2. Initial Audience Research
The results of the survey show us that our audience wants to see a crime documentary that focuses
on showing young people, adults and police officers. The age group that answered our survey the
most was 16-26 year olds therefore our target audience is young adults which corresponds with the
majority of respondents choosing ‘BBC Three’ as their highest preferred channel to watch
documentaries. This means we need to target young adults in a BBC Three style.
3. Initial Audience Research
The favourite documentarian is David Attenborough however he does nature documentaries so we need to use the
second favourite Louis Theroux as an idea for how to present our documentary as he focuses on social issues like
we want to. The most popular form of documentary was performative, meaning a documentary that explores
context and tackles more perspectives of an event, therefore we shall attempt to do this with our documentary. The
least favourite was observational so we will avoid this by having more of an involvement within the documentary.
The most popular style of documentary was narrative, therefore we will have a voice over to explore the ideas of
the documentary rather than performative, so we can still carry out interviews but not have a presenter present.
4. For the sub-genre of our documentary there was no clear popular choices so we will choose to see
ethnographic as the most popular as this will allow us to show people and cultures with their customs,
habits, and mutual differences as a crime documentary. By a large majority interviews would be welcome
for a documentary so we will try and incorporate it into our own.
Initial Audience Research
5. The style of music to go along with the documentary would be tense/dramatic by popular choice, as we
want to do a crime documentary this fits in well as it is a serious topic to explore. Our respondents gave
different but similar ideas for our final question of ‘what should be important in any documentary?’ as they
responded with it must be engaging, interesting and a wide range of sources as well as a good choice of
music for it to be effective for the audience which we will try and take into account.
Initial Audience Research
8. Individual Synopsis
Our crime documentary would firstly show that it would be airing on BBC Three to
get across that we aim for it to be for a young adult audience that will show a
balanced view to promote civil society. It will be a documentary that focuses on
crime rates of youth within certain areas of London and possibly the rest of the UK
to compare.
It will be a narrative piece rather than performative but interview police officers and
also youth to get different perspectives. It will show the crimes that youth are more
likely to commit but provide a balanced argument of whether youth are more likely
to commit crimes and show the reasons behind these choices.
