Our Diary of Progress

September

Week FourMonday: Wee looked at ‘Super Size Me’, a documentary about health and the effects that eating unhealthily has on the body. From this we managed to pick up things that we could use in our own documentary. We also decided on other documentaries that our group would watch to consider other genres of documentary and how we could use ideas from them.Wednesday: We fed back from the documentaries we watched and thought about the genre of documentary we would like to make.Friday: We each handed in an essay on ‘Super Size Me’ so that we could consider things we had observed and share our ideas.

OctoberWeek OneWednesday: We did research into other documentaries to see what kind of things we needed to use in our own documentary. We also wrote a questionnaire so we could find out what people thought of documentaries and what they enjoyed to watch.Thursday: We got people to fill out the questionnaires.Friday: We collated our questionnaire results so that we could create statistics to consider when creating our documentary.

Week TwoMonday: We considered what topics we could do our documentary on. Our ideas involved ‘Health and Body Image’, ‘Knife Crime’ and ‘Video Games’. We then did research into our chosen topic of ‘Health and Body Image’. We thought about all the ways in which we could explore this topic. As well as this, we did a target audience questionnaire to find out what our target audience’s preference was. We also did a risk assessment for filming.Wednesday: We sent out emails to people who we wanted to interview. We emailed Julie Maitland, the Student Development Team manager, Solihull Youth Council, Principal Paul Ashdown and a psychology teacher. We also created some questions to ask them during the interviews. We also thought out some story boards to get an idea of what we wanted the documentary to include.Friday: We filmed the introduction to our documentary and some background footage with the computers.

Week ThreeMonday: We filmed some background footage of vending machines in the college refectory. Wednesday: We filmed our interview with Julie Maitland. During the interview we had the opportunity to ask her the questions we had come up with and she also suggested some of her own questions that she thought may be important. Thursday: We filmed our interview with Paul Ashdown, principal of The Sixth Form College, Solihull. From him, we were able to gather some relevant and important footage for our documentary.

NovemberWeek OneMonday: We filmed some footage with our onscreen presenter, Jake, and considered what questions he would need to ask and what he would need to introduce. Wednesday: We interviewed three youth workers from Solihull Youth Council. They were able to give us some opinions that fit well into the theme of our documentary.Friday: We considered other background footage we may need. We asked some people who were eating in the refectory if we could film them. We experimented with some camera shots to see what we preferred and also thought about how we could use these.

Week TwoMonday: We looked through our interview footage to find parts that would fit well with the theme of our documentary. We also considered what background footage we could use for these clips and how we would introduce them.Wednesday: We filmed some voxpops of students in the college refectory. We asked them about where they eat, whether they think they eat healthily, and whether they exercise.Friday: We began putting our documentary together. This gave us the opportunity to see how well the footage fit together and what we needed to film.

Week ThreeMonday: We continued to edit together our documentary and considered what still needed filming. We also added captions over the beginning of interviews.Wednesday: We decided that we weren’t happy with our introduction and so we filmed it again using a different angle and style.Friday: We collected together some statistics about our topic of Health and Body Image that we thought would be relevant for the documentary and filmed our on screen presenter saying these facts in front of various backgrounds to experiment with camera movements.

Week FourMonday: We began looking at some listings magazines and how they presented articles about documentaries. We also looked at how previous students had presented theirs and used these to gather ideas for our own article and made a rough draft.Wednesday: We filmed some footage of our onscreen presenter using relevant props such as food and salt to present facts that would fit well into our documentary.Friday: We continued editing our documentary, including using some footage we had filmed that week to create stop motion.

DecemberWeek OneMonday: We looked at music that we could use in our documentary and narrowed down some clips we thought would fit well.Wednesday: We checked the sound throughout our documentary so that we could add music. We then edited the sound levels so we were sure it sounded smooth and came from both headphones.Friday: We checked the sound levels by playing the documentary out of the loud speakers to make sure it sounded smooth and clear at all times.

Week TwoMonday: We finished adding last minute touches to our documentary and ensuring that it flowed well. We did this by asking others who were not in our group to watch it through.Wednesday: We took some screenshots from our documentary that we wanted to use on the double page spread. This way we were able to see how much room we had left on the page for the article, pull quotes and a heading.Friday: We started the article and the article heading using our drafts. We created two separate ones with different headings so that we could see which was preffered.

Week ThreeMonday: We listened through our documentary to find which clips we wanted to use for our radio trailer. We then came up with a script for it.Wednesday: We used the script we had made to put our radio trailer together. We also made some adjustments to the clips we had taken from the documentary to add transitions and adjust the music so that it sounded better.Friday: We made the finishing touches to both of our double page spreads to decide which we preferred. We decided that we liked the heading of one and the main body of the other, so we adjusted them so that we could use the parts we liked.

JanuaryWeek OneMonday: We finished editing our article. We also listened to our radio trailer and had others listen to it to ensure that the clips we’d used fit well.Wednesday: We watched our documentary through a few more times to make sure there were no mistakes and then transferred it onto a disc.Friday: We watched the documentary through on the disc to ensure that it had transferred properly. We then thought of some ideas of what we could ask for feedback from our target audience on our work.