Ideas for our 5 minute documentary

1. Formal proposal for documentary
Zero Hours

2. The topic of the documentary-
• We decided to choose the topic of teenage
working for our documentary. We brainstormed
many topic ideas for our documentary and
compared the possible interviewee’s we would
have for each topic.
• Doing a documentary on jobs for the young
gives us many options on whom to interview. It
also gives us a variety of issues and subjects
to include for example we could look at the
history of young people working and even look
in to child labour.

3. Type of documentary-
• Like the majority of professional
documentaries analysed at the
beginning of the year we decided that
our documentary would be mixed. This
means that there is going to be
narration, interviews as well as archive
material taken from other sources.

4. Style of documentary-
• The style of documentary will be formal
as it is a serious documentary that has
controversial topics included. Due to
this we will make sure that no language
used in the documentary is slang and
that correct English is used in the
narration.

5. Channel and scheduling-
• Through analysing results from the target audience
questionnaire we were able to come up with a suitable
channel and an appropriate time to schedule our
documentary.
• Channel 4 was the best channel for our target audience as
the documentary is aimed at teenagers. Through our
questionnaire it was evident that the most popular day for
watching TV was Sunday so we will be scheduling our
documentary then. We then came up with an appropriate
time of 8pm as it is before the watershed for younger
teens however it is also not too early in the evening.
• Currently at 8pm on Channel 4 on Sunday ‘Speed with
Guy Martin’ is on, it starts at half 7 and finishes at 9. This
could be a problem and be competition for our
documentary.

6. Target audience-
• We came up with our target audience
through looking back over our
questionnaire and also looking at the
suitable interviewee’s that we would be
interviewing. This highlighted that our
target audience would be the younger
generation from 14 years old up to around
20. We also then considered parents who
have teenagers watching the documentary
and also included people in their late 30’s
up being middle aged in our target
audience.

7. Primary research needed-
• Interviews are a big part of the
documentary and therefore questions
need to be made up for the various
types of interviews that we will carry
out. We may also consider giving out
another questionnaire asking about
more specific topics as including
graphics in the documentary with facts
about first jobs would be very effective.

8. Secondary research needed-
• Secondary research includes gathering
archive material such as news clips and
old footage from the 20th century. We
will also be gathering statistics from the
official gov.co.uk website in order to
display accurate facts to our audience
about the young working.

9. Narrative structure-
• When examining our professional documentaries at the
beginning of the year we noticed that the majority of the
documentaries were open, meaning that a lot of questions
and opinions were left at the end of the documentary for
the audience to figure out.
• This seems like the best thing to do for our topic in
particular as the topic is very subjective and often requires
an opinion. In terms of the documentary being linear or
not, the topic we have chosen wouldn’t be very easily
applied to being in a non-chronological order and
therefore we will follow a linear structure.
• Our documentary will be multi-stranded as it will have a
variation of topics within our main topic. We will also be
interviewing an array of people who will tell us their stories
about jobs when they were young and their first jobs etc.

10. Outline of content-
• A major part of the content for the documentary will interviews and we
have been able to set out who are interviewee’s will be as well as
brainstorm some questions that could be included in the interviews.
• Interviewee’s will include-
• JD (Birkenhead store) Manager/Assistant Manager
• An ex-student who now works at a local establishment and is in higher
education
• Teenagers who are looking for jobs in their local area
• Young people doing apprenticeships
• The older generation who had to work as a teen and how they believe
it’s changed since then.
• Other content of the documentary will include archive footage such as
people working in the olden days when children as young as 6 would
be working to help support big families (black and white footage). Clips
from the news such as people talking about unemployment of the
young as well as official statistics taken from the government about
young people in work. We could also use stills of newspaper ads
recruiting people for jobs