Idea Change

After several days of debating and thinking, I have come to the conclusion that the concept of a documentary pursuing the production of a musical (Hairspray) at my school stood as an extremely challenging and problematic project, mostly down to my deciding to work independently. My research was directed towards documentaries obviously produced by teams, capturing an event from different angles and covering all areas. In my situation, this is obviously impossible, meaning that I was setting myself a stressful and the nonetheless unethical challenge. During filming, I found myself to be extremely restricted due to the unpredicable/unorganized enviorment, with it being a "point and shoot" scenerio. It may be argued that this is what all documentaries are stemmed from, but it must be understood that I was attempting to create a "Mocumentary"...an element of fiction running through an otherwise very real and live setting. Intense planning and organization would therefore be required, too large of a task when working against both a school timetable and as mentioned unpredictable envoirement. The idea of staging/setting up fictional scenerios whilst an actual production was being created implicated the issue that I would be of distruption to the creative process and the staff/cast, something which completely goes against the "fly on the wall" element of documentary making. Due to these issues, I have concluded that a change of idea is of need.

Since I have already conducted research towards the documentary genre, it makes sense to still pursue the same conventional format, but simply change the subject matter. Conducting a brain storm of ideas on the 10/10/10, I eventually came across the idea of pursuing the fictional story of a person with an absurd phobia, putting to work "Mockumentary" to full effect. Due to the project being entirely of fictional content, I can have 100% creative control, even having some sort of script in place to guide me a long (even though the project will be largely improvised) something that was missing in the previous idea. I can also due to this present written evidence of my planning/script to a far greater extent, such as this rough template of direction concerning dialouge and camera movement:

Further Research

Looking for further guidance in terms of what direction I should be aiming for, I decided to look into the "Mockumentary" style of documentary-making to a greater degree, searching for programming of direction parallel to what I wish to obtain. Through past TV viewing, I had known of a pilot-episode show named "LifeSpam", a spoof-documentary exploiting the lifestyles/phobias of particular characters, all of which carry random/comical twists executed in a way mimicking the conventions of documentaries such as Channel 4's "Cutting Edge".

(insert video link)

The raw-uncut depiction of this otherwise satirical extract is exactly the direction I aim to mimic, conveying a coat of realism over an otherwise absurd and ridiculous narrative. The camera merely oversees and is not a presence-truly defining the "fly on the wall" perspective of my project. Much more of contrast to my earlier idea is the style of editing, previously being a high-octane pop promo cutting style; this project accounting a much more simplistic and slower pace-quite the opposite. I must therefore bear much more focus towards camera composition and planning, due to the fact that I cannot use a sequence of frenzied cutting to gloss over gaps or scenes of simply poor quality.

My potential target audience in comparison to my previous demographic has changed to a significant extent. Whilst I previously concentrated on a far younger age range (15-18) I this time will cater towards a much more versatile demographic, being 18-40, evidently the primary age range for documentaries on the likes of Channel 4/BBC1. Due to the humerous context of the documentary/mockumentary however, it may be argued that my audience will include persons younger than 18 (due to the lighthearted content and spoof genre)