Rebecca Barrett - TV Production blog

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