This planning brief summarizes a 5-minute documentary about Tulsi Vagjiani, the sole survivor of Air India Flight 605 that crashed in 1990. The documentary will focus on Tulsi recounting her personal experiences on the flight and in the aftermath. It will explore what happened to her, how it affected her, and how she overcame challenges. The target audience is ages 16-60. Potential constraints include scheduling interview time with Tulsi, securing equipment from the school, and managing costs with a small budget. Test screenings and online distribution will gauge the documentary's effectiveness.

1. Planning Brief
BY DILINI GORSIA

2. Production company: Dee Documentaries
Project Name: Survivors
Length
• Five Minutes
Format
• My production will be an extract from a documentary, specifically the opening
section.

3. Interviewee
• My interviewee is Tulsi Vagjiani who is the only person throughout the
documentary. This is because it is her story that is the focus point of the
documentary and therefore it is her who will be sharing the information reliant on
her personal experience.

4. Outline
• This in-depth documentary follows one women who shares her story about her survival
against flight IC605 that crashed and arose in flames back in February of 1990. We hear her
story about her experiences that day and the days that followed after. This emotional episode
is one of many in the ‘Survivors’ documentary series as Tulsi Vagjiani speaks from her heart
and tells us how horrific the whole experience was for her that day as she long awaited the
return of her families who unfortunately became casualties of flight IC605. The flight took off
from Mumbai at 11:58 and was travelling to Bangalore when the accident occurred and was
noted as the 8th worst accident in India to this day.

5. Target Audience
• The target audience for my documentary is very broad due to the fact that there
are numerous aspects that may attract a large audience to our documentary.
• For example, someone around the age of 25 -36 that has been through a similar
experience may be interested in the documentary as they may be more able to
relate to the experiences told by Tulsi. As well as this, someone who enjoys
watching a range of documentaries may also be attracted to my product.
Our target audience is 16 – 60 year olds, both male and female.

6. Areas of research
• What happened to Tulsi?
• How did it affect her?
• How has she overcome the problems she was facing?
• What is the Katie piper foundation?
• What were some of the hardest moments she had to deal with?
• Personal experiences?

7. Rationale
• The rationale behind my product is to hopefully stimulate curiosity along with
interest within my audience. I would like my audience to hear real life stories of
real people in order to emphasize how things like this could happen to anyone
and how it is possible to overcome such events. The desired impact of this
documentary is to share Tulsi’s story so that the audience are not only able to
connect with her but also sympathise with her and feel her emotion about how
real these things really are and what it meant for her, the struggles she had to
face and how no matter what she was able to overcome such a terrible situation.

8. How will you test is the product is effective
and successful?
• In order to track the success of the product, I will be conducting a post –
questionnaire. The questions within the survey will help me to really understand
what specific aspects of the production my audience enjoyed the most and what
they think I could’ve improved on.
• Furthermore, I will be showing the final product to as many people as possible by
making it available on a range of platforms and then hopefully raising a discussion
about what people think about it.
• One way this could be done is through social media platforms, such as Facebook,
twitter and YouTube in order to gather a wider response and to also see how
many views the documentary gets.

9. Codes and Conventions
• An authoritative voiceover that aims to encourage and inform the audience
• Real footage of events
• Realism (including natural lighting and sound)
• Archive footage/ stills to add authenticity and further information
• Interviews with experts in that particular field
• Texts and titles
• Sound
• Set ups of typical scenes (reconstructions e.g. children in a classroom)
• Visual coding ( Mise-en-scene and props in particular)

10. Resource constraints
• Some of the problems I may be facing are time management, money and equipment etc. This is because,
firstly, it is very hard to schedule filming time, especially because a lot of the documentary consists of Tulsi,
who is a very busy person and doesn’t have much time to help with filming. As well as this, there are a
large range of cutaways that also need to be filmed which may require some additional filming time. All the
filming sessions along with the written work takes up a lot of time.
• Secondly, as I am in a group by myself, money is another limiting factor. This is because I am only able to
work with a small budget for things such as travel expenses and additional editing packages.
• Thirdly, booking out equipment from the schools media department is a constraint as there is a limit to the
amount of times equipment can be taken out during a certain time frame. As well as this, there may be
other groups that book out the same equipment at the same time therefore arranging filming sessions
beforehand is very important and leaving filming until the end may mean equipment is unavailable.
• Finally, as with most productions, my final piece is reliant upon the people featured in the documentary.
This means that there may be a chance that interviewees are unreliable and may cancel filming sessions
last minute. This may result in strain on the final product and when it can be finished.

11. Constraint Explanation How to avoid
Time Management - Scheduling filming time
- Amount of cutaways
- Written work
- Schedule filming time in
advance
- Plan each and every cutaway so
you know what you have to film
- Complete all planning and
research and film as soon as
script, locations, release forms
etc. are complete.
Money - Travel expenses
- Editing software
- Use locations that are much closer
so travel is less expensive.
- Only use extra software if
absolutely necessary
Equipment - Booking equipment
- High demand
- Filming times
- Last minute filming
- Book equipment in advance
- Check weather conditions
- Don’t leave filming to the last
minute
- Arrange all filming times with
anyone else present
Interviewees - Busy
- Unreliable
- Main focus
- Arrange dates that best suite all
- Be flexible with filming times