Working with the primary schools

For the last two weeks, we have been to St John Angell Town primary school to work with a year 3 class as part of our documentary research.

The first week, we wanted to engage with the students and have them start to feel comfortable with having us there with the cameras. We were given two rooms and 12 students so divided up. Our girls showed the year 3 students how to use the cameras and they filmed each other talking about their favourite toys. This gave us some footage that might help us as we can see whether there were any obvious gender trends.

The second week we went, we started with some statements about gender that we wanted them to consider then decide if they were true or false. We filmed them talking about their answers. The major problem with this, was that we did this as 'circle time' and I believe the students were strongly influenced by what other students thought. After hearing what others said, they would often change their minds and not be able to recall what originally influenced their decision. Some also became rather shy or went off on tangents that didn't relate to the original question, and because we wanted them to feel comfortable and be honest, it was a little tricky keeping them to the point.

I personally was rather dismayed that most of them thought women couldn't do dirty jobs as they would be unhappy about getting their clothes dirty. One also stated that a woman couldn't possibly know how to fix a car, even if she was a mechanic. This was despite us providing pictures of a happy woman in very dirty clothes sat on the open bonnet of a car with a wrench in her hand! Most in the group I was with found it inconceivable that a boy might want to play with a doll. They insisted he would throw it in the bin, even when we asked if there was a boy that wanted to play with a doll, would that be ok?

Finally, the girls read them stories that challenge gender stereotypes and they seemed to respond fairly positively to that. In one, Princess Smartypants, the princess does not want to get married and scares off potential suitors. They didn't think it was a problem that she didn't get married in the end but did think it was wrong for her to disobey her parents wishes.

Tues 2nd Nov

Today, we had hoped to carry on interviewing, but were not able to get anyone in, so we carried on planning for the future interviews.

Firstly, we looked again at the previous interviews we did to see how they went and reflect on whether we could change the questions to get more out of the interviewees.

We have booked to go and work with a year 3 class at St John the Divine School the next two weeks, so planned what we would do. We have bought some dolls to use as visual stimulus to represent males and females.

We are also planning on interviewing a trans man, so planned how to question him also.

Finally, we watched the film Crash, which explores issues of stereotyping and prejudice surrounding race. (Students: you should write what you learned from this film?)

Starting to Film Properly

Today we were able to begin filming properly. We got various sixth formers and some that had recently left to give us their thoughts on stereotypes.

We came up with a proper list of questions first thing and printed the pictures ready.

We used the studio to film three interviews. After the first one, we watched it back and analysed how we could improve it.

More documentary planning

Don was in again this morning so we split up into the two groups. Don's group are focusing on those that challenge stereotypes and mine are looking at what the stereotypes are to begin with.

We came up with some ideas for what to film:

1. A montage of key words associated with those stereotypes to begin the documentary, such as 'black, asian, white' for the basics and then groups such as 'chavs, goths, geeks' and derogatory words for some such as 'hoodrat' and 'bimbo'.
2. We discussed doing vox pops but having people grouped with their friends in an environment they are comfortable in so they are more likely to be relaxed and honest and bounce off each other's comments. We thought it would be good to have boys together, then girls separately. Also in different racial or religious groups.
3. We came up with a plan to print off pictures of different types of people and ask the groups to comment on them. For example, have pictures of black boys in hoodies or a girl with skimpy clothes or another who dresses like a boy.

We watched some other documentaries made by amateurs on YouTube for more ideas. One we saw that was quite effective was made by primary school children including a boy who liked to wear pink and a girl who liked to dress like a boy and play sport. This we thought was interesting, to show how gender stereotyping starts very early on. Another one we saw included toys targeted at girls and boys, such as dolls and cooking things. It also featured young children being interviewed about gender roles which was very interesting. We have decided to try and approach a primary school to see if we can film the children.

We noticed that those that included presenters often had them trying to read a script which looked awkward. We have decided a voice-over would be better, as we will have different people filming each segment anyway, so can't have one presenter throughout.

Othert things that were achieved included producing the storyboard, devising questions for interviews, finding the pictures of different types of people and emailing people to see if they will be willing to be filmed.

Don's First Day

Today Don came in to help us start the planning for our documentary.

We discussed what we had learned so far about stereotypes, particularly in relation to race. We also talked about our role models, which were noticably all women for the students present.

Then we started to research different areas - statistics about race in the country, black, female and gay icons, contacts at magazines to ask them about their model policies, positive discrimination policies etc.

Starting to use the cameras

At the start of the day students finished writing about the documentaries we saw last week.

Then, the class learned about vox pops. These represent the 'voice of the people' and are short clips of members of the public, where they are required to give their opinion about an issue. They are often shown on the news to help gauge public opinion about a particular matter.

We looked at clips online to see examples. Then, students had to devise their own questions about stereotypes to ask people, before going off to ask around school and out of school during break time.

When students returned, they learned how to edit the footage on imovie on the Mac laptops. Some will now know how to import the footage from the camera, put it on the timeline, edit clips, adjust the volume and add text etc.

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.