Starting Documentary

Today we began preparation work for our documentary. We started with an exercise designed to expose our own assumptions. Students were asked to draw a doctor and a nurse, without showing each other. They were then asked how many of them drew a male doctor and a female nurse. As expected, most drew a male doctor and a female nurse. After this, we moved onto defining what a documentary is, starting by listing key words we associate with the genre, such as truth, facts, statistics and educational.

We learned a little about different types of documentaries by looking at four different types. They were Mad Hot Ballroom, Africa's Last Taboo, Bowling for Columbine and Peckham Finishing School for Girls. We divided into groups of three and different members of the groups made notes on the documentary techniques, film language, and sound in each one. We learned to identify things such as ambient and non-diegetic sound, amateur and archive footage.

As well as discussing the different techniques used by the documentary makers, we talked about how the subjects of the different shows have been represented. This was particularly interesting with the last one, as students had real life experience of the location and people to contextualise what they saw. Most felt that the worst side of Peckham was being shown, but that they also included positive elements such as young business people, the church and the martial arts community. This has given us great food for thought with our documentary, and we intend to represent an even broader range of people in this part of South London.

Girls in the Peckham Finishing School were Sarah & Cat, Alisha & Serena, Kerri & Steph and Lashan & Claire, plus Peaches who was co-ordinating the events. We will be writing this analysis up in more detail next week, and the instructions for this are on the shared area, 'Creative and Media Diploma', 'Stereotypes and documentary' folder.