2. Our practise documentary covered the new children’s
fantasy novel ‘Demons and Thieves’. We interviewed
the author of the book as well as a teacher who is now
studying it with her students along with three of the
students.
3. We learnt that it was exciting to be studying a fantasy
in a classroom and, from the teacher’s point of view; it
was nice to study a book that hadn’t been looked at by
the students in KS2. We also found that even the
students who do not usually choose a fantasy to read,
enjoyed the novel and were eager to find out what
would be happening in the next two books of the
series.
4. We decided we would base it on a Channel 4
documentary for two reasons; firstly, we like the
conventions Channel 4 use in their documentaries
such as the informal dialogue and real life costume,
lighting and locations. Secondly because we are going
to mimic these conventions in our final documentary
and so it will benefit our final outcome by showing us
what we need to focus on and what isn’t necessary.
5. To mimic the type of documentaries channel 4 create,
we asked the interviewees to look at the camera and
answer the questions we asked in full sentences, as
though they were not being asked them directly. We
also asked them the questions only once or twice
before the final edit to give impromptu dialogue much
like in channel 4 documentaries.
6. To make Lynda Berger, the author, stand out as the
most important interviewee we decided to use a
different angle on her. Whereas with the students we
used a face on shot, with the eye line matching the
cameras, we used a low angle shot on her to make her
seem dominant in the scene. We also used a different
interviewing technique; before we had asked the
students and teacher to answer in full sentences on
camera so they did not seem as though they were
being asked questions in the shot. With Lynda, we
featured the interviewer in the shot to make her
interview stand out even more.
