Content research

Our Initial Ideas:

When first discussing our ideas as a group the first thing that we did was ask ourselves 'What is bothering us right now?' we started to talk about subjects that had directly affected us in the last six months that are still ongoing issues, or issues that are beginning to affect us now and will throughout the year ahead such as the mass spread of Corona Virus. We then began to pinpoint areas that we had all brought up, these were:

-Social Media and its impacts
-Mental health problems in young people and why are they on the rise
-The Corona Virus outbreak

When reviewing all three we decided that the best topic for us to focus on was mental health problems in young people. This was mainly because we did some research online and discovered that "The rate of suicides among under 25s increased by 23.7%, reaching 730 deaths in 2018"(Samaritans, 2018). These statistics really stood out to me due to it being my age range which made them hit me that bit deeper. Personally I also suffer with Anxiety and this is something that I believe needs more light to be shed on, especially in my age range due to some of the pressures that I listed below.

What was Successful?

The part of brainstorming that I believe was most successful was being able to pinpoint different subjects that directly affect or impact us as a group. This was important as I believe when making a documentary you have to be very passionate about the subject as well as having an element of reliability to it and this is what we had with the topics that we came up with so as a group this was a success.

What was challenging?

The challenging element to brainstorming was trying to focus on one key area. We had a few that we were all passionate about but cutting it down to one idea was tricky but it helped to research and when I started to look at online statistics such as the ones that I mentioned above about mental health problems in young people it was clear that this was the area that we wanted to work with.

Moving to the next stage:

A challenge that we will now face is trying to develop our idea into a story. As well as this we have chosen a very broad topic of 'mental health' and we need to now eliminate this down into smaller elements and decide whether to focus on certain mental health problems or alternatively certain pressures on young people such as school or social media; this is a decision that we now need to make as a group.

Developing Our Idea:

We had another session to try and develop our ideas further, we aimed to try to evolve our idea from just a topic/area into a story with meaning. We started by splitting it into five topics:

-What is it about?

-Whose story is it?

-What shots are used?

-Does it interest me?

-Why now?

We created the document above which shows how we broke down our ideas into smaller categories to help with story development. It was important to us that each choice we made had a justified reason behind it so we wanted to decide these from the start. This allowed us to then start our story development stages as well as more research.

I began to research our current mental health systems as well us phoning my brother who is a psychology graduate and discussing ideas with him such as the current work that he does with young people and how he believes that more and more young people are now suffering with mental health issues. During the phone call with him he raised subjects that I wanted to research further into such as how our brains work and because as humans are brains were not made to sit in classrooms all day at the age of fifteen does this have an affect on our mental health? I then looked further into this and how learning and playing from a young age helps our brains to develop into our teenage years, and if we miss out on these key developmental stages will it affect our mental health as children grown into adults? From conducting more research I discovered that "In early years’ education, playful learning and giving children freedom to explore could help to encourage independence as well as the ability to know when to ask for help."(University of Cambridge, 2016) This interested me however as I am not a psychologist I did not want to discuss this point myself in the documentary without any real knowledge so this led me to suggest to my group that we should have a psychology student in our video to explain the topic further.

As a group we listed what we believed to be the biggest impacts on young peoples mental health and these were:

-School

-Social media

-Pressures

-Lifestyle 

-Communication

After we had these elements as a group we decided on roles for the film to help us develop into the next stages of making the documentary; the roles are:

-Director and researcher: Matthew Cowan

-Producer and researcher: Sophie Cowan

-Cinematographer and researcher: Luke Hallett

-Sound, Gaffer and researcher: Evangeline Giacomini

We then discussed how we could get information and different perspectives on these and began to think of contributors that would link to these issues, these included:

-Teachers

-Doctors

-Mental Health Charities

-Psychologist

Having these contributor ideas helped us to start thinking about a story layout and interview ideas. As Matt's director of our film he started to suggest ideas about style and how we could use some cinematic cutaway style shots to portray statistics and to add emotion and impact to the documentary. Then we came up with the idea of having students in the film and if it would work; and after discussion we thought we cannot make a film about young peoples mental health without having young people in it! 

We then thought that we could take five students from different schools to represent different people, classes, races and social groups and then ask them the same questions but compare their answers to see if they believe any impacts on their mental health are linked to the social friendship groups they are in or the general pressures they face at school etc. 

We started to think more about how we will link all our contributors together as we did not want our documentary to end up being a string of unrelated interviews. As Matt (director) had stated that he wanted our piece to appear quite artistic, I came up with the idea to get all of our contributors to get given a blank piece of paper with an outline of a brain on it, then to give them some colours and while they are speaking to us to colour in the brain on how they would associate it with colours and then we can compare all of them at the end as it would link them all well.

Finally I briefly jotted out the storyboards as seen in the image below to create a rough layout for how our documentary will appear on screen and it has helped me to structure it more as a story rather than as just an idea. The story does need more refining but we will do this when we make our detailed shot list during our next meeting as a group.

Once we had changed our idea I did not contribute as much to the research due to focussing on the preproduction work and the interviews and poem, therefore in future the area that I would like to contribute more to would be the research.  

Today we had a Zoom workshop with Beth where we went through how to hold a successful interview, along with how to ask the right kind of questions. In terms of research this session really benefitted us in terms of realising what king of information we would like to extract from our contributors and how that will create something new for our audience. To start with when thinking of questions I was coming up with ideas such as:

"What do you believe to be the biggest impact on a young persons mental health?"

This sort of question would be good as it would give us ideas of what the biggest impact is from different perspectives, however it could reveal many different opinions and topics and we only have a ten minute time slot in which we mainly want to focus on revealing to the audience facts that they may not heard of before around the topic of mental health with young people. We also had decided that we wanted to focus on having it based around the students point of view so we started to think of what might be interesting to ask them. This enabled me to come up with questions such as:

"How would you describe happiness".

This sort of question is still very open but takes the topic and is still focussed on the topic but will allow us to discuss specific feelings that young people have and hearing it from them will be more powerful as well.

Once we had changed our idea we had to do our research quite quickly before preparing for the pitch, we decided to create an online document in which we could place all of our ideas, this was useful and really helped with developing our ideas into the treatment. We wanted to still try to keep our contributors similar due to having the research on them completed on them. 

I think the hardest thing when researching for the contributors was making sure that everyone was represented. This is not a subject that only affects a few people or a minority, coronavirus has really impacted everyone in different ways therefore it was hard to choose who we wanted to interview. We decided by first of all looking at who is the most vulnerable,; these are the people that will be affected the most. Then I looked at key workers and noted down the 'government listed critical workers' and began to read into who the government feel is most affected. This helped us to find our main contributors.

I feel that the main reason for having the poem is because we wanted to show how everyone has been affected and the only real way to do this was to showcase a large amount of people all speaking the same people to portray how the world is in unison at the moment.

Bibliography:

Samaritans (2018) Suicide Facts and Figures. At: https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/research-policy/suicide-facts-and-figures/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwmdzzBRC7ARIsANdqRRlJAwK6amtDSy-mjcSlpg40xbKkkUghmIRbyaMeMZqLZvTutzZqTHsaAuRLEALw_wcB (Accessed on 13/03/2020)

University of Cambridge (2016) Education and the Brain: What happens when children learn? At: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/education-and-the-brain-what-happens-when-children-learn (Accessed on 19/3/2020)

Government (2020) Critical workers At: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-maintaining-educational-provision/guidance-for-schools-colleges-and-local-authorities-on-maintaining-educational-provision (Accessed on 12.05.2020)