Rebecca Barrett - TV Production blog

Brainstorming: Shortly after our briefing, we got into a group that consisted of myself, Carla and Jack and began brainstorming about possible ideas for our piece. The three ideas we could pick from (we could either do one story or do two) were environment, sleep or veganisim. Our first initial ideas, environment, came from a newspaper article Carla had read which talked about petrol possibly coming to an end in just sixteen years. We ran with this initial idea as environment and it's protection are big in the media at the moment, with Greta Thunberg being a widely talked-about advocate at the time of researching for our stories. Jack came up with a story idea for veganisim as he had already done some research into the topics, prompting him to want to create a historical focused piece of how it was perceived back in the 1980's hen it first came about compared to now, where more people are adopting a vegan lifestyle. During his 'pitch' to us, he talked about the ef

This Morning: This show is a breakfast TV show broadcasted on ITV. Image:  This Morning logo. (2019). [image] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Morning_(TV_programme)#/media/File:This_Morning_TV_Logo.png [Accessed 13 Nov. 2019]. Typical structure features: Live and features news Topical items Showbiz Style and beauty Home and garden Food Health Real-life ...and more Focuses: - Presenter: A lot of the show is presenter-lead, with shows mostly being presented by two duos: Phillip Schofield, Holly Willoughby, and Ruth Langsford, Eamonn Holmes. For this show, all of the presenting is done within the ITV studio, for Holly and Phill, much of their presenting is done through either having live-guests through small pieces or through interviews with special guests on couches. Because of this, the audience feels drawn in and the presenters are friendly and have good chemistry together, this is because the show isn't as formal and 'scripted' as B

The story being analyzed:  From poverty to Politics: Meet Brazils AOC - BBC News (13th November 2019)   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y-gRsBPqec When watching this through, I focused on several things that I knew would be key towards our own news piece: Camera - shaky camera, possibly hand-held, general view shots to fill in sequences and to cut between different pieces A studio presenter Reporter delivers his speech clear way - voice-over, he is off-location of the filming but still inside in the country. Image:  BBC (2019).  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcqk3W87Sw4 . [image].  Presentation techniques: For this piece, even though the presenter, Robin Brant , was not directly on-site, most likely due to the dangerous situation the camera crew was in themselves, it still showed him presenting to a camera still within the city, calmly and clearly. This shows he is well-versed to be delivering a news piece like this even though he is away from the 'action'.

For my analysis, I decided to look at a BBC news package as that was the style of presentation we were going for with our piece. On my first watch, I noticed that the first thing that appears on screen is a presenter lead intro before switching over to an on-location reporter speaking directly to the audience. This boosts audience engagement as you feel as though you are being directly spoken to and informed of the story by the reporter. It then switches to a pre-recorded piece that focuses heavily on recorded sequences being intercut with interview footage as well as graphics that link directly to the story. This image is from 'BBC News - UK Election: The View From Leeds' - 7th November 2019 Screenshot by me As I know our piece was going to be similar to how the above package was presented, I wanted to focus on analyzing three key aspects, voice-overs, presenting to camera and GV shots (General views). Presenting to the camera: For this, we knew straight a

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Green screen workshop For this workshop, we had the chance to work with green screens for the first time. This was something new to me as I had never used one before. Myself, Carla and Jack got set up in the green room, with Jack being the presenter for our workshop. We did several takes as we were all new to this and had to spend a while getting used to the equipment as well as the teleprompter's speed and how it worked. While we got through the workshop relatively quickly, our next task was to edit the piece. For me, not only had I never used a green screen before, I also hadn't edited one out of a video. So, to help, I looked at a tutorial to help, which broke down the process of GS removal step-by-step. once I got the hang of how to do it, I played around with the settings over and over to develop my skills with it. The below image shows my final result of my green screen edit. For the end effects, while I did play around with the settings, the guide I followe

Story ideas: For our stories, our first brainstorm was to do with sleep disorders and climate change. To help research into why we should do this story, I looked into sites that explored 'new' sleep research about disorders and more.  This research (in my links at the bottom of the page) helped us to form what would be our final story about sleep disorders. This research included general facts and statistics about sleep disorders, while others showed a darker side to sleep disorders, with one website showing that '24% - 31% of men and 9% - 21% of women have obstructive sleep apnea...'. These statistics shocked us, so, we decided to push that story to be a larger part of our package. For another initial story, a story was climate change, however, we didn't really do much research into it as we couldn't really make it fit with our other story. Jack later came to us with the idea of veganism and about how we could explore if veganism is just somethi

Research: To begin our process of creating our documentary we began researching several topics which landed in between Business, Social Media, or Technology. However, once we went in to pitch our idea to Helen, she explained to us that we had too many ideas, and not a solid story, so, she advised to us to refine our ideas into one solid idea that we can base into a compelling story. So, after taking this advice on board, we narrowed our idea into 'How social media is affecting our social environment', this meant that we would explore how/if social media is affecting our everyday lives through several off-branches such as behavior online compared to reality, mental health and several topics. We initially decided to focus on all sub-topics into our main one, but, we soon realised we wouldn't be able to fit all of those subtopics in to ten minutes, so, we narrowed it down to the social environment and mental health and if social media had a negative impact on our own men

For this unit, I decided to research into documentaries about mental health as that seemed to be the focus our documentary was leaning towards. The documentary I chose to look at from its director, Holly Challinor, was called 'Girls on the Edge', the film won the award for 'Best Documentary' in Mind's Media in 2018. The documentary 'follows three teenagers and their struggles with mental health after being sectioned indefinitely under the Mental Health Act.' and is also quoted as being '... a hard yet necessary film to watch... allows us to see the true impact that mental health conditions such as depression can have on young women and their families'. Holly has been involved with documentaries for many years, from being assistant producers on several episodes of  Skint and Tower Block of Commons. She has also been a producer for Hospital, The Met: Policing London. She has also directed some of Skint, Tower Block of Commons, Hospital and Copper

For the first interview of our documentary, we interviewed Rochard Grannon who runs 'Spartan Life Coach', Richard is an 'NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) master practitioner, is passionate about helping people defend themselves, get back on their feet and finally free themselves from narcissistic abuse'. He also focuses on social media and aspects of it alongside social media. We choose Richard for this interview as we felt we could get two elements of both mental health and social media in one. We interviewed him on the 5th of May for roughly twenty minutes exploring how social media can affect mental health and how it has affected our society as a whole. Below is the interview video from that day. For transcribing his interview, I played through his interview many many times in order to write down his answers to every question Aodhan asked. Below is the link to the interview transcript:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ciFq6nMqdTa_qTRSy0uY4tUjOYzylh8mn2AD8

For this lesson, we had to pitch and present our ideas to Helen and Laura as a group. By this point, our idea had changed from Business to a range of ideas to do with Technology and social media. After we presented our idea, Helen made a few key points about that we had an idea, but not a story to tell (which is vital to telling a good documentary). She also suggested that we narrowed down our multiple ideas into just one in order to put as much detail into one idea, as well as being able to branch off into mini topics throughout the documentary. So, after our pitch, we headed back into the base room and began brainstorming over a concrete idea we could have and develop into a story for our documentary. For our final idea, we decided on 'The Impact of Social Media on the Social Environment', this was a much better idea and enabled us to branch up to a few more points within our idea.

In our first lesson, we were introduced to different types of documentaries, their purposes, as well as our briefing for this unit. In this unit, we had to create a documentary that would be suitable and engaging towards our 'age-group' (18/21) while also creating it as if we were giving it to BBC3 for broadcast, this meant we had to be factual and engaging to the topic we were presenting, but we also had to bear in mind that it also had to be 'family-friendly'. Our overall brief - what we had to link our main subject to - was 'Living Online'. In this lecture, we were also assigned to our groups, I was put with Jazz, Alan, and Aodhan. After that, we were free to go to the base room and pick an idea between us. After we had lunch, it was only myself an Aodhan to work out an idea. We narrowed it down to two: Mental Health or Business. My idea was Mental Health as, in the last few years, suicide rates, especially in our age groups has increased quite a lot in

For this location workshop we went to Chatham Dockyard for the day. Helen gave us the briefing, which was to record footage from a select are in order to tell the story of the history of the Dockyard., We were split into our documentary filming groups and given a certain part of the Dockyard to be allowed to film in. My group was myself, Aodhan and Jaz and we were given the lifeboat area to film.

In this lesson we learned all about how to shoot interviews, were taught multiple key things as well as terms and explanations. VOX: A type of interview commonly used when interviewing people in the streets, which is most commonly seen in news segments or surveys. Not very representative/doesn't add much to story Useful is story is engaging. I nterview tone/style: Depends on subject matter Hard exposure : Investigative Informational : Puts audience in the picture Emotional : Engaging and revealing the subjects and emotion 'Proper' interviews: Add personal experience and expertise to the film Adds colour and context Emotional engagement Evidence - personal testimony Who is needed for interviews? Experts - Scientists, doctors, lawyers - Professional opinions and relevant to subject Ordinary people - interested - relevant to subject Officials - Appointed representatives What to ask? Explore subject being tackled Get to know interviewe

For our contextual research, we had to look at 2 different TV dramas that helped to influence our work. One TV show I decided to look at was 'The Fall', which is a British-Irish crime drama that follows a police detective as she tries to hunt down a serial killer in Belfast who lives the double life of a serial killer at night, but an honest and caring family man during the day.  I decided to choose the 'The Fall' as a show to look at as the TV series focuses on psychological horror which is the premise of my chosen scene remake from 'The Strangers'. The series is particularly clever in the way it portrays Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan’s character). Instead of being a cliché serial killer programme where it follows the serial killer through his killings, it instead does a great job at contrasting his character during his family life during the day and then his killing spree at night. An example of the contrast is also something I wanted to capture in

In this workshop, Simon showed us different styles of editing within a film and told us that editing is unique only to film making as it is known as 'invisible art'. The three main types he spoke about were: Editing  = joining shots together to make a long sequence that shows a complete story Continuity editing Montage Editing enables emotions, drama, rhythm and action through story-telling. Up to the early 2000's, film was still being edited through splicing it together with sellotape. This was because: 'Economics of story-telling' A single cut could take several minutes Less cutting before 1990's - 'slower' pace / more editing = 'quicker' pace Linear editing: One shot is edited to be one after another to be in order, however, because of the way films were edited back then, the edits cannot be moved unless the editor wants to start again. Non-linear editing: Combined freedom of film edits and the speed of video editing French

So, what went well in this project?   To begin with, I am extremely proud of this project, as even through all the stress and late nights working things out, I’m really happy with the final piece overall. I feel as a director I did well in getting exactly what I wanted from my actors on the filming day. And while it was very stressful arranging the actors, especially with the very last minute changes of the male actor dropping out a few days beforehand and one of my female actresses dropping out that morning, my remaining female actress, Alexandra, was very understanding with it being my first time directing. She was very kind and gave her all in her role. After filming was done we exchanged emails back a few times where we were both please with each other and both expressed interest in hoping to work with each other again. When it came to the shots I wanted, I managed to get all of the ones I wanted, as well as some fantastic choices we decided to add in. Throughout editing

For directors, one of my two chosen directors is Greg Mclean. He is an Australian director who has directed seven films from 2001 to 2017. I picked him as I recently watched ‘The Belko Experiment’ – an action/horror/thriller film that focuses on the social experiment of how average everyday react to being told to murder each other. Greg’s directorial decisions in the film really helped to influence how I created my film. One of the decisions that are clear in this film, is how he really focuses on the character performance as the workers slowly begin to mentally collapse as they realize that they have to murder to stay alive. Also, even though the film is made of a huge cast, he still manages to develop the cast to make them relatable to the audience even though they may not have as much time in the screen as a normal horror film would take it. This is something I took into consideration when making my scene; I really wanted to develop my characters enough to make them relatab