Rebecca Barrett - TV Production blog

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.