Experimenting With Interviewing Techniques

The video above is me and my classmate experimenting with different interviewing techniques to create different atmospheres for the audience. The first technique of the art teacher was used to create a positive atmosphere for the audience, we can tell this from the lighting used and the position of the interviewee in the shot, you can see that the shot is slightly shaky, this was Kate's best attempt to keep the camera as still as possible without using a tripod.
The second shot of the sixth form student walking down the corridor whilst talking was created as a tense atmosphere and and to convey to the audience that this person is very busy and maybe a professional, we had hoped to have other people to come into shot and get the student to pretend that she was signing a form or otherwise, further emphasising the interviewees professional status. This shot is often used in documentaries to mostly create tension.
The third and final technique of the interviewee sitting down is to create an opposing view of the interview. We can tell this from the content of the interviewee and the position and lighting used in the shot. The lighting above the interviewee creates shadows across his face further emphasising the point that the person doesn't agree with the interviewer. The position of the character shows the audience that the person is very confident about his views and therefore reclines in his seat.
All of these interviewing techniques were practiced to help us get a better understanding of them and help decide what of shots we would use and what atmosphere would be created in the process. Overall i think that this exercise was very helpful and that we will definitely be using some of these techniques in our final documentary.

Storyboard

We have made two storyboards for our documentary, one as a draft to look at and annotate so that we can add more ideas to the documenatry. After a brain storming session with our draft storyboard, we made our final storyboard with still images of what we would like to use for the final shot and included the technical information of how the shot should be set up and how we could move on from one shot to another using tansitions.
Overall our storyboard is still a plan because we may find that we want to add even more ideas to the documentary.

Research for Project

To get a better understanding of the effects of TV, we conducted our own research from books and the internet to gain more information that will prove useful.
Some of the books that we have read are: 'Television is Good for your Kids' by Dr. Marie Messenger Davies, 'Children and Television' by Bob Hodge & David Tripp and 'Understanding television' by Andrew Goodwin & Garry Whannel. These books have proven to be very useful in our research as they include statistics and quotes from interesting and reliable sources.
W have also looked at internet sites from news sites such as the BBC site to religious sites, expressing their open opinions, such as SSPXAsia.com.

We have collected some information from The American Academy of Paediatrics which has given us extremely useful statistics and results from tests that have been carried out relating children's behaviour or educational abilities to the effects of over watching TV or the contense of what programmes that the children viewed.

Some useful links that we found to be interesting to collect further information were:

http://www.boloji.com/parenting/00208.htm - A blog by Kamna Raj expressing her personal views of todays TV viewing and how children should not idolise the characters seen in cartoons but everyday heroes such as policemen and fire fighters.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/14/tv-children-harmful-effects - A section by the Guardian questioning the true danger of TV, whether we should restrict the amount of TV a young child watches or whether we should just ignore the warnings and make our own minds up.

http://www.femail.com.au/effectoftvonchildren.htm - An article about how Disney films teach young children early life skills that, when taught early, can help children to continue using the skills they have learned and develop them as they grow up.

Planning

For our new project of "Documentaries" we have decided to do ours on the theme of 'Is TV a bad influence on young children?' which we feel will be an interesting topic to investigate. We hve started planning what, where and how we will shoot our documentary and what sort of equipment we will need such as a proffesional camera with a radio mic for dialogue.
We have also considered who we will want to interview such as parents, teachers (particularly year managers), young children and experts who will give their own opinions about TV either as a positive or a negative.

Above is our original mind map for Planning a Documentary which included our intended form for the documentary.

It set out our preliminary task of what we were to start and what we wanted to use in the documentary such as archive footage, interviews with different parties and what information would be crucial to help give the documentary more depth, such as statistics.