Genre Research:By researching through multiple past examples of youth orientated Channel 4 documentaries, it provided our group with the ability to use, develop or even challenge the conventions of modern Channel 4 documentaries.

Some examples we looked at were ‘Disarming Britain’ and ‘Britain’s Forgotten Children’, both of which primarily focus on modern youth within society. We narrowed our wider research to Channel 4 later in research as Channel 4 has its own unique way of presenting documentaries in its own style and structure in comparison to a wider variety of documentaries over multiple channels and broadcasters.

Used ConventionsRepresentation within modern society and culture is a popular topic and theme that takes place in a range of Channel 4 documentaries. This was one of the primary reasons that we chose Channel 4, it gave us the opportunity to present a youth perception investigation in both a stylistic and informativeway.

To achieve this we decided to use a balance of professions for interviewees to create a non-biased production and placed this between scenes of general views and statistic based animations. This is similar to that of the more recent Channel 4 documentaries such as the Connecticut Shootings documentary, with its expressive range of opinions from multiple members of the public and law enforcement as well as presenting evidence through graphs/percentage charts.

As for stock characters: students, teachers and experts are generally considered to take part in our genre of documentary. This was something we felt was necessary to include within our documentary on youth to steer away from developing a ‘moaning-session’ with the limitations of just young people. To further improve this we could have included more from an experts field of view, but we still wanted to focus on the publics views to gather a generalised perceptive finding.

We also decided to use one of the typical stock settings of a youth documentary, a school. This was something that we felt was a location which a broad range of young people could associate with seeing as education is a key aspect of youth culture that people in Britain can identify with.

Developed ConventionsA popular choice of in the navigation of Channel 4 documentaries is the ‘Voice of God’ voice over technique. We established this as our primary form of navigating our documentary however, to develop this further we decided to include a young presenter to bring something new and innovative to the table. We felt this was a strength as it allowed the presenter to both empathise with young people yet keep a non-biased middle ground in a serious investigation.

Certain meaningful shots amongst our general views would have colour/blur effects on them to highlight their significance towards the youth perception.

Challenged ConventionsWhen deciding to incorporate our own sense of iconography unto this documentary, in our five minutes we chose to establish two interviews with mass diversity. Using both a student and an expert in the field of sociology allowed us to experience two interviews that shared both similar and different views on the perception of youth.

Once this was investigated, we had our young presenter retrieve vox-pop interviews to gain even more data, this was deliberate to gain an understanding on how the young people think others see them.