Documentary Group Discussion - Initial Ideas

After this week's documentary seminar session I formed my group with Jamie, Alex, Elliott and Saul. We met up briefly afterwards to assign roles and talk about our initial ideas in response to the brief.

As the only member on the sound module, Jamie was given the role of sound recordist, with Elliott as editor. Although I have ended up taking on producer roles for other projects, I have never had the role officially, and so I chose to be producer for the project. With both Alex and Saul studying cinematography, we left the roles of director and cinematographer to be considered at a later date.

We each then shared our initial, undeveloped ideas for the project, of which Jamie had several. His first idea was around kids and gaming, exploring how young kids are playing older games, and how they are taking over the older generation in their technical ability. The second idea was to find a local musician or band who are trying to get into the industry, and asking them of their opinions on the state of current music. Lastly, an investigation into Sheffield's steel industry, and the impact its disappearance has had on the workers who were one part of it.

After this, I shared my initial research and list of potential ideas for the project (below).

I had started off the list with ideas for the poetic documentary exercise, which could be represented more abstractly with use of symbolism and metaphoric visuals - similar to the examples we were shown of 'Blight' and 'Sans Soleil'. These ideas, such as 'dreams', 'time' and 'memories' would work well for the first exercise, but would require significant work and a strong focus to be turned into a 5-10 minute documentary.

For more focused and topical ideas, I did some research into news articles and charities, for which the website 'Sheffield Help Yourself' was very useful, listing groups and community projects of all sorts and sizes in the Sheffield area - providing contact details and websites for further information too.

After watching 'Alive Inside' as part of Sensoria film festival, a film revealing the incredible effect music has on the lives of dementia sufferers, I was inspired to see if something similar could be found locally. I'm very interested in mental health and diseases affecting the mind such as Alzheimer's, and I feel it is an emotive topic that can be represented both through visual poetry and a more conventional documentary format. Whilst looking through the website I found two groups who sing to dementia sufferers and get them involved in music, a potential lead for if we base our film around such a topic.

I also remembered an article I read by The Guardian over the summer calling students at Sheffield universities to rally together and vote Nick Clegg out of power after his backtracking on tuition fees. Rather than centre a film around this, I thought about the wider issue of youth disconnected from politics, what has caused it and what needs to be done to fix it. At a time shortly after the Scottish referendum (which saw unprecedented levels of young people voting to change the future of their country) and the 2015 general election, I thought it would be an interesting and emotive subject to explore - and one that we could associate with.

Other topics I researched as potential directions for the project included young people with dementia, the WW1 centenary in Sheffield, a home for housing and rehabilitating refugees in Leeds, the momentum for change in Northern England following the Scottish referendum and the changing ways in which we now consume media.

WWI centenary exhibition at Museums Sheffield

For the rest of the meeting we discussed these ideas and suggested directions they could be taken for both exercises, with the topics of youth politics disconnection, Alzheimer's, dreams and music being our favourites at this time. Afterwards I set up a Facebook page for the group encouraging everyone to share any interesting articles, films or stories they found, and continually add to the list of ideas we've created.

In a few days we will meet again to pick and discuss our strongest ideas for the project, so that we can have our pitch developed by the time we share them with our peers and tutor.