Documentary - First Team Meeting and Ideas Lab (17th March 2021)

First Team Meeting and Ideas Lab

Our brief for this unit is a ten minute stand-alone documentary that fits in with the idea of '2021 vision' for BBC 3. 

We were put into breakout rooms with our groups to begin to discuss ideas, thoughts and decide upon roles with regards to the documentary. I am assigned as the Producer and Covid-19 Supervisor, Heather Wallbanks the Screenwriter, Derrin Elliott the Director of Photography, Joey Main as the Editor, and Harry Macer as the Director. 

In the breakout room, we came up with a selection of ideas for our documentary and discussed through each one. Our ideas were as followed: how young people live their lives through social media, students in lockdown, how Covid-19 has affected things (e.g. culture, drugs/the increase in the use of drugs), how Covid-19 has affected exams/schooling, graduates finding it hard to find jobs, dognapping and ideas surrounding protests. Upon Beth's feedback, we decided against a documentary to do with Covid-19 as there has been a lot of coverage with regards to this and multiple documentaries have been and are being made. We also decided against a documentary about dognapping as we couldn't see it as being feasible and safe to film. Discussion with regards to a documentary about protesting and the recent Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, kept coming up so we decided that we would do a documentary about that. Some of us, including myself, are incredibly passionate about the subject. The target audience of BBC 3's target audience are 16-24 year olds and they are looking for something that feels "timely and contemporary in subject and/or shape" (Campbell, 2021). Our documentary idea fits in with this as within the last two years, there has been an increase in protests, especially with regards to the Black Lives Matter Movement, climate change and women's rights, meaning that the subject is current. In addition to this, young people appear to be becoming increasingly vocal, with regards to societal issues. 

With our idea, we also had to think about the angle we are taking and what is new in it (Turrell, 2021). Some things that we had to keep in mind were the perspective presented, the contributors and choosing them (ensuring that they were engaging and in some cases controversial). We struggled to get to the deeper meaning of the angle and what we were trying to get at, which was frustrating. In order to tackle this, we are going to have a conversation with Beth to gain an outsiders opinion as to what she thinks we're getting at. 

Bibliography:

Campbell, F. (2021) BBC 3 Commissioning. At: https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/bbc-three (Accessed 18/04/2021)

Turrell, B (2021) Documentary Lecture Series. [Online 17/03/2021].