This document discusses mediation, gatekeeping, and representation in documentaries. It notes that documentaries manipulate viewers through selective editing, music, and other techniques. As gatekeepers, documentary makers must filter hours of footage down to a short runtime, including only the most relevant material. For their documentary on technology use across generations, the authors plan to edit interviews quickly, dress experts professionally, and present both youth and older adults in a balanced way to avoid biased portrayals or stereotypes. While selective editing amounts to manipulating viewers, it is a necessary part of documentary filmmaking to keep the audience engaged and convey information objectively.

1. Mediation, Gatekeeping and
Representation
MAGDA RAK

2. Mediation
 Every media product that we consume is manipulated, we are not seeing the truth but
a version of it.
 The producer of the products adds and taken scenes away so the audience receives the
product a certain way.
 Things are also edited together in a certain way to produce a feeling and emotion.
 Music is a very important part of mediation as it’s often used to make the audience feel
a certain way and manipulate a certain feeling out of them.
 Often the tone can be changed just by the way that scenes are cut together and edited.
Even just the color palette can manipulate the viewer into a certain emotion.
 This isn’t always evident or obvious but can be seen and realized when the viewer is
watching.

3. Gatekeeping
 This is the process through which information is filtered for the audience.
 The person who controls the information that the audience can and can’t access is
the ‘gatekeeper’.
 For our documentary, we are going to have hours of footage and our final product
will only be 5 minutes. This means that most of our footage will not be included.
 When selecting background footage, we will more likely use footage of people
who are using their phones while walking rather than people without phones. This
is because it is more relevant to our topic and supports the point we want to make
that most people use technology.

4. How this will apply to our documentary
 We plan to make our documentary fast paced and energetic. To make the
audience relate and feel like this we will use quick editing and fast paced music.
This means that most of the publics opinion that we will have will be short points,
this could mean that they won’t get their full point across and that means that the
viewer will only get a partial view of what the person is saying. However this needs
to be done to keep our documentary well paced and interesting to the viewer.
 We are going to make sure our experts are wearing their uniforms and standing in
front of a phone display so the viewer will get a representation of the person
being professional and relevant to our topic so they’d trust the documentary
more, rather than someone who is just wearing casual clothes that the audience
won’t trust.

5.  As our documentary relies on binary opposites it’s easy to make one group seem
superior or better than another. To avoid this we will try to present both the good
side and bad sides of young people and old people equally. Our documentary is
an exploration of the topic and isn’t trying to make an argument one way or the
other.
 This means that a lot of mediation will take place as it can be expected that most
people will talk about older people being behind in terms of their knowledge
about technology.
 We are manipulating our viewers by doing this due and that may be seen as
providing false information and not truly showing what the public’s opinion really
is. However, I feel due to us wanting the documentary to be as objective as
possible this manipulation is necessary.

6.  It is easy to represent one group as ‘worse’ than another. For example the
dominant ideology about older people is that they are unwilling to change and
stubborn. We are trying to avoid this mostly as it is a very negative representation
and we don’t really want to show either group like this. This means that if
someone says that older people are like this we will show an opposing opinion
next to try and counter this.
 A stereotype of young people is that they are addicted to new technology. It
would be very easy for them to be represented this way in our documentary
therefore I think that we will try and present the younger people as willing to help
older people and using technology for things that are productive, such as school
work.
Representation

7.  All of these changes that we are making may seem problematic as we are
manipulating our audience without them knowing. This is done through the use of
selective editing as we can’t use all of the footage that we have. Due to this some
of the audience might realise that we are being selective as most people will
already come into our documentary with a pre formed opinion.
 However, every documentary that we watch uses selective editing either to make a
point or out of necessity as not all of the footage can be shown, therefore I don’t
really see this as a problem.
 As we are trying to make our documentary objective I don’t feel as this is really a
bad thing but rather trying to be fair and unbiased.