A2 Media Studies | Further Documentary Planning

In preparation for the documentary which me and Tom are currently filming, we have decided to show a development in our documentary with the creation of a permission letter that we had to write in order to film in the school and a set of questions that we'll be asking students and the teacher that we have been able to get to film for our documentary as illustrated below:

Our intentions with this now in the next steps of the planning is to successfully film the interviews being done and the classroom so that we have scenes from inside the school as well, which will make us ready for finalising the documentary through the editing process.

(26/02/2016) - Narrative Structure

As the documentary nears its final touches at this stage, I have decided to explain what the narrative is in a chronological order as listed below:

• The documentary starts out by introducing the school to the viewer showing an establishing shot of the school entrance sign and a building in the background, with a pull focus introducing "Inside Britain's Schools" afterwards, this is also when the '8V' logo appears just after the frame focuses again.
• Several shots of the school are shown in the frame including pans and establishing shots.
• Mr Preston is interviewed and the viewer gets his reflection on the school on what he thinks of it, whether the students are challenging or not and what his passion for English is. This also includes shots which reflect on the school showing shots of other areas in the school as well as action inside the class when Mr Preston is teaching.
• Soon after this comes a scenario where Mr Preston is handling a child who is misbehaving by talking over people and the teacher who is then sent outside to be dealt with, linking to binary opposites as this could be viewed as good/bad due to a misbehaving student and a teacher shouting at the student as a result of him trying to do his job. Whilst this could be putting the school in a negative light which is something me and Tom assured that we wouldn't be doing, we've come to the agreement that it's showing the viewer that the teacher is doing his job properly and is able to handle students in a professional manner.

This is all I can quite remember for the chronological order of the narrative as well as the documentary itself, I also recall that there are other shots after these points and then after the credits roll there's a preview for another documentary which is something Channel 4 also do on the end of their documentaries which me and Tom got the idea from.

Me and Tom picked this narrative structure because we wanted to have a documentary where it begins with showing the school as a whole including an interview with someone which is around the time that tension occurs (relative to a Channel 4 documentary as tension occurs and then the problem is resolved later into the documentary e.g. Educating Yorkshire) and after the tension occurs, as mentioned before, the problem is eventually solved. We both think that it's a narrative structure that a Channel 4 documentary would go along with and that it's also a suitable narrative structure for showing the school in a positive light and informing the viewer that the teachers do their jobs properly at the school alongside facts about what an English teacher thinks of the school (Blumler and Katz, 1974).