This document summarizes the approach taken to create a documentary film about mental health issues among students. It discusses conducting interviews with students, college staff including a psychology teacher and academic coach, and a worker at a local Bible learning center. The goal was to represent different perspectives on mental health issues and the level of support for students. Scenes were filmed on the college campus to establish an education setting and interviews used close camera angles to feel conversational. The film aimed to raise awareness of mental health issues in an honest way without hiding the true impacts or censoring differing opinions.

1. Ben Page
For our film we have used a variety of VOX pop, four with students, and also there
interviews, with an academic coach at the college, Rebecca Parsons someone from the Bible
Learning centre, Pauline Smith and a psychology teacher from the college, Tom Krawec. We
decided getting VOX POP interviews with students would be incredibly appropriate for our
film. This is due to the fact that it focuses on this age group. Through them we can generate
representations such as ignorance surrounding our topic, but also compassion that the
students may show towards it, considering it is mental health and is a sensitive issue.
To create the representations of young people we stuck to a strict mise en scene showing
them to clearly be in a college and wearing casual clothes, something you would come to
expect from people of the 16-18 age group the film is focused on. Interviewing students
helped to achieve one of our goals also, which was to gain an understanding of how aware
our target audience was about the issues surrounding our topic.
The interviews worked very well as we got a very mixed response, some of the people we
interviewed seems very well informed whereas other didn't seemto know anything at all
about mental health problems, especially within those in the education system. We thought
it would be a good idea to interview some staff members from the college as they could
have dealt with those students who have suffered with problems that we discuss in the film.
We interviewed a psychology teacher, who provided an incredible insight into mental health
problems and analysed the deeper impact that they can have and heavily stressed how
important of an issue they are. This was good as the viewer will see him as a trustworthy
character as he is a professional in the area with a deep background in psychology so he is
guaranteed to be very knowledgeable on the subject. The second member of staff we
interviewed was an academic coach who's duty is to make sure the lives of students are
going well and that they receive all of the support that they need. Considering a big part of
her job is helping students it seemed she would be a necessary interviewee who would have
a big insight into how students are affected by mental health problems and also what
support is available to them.
We also arranged an interview with a worker at the local 'Bible Learning Centre'. We hoped
this would give us an alternative insight into people's attitudes towards those with. We
were hoping the point of view they would present would be one contradicting to our in the
hopes we could perhaps 'debunk' it in the film, however the interview didn't' really give us a
hugely opposing point of view.
The topic of our film focuses heavily on the education side of mental health. Therefore it
was important for us to create a common them within our mise en scene to ensure an
education orientated atmosphere was felt throughout the whole film. To achieve this we
have many scenes that take place in and around the college. The environment comes across
through displays in the background, and the people in the film, who are clearly students
based on their clothing, attitude and general appearance. The VOX POPs we have in the film
are especially good at portraying these young people as they seem very casual and informal

2. Ben Page
something that you would expect to see when asking a young student a few questions. The
college has been filmed in a variety of ways throughout our footage, from long establishing
pans of the college to set the scene as an education environment, to close ups of displays in
the colleges corridors. The topic of mental health is quite a personal one, therefore we
decided to give the film a fairly personal feel when it came to the cameras angles especially
during the interviews. We generally used close ups some showing the interviewee sitting
down. This gave more of a conversation aspect to the film which is what we are trying to
achieve as the documentary is essentially a debate with opposing arguments.
Overall I feel the film that I have created is very truthful. The documentary as a whole
revolves around facts and exposing the truth behind mental health illnesses therefore is
incredibly honest. We took the route of being sympathetic to those affected and not holding
back on the extent that problems affect people. Many forms of media may decide to use
gate keeping to hide the extent of these such problems, perhaps newspapers that support
the current government who aren't doing enough to solve these problems. We have not
done this at all and aimed to make these problems as clear as possible to the audience as
that is our aim - to raise awareness.
For the areas of the documentary where we asked people there opinions we were
completely truthful in the responses also. Some filmmakers may ask their interviewees to
answer in a certain way but we allowed them to say what they wanted and we did not pick
and choose what we used in the final film we took everyone's answers not matter what they
said and included a variety of opinions in the film. This was good as we can give examples of
people who are more ignorant of the issue, either by being insensitive or not knowing much
about it. On reflection of this we could have included more of an opposing argument to
what we were portraying as our own belief.
We had planned to speak to some locals from a Bible Learning centre who we though may
have seen mental health in a different way to us, however this did not work as planned as
they didn't entirely oppose the message we were trying to convey. This would have also tied
in with our ideology as we aren't holding back on any opinions and are trying to expose any
ignorance's or insensitive opinions.
In our filmwe looked at if enough was being done in the education system to help combat
these mental health problems