Documentary maker and documentary research

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 Coppers.

This documentary style also captured my attention as it focused on their journeys as individuals as well as the wider impacts of those people around them. This is something we tried to capture in our documentary, that while social media can please some people, it is also a possible starting point for mental health conditions and a possible contributor to them worsening. This documentary also influenced our style and how we focused on our main topic as we were originally going to focus on multiple sub-topics from our main topic of 'social media impact on our social environment', however, this soon changed to how mental health and social media correlate. After watching the documentary though, this influence carried across and we decided to focus on mental health as that was reflected a lot within the documentary.

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