Documentary research

1. DOCUMENTARY RESEARCH
Research into similar products

2. Documentary 1 – The Human
Mannequin
The Human Mannequin is a documentary about a 17 year old girl who has a rare
disease that causes her muscles to lock into place. Despite this, she is desperate
to make it in the world of fashion. However, will the extremely body conscious
fashion industry accept her. This documentary is relevant to ours as it is dealing
with similar issues like body image and being judged by others.
This documentary is a mixture of reality TV and Self reflective documentary as it
follows the life of a real 18 year old and she is aware the documentary and she
talks to the camera. It also includes interviews with experts in fashion and
medicine as well as close friends and family. The target audience is teenagers
aged 13 – 18 which is similar to our documentary’s target audience. It is also on
the same channel at the same time just the day before. This shows that we are on
the right lines with timing and channel as it shows that this must be a popular time
for our target audience to watch television. It starts with an establishing shot of her
face whilst she’s having her make up done. This is introducing the person and
theme in a subtle way.
We would like to adapt this by starting with different vox pops talking about things
they don’t like about themselves or they’re image.
From this documentary, I have learnt that a teenage target audience prefer
somene that they can relate to in a docunmentary

3. Documentary 2 – Catfish UK TV
Catfish is a TV show documentary where experts look on internet, specifically
social media, to find out if people are who they say they are. People use fake
pictures, profiles and identities to lure people into serious relationships. This
documentary explores social media and how it effects people who post them and
people who get involved. This documentary is a mixed documentary including
elements of reality TV and Docusoap. The real people are followed and
investigated online. Using social media, they track down people who have been
online messing with people. This does deal with how people use social media to
edit pictures or even change profile altogether and tricking people like that really
impacts on them. This is similar to how our documentary will look at how people
use images on social networking to make themselves feel better.
Our documentary will have a reality TV element about it as we will be talking to
real people about how social media has effected them. This particular
documentary style television programme has inspired us to look at specific things
on the internet which cause serious damage to teens everywhere.

4. Documentary 3 – The secret life of
students
The secret life of students is a Channel 4 documentary in which students are given special
IPhones that track all their texts, calls and online activities. This is good for pre filming research
as it is the generalised habits of the age group that our documentary will revolve around and
be targeted at. This TV show documentary is a mixture of self reflective and reality TV as it
follows the lives of real students and how social media effects them. The clip starts with a very
wide shot of the student accommodation. This works as a type of establishing shot which
shows the audience where the footage is taking place and what the general theme is. This
then moves to a wide shot of subject Helen reading her book for university. This suggests that
she really is trying to focus. There is also a close up of the main distraction, her phone, to
show she is texting. When Helen is doing an interview there are several cut away’s. One to a
shot of her using her phone and one to the person she is texting. The main thing we will take
away from this documentary is the shots used. There are a lot of high angle and over the
shoulder shots to show the subject and the screen of their phone. This would work well for our
documentary as we can show social media and the effect it has in the same shot. The subjects
of this documentary fall into our target audience for our documentary and understand social
media as they are the main users of it. There is also a representation of students (our target
audience) as being care-free outgoing people with little worry about consequences on
themselves. However, in our documentary, we will expose the secret side of teenagers, the
secret worries and judgement that is inflicted on them every day.

5. Applying research to our
documentary.
 Our documentary is going to include similar key themes and
ideas to the similar products and it will also be slightly
dumbed down and ‘Disneyfied’ for the convenience of the
audience and to generate the expected viewing statistics for
a major Channel 4 drama ( our documentary would be going
up against things like despatches). We will be using an open
narrative for our documentary as it is stereotyped that
teenagers don’t like being told what to do, so an open,
circular narrative will suit the target audience vey well.
 The purpose of doing this research is to get a first hand look
into what our target audience watch in terms of
documentaries. Watching and analysing this documentaries
gives us a first hand insight into what is enjoyable for them
and what will make them change the cannel in boredom.