waited and then collected my responses.

Having looked at all of the responses I found that it was a higher percentage of people that hadn't self harmed, though I had the trouble of deciding whether or not this was fair because not only did I have these responses but because I only had the fee use of the website, I had seventy-four responses that I couldn't look at, so I have to rely on the ninety-four that I do have. I found that thirty-nine of the people that took the survey had self harmed, so I went further to look into the rest of the responses to why to see if I could relate any of the reasons to Kayla.


The most shocking thing to look at was the reasons to why these people started to self harm because they all seemed to be similar problems, the main cause was stress. Not only that but anxiety and depression seemed to be other reoccurring words that appeared in the forty-one responses. Linking back to Kayla, I know that she suffers from depression and going to to ask her if school was ever a problem she agreed and said that bullying was something she had to face everyday and still does when she goes in though she is learning to face it. I think that college is similar, in the way that self harming occurs through bullying, as some responses had said. These were all interesting responses to see because they are all something that happened to a lot of these people, and throughing out my opinion I think that if this is something that is happening around college then clearly something could be done about it? But that's a whole different story. Further looking into the responses from my survey,one of the most shocking points was the question where I asked if these people would like any help. and thirty-one people said no, where as three said yes.





This is really shocking to know that so many people wouldn't like any help, and this lead to the question of how long people had self-harmed for to see if it was an ongoing situation or something some people just had an outbreak off around college. The scariest thing is out of the forty-one replies, exactly half of them had been self harming for three to nearly four years, a lot of people also specified 'since year 9' which seemed to be a trigger point for a lot of these people. I have found that this survey was quiet an insight to know that a lot of people around me within the college do actually self harm, though no one wants any help but for everyone to keep it to themselves. I find that these results are really something that I could talk about in my interview with Kayla, or at least talk to her before or after about to see how she feels about what is not only going on in school but is also happening in college, as some of the reasons she can relate too. After having done this survey, I made sure that help was available for everyone by adding some links to the bottom of my survey, of course everything was kept anonymous too.



After having done some more research I also needed to do some market research to find out how popular Documentaries would be and how often they were on TV to the amount of view time they had, well recently we paired up in the class and figured out the amount of view time that documentaries had, we found that there was a lot more view time then we would've thought as a huge 9.52% of TV time over the period of a week on Channel 4 was 15 hours and fifteen minutes. I think that this is a really interesting matter to know that documentaries are a lot more popular than we thought and Looking at some figures on Channel 4 I also found that documentaries were quite popular, and I found that having to shown mine would be interesting as I suspect more people than I thought would be interested in my documentary and watch it.

Going back to Kayla I think that school is a really important factor in her life yet this is also a triggering point, and as found in my survey that the school/college environment really plays a part in self harming. I asked Kayla if school was ever something that made her self harm and even though she agreed (as mentioned earlier) she said it's not her sole reason to self harm at all, though she couldn't explain why school wasn't that important to her she did say that she never self harms to attract attention as some girls in her school do (as she said). I went on to look into schools as a problem and found that it seemed to be something a lot of schools found it a problem but because of a coping mechanism rather than having a psychological or personality disorder. I found this piece of information to explain my results well.

After looking at all of this, I knew that Kayla's reason for her troubles wasn't from school, but having a little information myself to know what kind of things now a days affect teenagers her age was interesting to find out and for that I am glad that I looked into some areas that can 'trigger' some students. That was then further backed up by my results that I found when I did the survey for the college, I really think that my documentary is going to be an interesting one as I would really like to see Kayla's views on this whole topic in more detail, and lets hope it goes well.



Bibliography

Mental Health Statistics: http://www.youngminds.org.uk/training_services/policy/mental_health_statistics
Impact of Child Abuse: http://www.asca.org.au/about/resources/impact-of-child-abuse.aspx
A World Of Pain- Meera Syal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVng5a6Hh60
Childline: http://www.childline.org.uk/Explore/Self-harm/Pages/about-self-harm.aspx
Mind: http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/self-harm/#.UylozPl_t8E
Helping Self Harm Students: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec09/vol67/num04/Helping_Self-Harming_Students.aspx

Proposal

Creating a 3MW for me will be around a topic I really wish to explore. Looking at a friend's life, I will delve into her past uncovering some delicate issues as I wish to explore how she is coping with everything now and how it's all affected and still affecting her. I would like it to be touching documentary but have a positive (hopefully) outcome which when researching and talking to my friend I will uncover interesting and touching factors about her life which will be really good for my three minute wonder.

Putting the documentary into a genre will be quite simple as it will be a straight up documentary, being simple, honest and open, not only that but I intend to do it in an expository style, there are multiple reasons behind this, the main reason is the friend I know is only fourteen and for privacy reasons and because she is young, so I am keeping her identity hidden and doing an expository style, I will have a voice over and a load of shots of things in her life which are memories or important to her when I find out information. I also think using an expository style will be a real nice way to go about it anyway.

The audience that I will be targeting will be people around her age and the majority of the younger generation, who have had or are having issues in there life and also need something that they can connect with, and they will be my primary audience. There are a lot more of the younger generation who have issues in there life now more than the younger generation have ever had and having this documentary means that they can have something to refer to and connect with and maybe even help or be inspirational to them, as I find her inspirational to me and I find that the younger generation is the perfect target audience. Not only that but parents would be my secondary audience as it will rise awareness of what they child/children maybe be suffering from or have issues they may be hiding and it can be an eye-opener to try and make sure everything is all okay.

Creating some kind of relief and making people connect will be the main aim behind the documentary, I don't have a main goal, I just find her so interesting and her life is so tough and there is so much going on but she still keeps going and can be so good and just make it seem like there is nothing wrong sometimes, I just find her so inspirational, I'd like to share my feelings in a video with how she can be but with how much real goes on in her life and how she copes. I also think that maybe making this documentary could be really good for her as she has the chance to open up and just say what ever she wants, I really think that this could be a good three minute wonder.

For filming, I will have a few locations, at least I am hoping, as I will film wherever she wants to film, I think I'll film in her bedroom with hand movements and where she spends most her time being comfortable. I also would like to give her the camera and for her to film whatever she wants to film with things she does and what keeps her occupied such as if she goes for a walk on a certain route and where she goes and shots of the route. I don't know all of the locations but I'm hoping that the main place will be her bedroom.

For the production I will need myself to do some filming and ask questions about her life but I would also like her to be part of the production team as she uses the camera to film things in whatever way she likes of things she wants to be in the documentary. I will not need any other production team as I am capable of putting a camera on a tripod and doing some filming. I will need my talent to be in the film and depending on what's said I might also have her mother or brothers giving an opinion about it (but that might not be needed). Other than that I don't need any other people, mainly her and myself.

Sample Interview Questions-

Mentioning earlier about the camera and tripod I think that they may be the only two pieces of equipment that I will need on location as I will just be filming everything that happens when talking. I might later re-record the voice for the voice over but I'll see how that goes later down the line, I also might use a camera to take some photographs if any photos of things that interest her she may want to take. Other than that I will not need any other equipment. With costumes and props, I will not set anything, it will just be whatever is being worn on the days I film, I don't want there to be set costume as I want it to be as real as possible and if I film on different days and the clothes have changed then that's that, the clothes have changed, I don't mind, there are no set props or costumes.

For this filming, I have no budget, purely because I will be borrowing a camera and tripod from college so I won't need money for that and traveling expenses aren't much because I see her quite regularly and I will have to see her in my own time as she will be at school if I wanted to film during college lessons so it won't be much of an expense. I don't have a budget and I don't think that I will need one.


Update after discussion with my teacher:

Sean:-

It's acceptable to return to sample questions after I have conducted my secondary research, as I will have more of an idea of what kind of questions that I would like to ask. I also have to think more about the mood, as at the moment the 'mood' is unclear ergo I need to have some way of making it positive and uplifting but will have to wait and see based on the footage I get, hopefully it will work out.

Ellie:-

• Capitals and italics for titles
• Look again at primary and secondary audience and weigh up content with 3MW audience and placement on channel.
• Discuss accuracy / truthfulness of getting her to film segments.

Three Minute Wonders

Looking into documentaries, I looked at a program called '3 Minute Wonder'. This is a television series that has been going since 2001 and shows the three minute life of various sequences, these shorts give the directors a chance to target a large audience and get them an attempt to be noticed to get into the bigger film and television industry. We were given the task to watch some of the episodes and then explain our own opinions and also link them back to the Bill Nichol's five documentary styles,

After having searched a while through YouTube and watching a handful of 3 minute wonders there were a few that stood out to me and that I found most interesting. Taking a look at the first video that I found, it was called 'Home' and was a really touching documentary as it explores our collective sense of home through a visual poem, spoken by Joe McGarry, he speaks about the journey of finding his home within himself. If I was to categorise this, it would definitely be expository, I say this because it is done in such way as it presents a topic which is demonstrated visually with various images and a voice over (also a typical characteristic of this style) which addresses the situation about home, not only that but it is neatly linked in with the dialogue being a poem, this is simple and easy to understand, well at least I found it easy to understand and I really like how each photograph represents the different homes, yet it's irrelevant to the message he is trying to get across. This is a simple way of creating a documentary and yet it is a very powerful one, which is why it is one of my favourites from the selection I watched.





Secondly I found one which was very different, especially the documentary style, but it was still addressing a topic, but this was done in an interactive and observational style. The documentary was called 'This Is Our Youth: Carrot Crew' and was trying to promote healthy eating but nobody would listen to their argument and the 'Crisp Crew' were the ones who never got in trouble. This documentary had the interactive style as we have one sided interviews with the 'Carrot Crew' as they give their opinions about what they are trying to do and also the opinions on how others have reacted to them. Though there are usually two sided interviews in interactive documentaries, this still sets up an argument and I guess the 'Crisp Crew' are the other side, though we never do see an interviewer. There is also the observational side which is when we see shots of the 'Carrot Crew' at lunch time switching the food and also when they are about to enter their lesson, this just shows the real life events without the film maker making any interruptions to what is going on and therefore is an observation. This was one of my favourites as I liked they mix of both documentary styles and I also thought what they were doing was really inventive and it was quite amusing which is why I enjoyed it.





Finally, I found another video which was really quite strange, in fact, I'm not sure how to explain it at all, it was completely different and the camera angles and the way it had been shot was something that really stood out making it just a really strange documentary. This was called 'King Of Laughter' and was about a man who travelled to England as he wanted to cheer up England with laughter. There are various scenes cut together showing the responses of people laughing, the people that he cheered up, and this is done to show how he has improved and is making people laugh, in some way I find this documentary a little manipulative because I am sure not everybody laughed (me being grumpy and all) therefore these clips were assembled in a little montage of laughter sequence to show his improvements and this to me doesn't seem to be real, but all of the clips are observational as he goes out in daily life to see these people and observe there life though he does partake in the action alongside a voice over which could be slightly interactive but the voice over itself can be expository. I am not sure how to explain the video as it is very strange but I feel that the guy is trying to hard to make it seem like he has cheered everyone up because that's just not possible, maybe I just don't have the belief that it could happen like the man does and therefore it's a strange but interesting documentary.





Overall, I find a lot of the three minute documentaries quite different and inspiring to others all in there own independent way, each one seems to be unique which makes it valuable for the time slot that it is played in which really does give a chance to get the directors known because they have something different. I think that these documentaries all show different areas of interest using a mix of Bill Nichol's styles and it was interesting to research the 3 minute wonders.


Documentary Marketing Research

Looking at TV listings, we (Steve and I) went through the Sky TV Listings and looked at a couple of channels to see how many Documentaries were on in a week. With this we looked at the amount of programs shown and how many hours it calculated up to, counting from today 12am to Wednesday 12pm. Firstly we looked at Channel 4 and counted all of the documentaries during that week, there were only twenty documentaries that were being viewed, the total hours of TV in a week is 168hrs and only 15hrs and 50minutes were documentary, this is a mere 9.52% of TV in a week that is documentary. Furthermore we went on to search how many documentaries were on during peak time. Having searched when peak time was, we found that it was during the hours of 6pm and 10:30pm, then working out how many of those documentaries were during that time was only eight, this means that only 40% of the documentaries shown in a week are shown during peak time.

After doing this channel we then looked at another set of TV listings and compared Channel 4 with BBC1, firstly we thought that there would be a much smaller amount of documentaries that were shown on this channel and that's why we picked it, though we were shocked to find that there are sixteen episodes that are shown. Though two of those programs every morning (excluding Saturday) have an 1hr and 15minutes of documentary that are a daily episode. Altogether that was 12hrs that were shown on TV, compared to the 9.52% that are on Channel 4 there is a 7.14% on BBC1. There may not be a huge difference but having found a higher outcome than we thought, we then looked into the peak time and there were only two programs that were shown during peak time compared to the eight that are on Channel 4, in percentage thats 16.67% for BBC1 and 40% for Channel 4, this is a huge comparison, and shows that documentaries are shown a lot more on Channel 4. This was interesting to find out and I am surprised there are still a really small amount of documentaries shown on TV.


BARB is where we went to look for more information about documentaries and how many views that some programs got. When here I looked at Channel 4's TV views and found that for the documentaries there were a fair amount of views, making them quite popular, for instance out of the top ten of the most viewed there are six documentaries, one being Benefits Street: The Last Word, which has 3.13 million views, which is even more than Hollyoaks, a well known popular drama which has 1.24 million views, this shows that the documentary is a lot more popular and that specific documentary has been a huge success, showing that documentaries can be really good and popular, shown within the Channel 4's viewing results we can see this.

Documentary

What is Documentary?

"The creative treatment of actuality" I think that would best describe what documentary is, but that's quite difficult to understand too. When you think of a documentary you think whether or not it is fiction or non-fiction and then there are a few ways in which a documentary can be done. These various approaches are what make a documentary so distinctive, as documentaries have a sense of authenticity to them.  Documentaries consist of real time events that are going on or have currently happened and these are meant to be un-staged and have a sense of realism about them. These variations all have certain features which make them the certain types, Bill Nichols was the man known for identifying the types of documentary, they were:

Expository

This was the most common occurrence of documentary, known with a voice-over ongoing over the top of the image that is being played, this is known to usually be informative information as the voice-over describes a certain circumstance or situation, although the voice-over is not currently at the scene where these images are, its later added in. The intention of an expository documentary is to provide some kind of an argument or even to inform/educate the viewers. A good example of this is We Are The Lambeth Boys (1958) where the voice over informs you about the lives of these teenagers, also linking in with the argument point, the issue with this is that we only have the voice-over to listen to and the opinions may be one-sided and therefore tamper with the realism and authenticity of the film.

Observational

Secondly, a documentary that is unstructured and entirely led by the event, as we observe what is going on. There is no voice-over like an expository documentary, we are just left with the event to keep the audience entertained and be observational, this is also given a term 'fly-on-the-wall' as you are just observing, this gives the viewer a chance to obtain there own opinion about what they are watching and come to their own conclusions about it all. A prime example of this is Etre Et Avoir (2002) where a class and the teacher are being observed and we get long takes of the classroom and what the students are doing. This leads the viewer to make an emotional attachment as we see them over the year and we make our own opinions on who we feel is good and bad or even just to learn about them without drawing major conclusions like some documentaries, this is laid back and truly beautiful. The sad thing about this is that this true beauty of a documentary was made, once the film had been released the teacher (George Lopez) tried to sue the director (Nicolas Philibert) for the release of the film as Lopez was told that this was intended for educational purposes only and not to be such a mainstream distributed film.

Interactive

These are documentaries where the film maker makes themselves apparent in the documentary, they are usually there to ask questions or keep the flow going but mainly they try and explain and prove the point that their whole documentary is setting out to say/do. These are different from the other types as they don't try and observer or talk over an observed event, they are more involved into getting answers to the questions and making the decisions in leading the audience through the documentary and making sure that things are done. Michael Moore is known for his documentaries and he is very interactive with them as in Bowling For Columbine (2002) he was a key feature into whether or not guns were a cause of violence into the Columbine Shooting, but he had a lot of on screen time and was also very leading in the documentary, although most interactive documentaries tend to share both sides of the argument. He continued to voice his own opinion on others whilst the documentary was juxtaposed together in the way that he wanted it to be seen. Interactive documentaries cause problems with access and privacy and this tends to affect a production, the reason for this is there tends to be a lot of interviews and this means there has to be a lot of paper production work that goes into it before being allowed to film the interview, this is the same with filming people under the age of eighteen as until they have signed the form they can't be filmed. Linking it back with access, location release forms are very important so that the production has the rights to film on that location, all of these are issues that arise in interactive documentaries more commonly than others, though paper work still has to be completed for any kind of production.

Reflexive

A type which doesn't hide the fact that it is a documentary, in the way it entails itself and reveals the conventions of documentary to the audience. A completely different approach to the other types of documentary as it tries to break the existing conventions to make it apparent that these things are going on, not only that but reflexive documentaries make the whole process the main focus point, most of the time the film maker is involved (like interactive) but they will still provide a narrative. Man With A Movie Camera (1929) is a great film that is entirely based on a man with his camera and he films himself doing all of these things involving great camera work, making it apparent and well focused on the film making process. I find that this is also a well edited movie in the narrative structure for the time it was made to be such goodness.

Performative

Finally this type of documentary is based on being most presented rather than observing situations as there are a lot more re-enactments and stories that are created to construct what is being said. The problem with this is that the reconstructions of certain events can be done to far, so that the truth is then twisted and this makes the documentary not completely true, though saying this, these kinds of documentaries are usually one sided as the production tends to aim towards one view fights to make it that way. Dominic Littlewood has appeared in many TV documentaries that tend to be aggressive towards finding out the truth in certain situations as he implies a lot of things. A program called Fake Britain is another where he sets out to catch people out, this is emphasised by re-enactments of situations to see the problems they may have caused. Another program he is in is Cowboy Builders where he purposely sets up the event (instead of a re-enactment) where he then catches the trouble makers in the act, this is another interesting way to approach this type of documentary.


Overall, I don't think you'll ever be able to achieve a documentary that is 'the creative treatment of actuality' because not only are there so many different approaches to going about a documentary but it'll never be completely true, because there are so many things that are done and said and editing out with this careful selectiveness and then you're already taking away the true realism of it.