Cut-away shot ideas

We are planning on filming our cut-away shots within the next week or so. The ideas for the shots are:

1) Students during lesson - To show behaviour within the class.
For this cut-away we will be using a establishing shot to be able to show the whole class of students during lesson.

2) Students after school - Showing their behaviour, once again but out of class.
A wide shot is going to be used to show a wider view of student behaviour outside of school hours.

3) News paper articles on the decline behaviour and achievement
Rostrum camera shots showing the headings of articles.

4) Uniform shops - To link in with the arguement whether uniform has a impact on student behaviour

At the moment these are the cut-aways we were able to come up with. Once we have decided on some more cut-aways, they will be added to this list.

Updates

We have been trying to arrange interviews with people who we thought would be able to discuss the topic we have chosen to do for the documentary.

We rang up schools to arrange interviews with teachers and head teachers. At the point we were unable to directly speak to these individuals however we were told that our message would be passed on to them and they would get back to us with an answer in wether they would be interested to help us out or not.

Updates

Munya designed the pre-documentary questionnaire which we handed out to 30 people. 15 of these were females and 15 of them were males. Once we get the questionnaire back, the results will be blogged.

List of possible speakers

Parent - Janette May

Head Teacher - Mrs Anita Johnson - Loxford School of Science and Technology

Two Students

A member of the refferal unit

A member of the teachers union

Teacher of a secondary school

School governer

MP of Romford - Andrew Rosindell

A Psychologist

Updates on progress

During the first few lessons we have been doing research to get more information on the topic of our choice. We have also been planning how we are to go about filming the cutaway shots and the interviews.

Framing a Interview - The Rule of Two Thirds - Rizwana Jawid

The rule of two thirds is a concept in film and video production where the framing of the scene is divided into nine imaginary fragments. The image above shows an example of how the frame is divided. When framing an interview, it is necessary to make sure that there is not too much head room and that the main focus of the scene is taking up two thirds of the screen. The camera should be positioned so that the interviewee in the documentary does not have direct eye contact with the camera.

Another issue that needs to be taken into consideration is that the background which is being used should not be distracting the main focus of the shot. For example, plant pots sticking out from behind the interviewee’s head.

Key Facts - Munya Gatawa

• More than 2,200 students in England are excluded from school every single school day. (BBC)

• Annual statistics show pupils removed for disruptive and bad behaviour,show short term exclusions have risen to 425,000.

• Permanent exclusions have fallen by 7% down to 8,680.

• 4 times as many boys as girls were permanently excluded.

• Long term pattern exclusions show that there are many more short-term exclusions of 3 days or less and many fewer permanent exclusions down 29% since 1997.

• Majority of these are in secondary schools.

• Exclusion levels now equivalent to more than 1% in 10 pupils.

Documentary Proposal Explaining Our Topic - Rizwana Jawid

As a group, we decided to base our documentary on the decline of student behavior and the effect it has on their achievement. We will also be focusing on whether having a school uniform has a impact on the way students behave. Does it encourage them to be more well behaved and disciplined? or Does it not have an impact on behavior and achievement at all?

Within this documentary we are planning on interviewing a number of people who will be able to provide us with more information on student behavior and the impact it has on a students exam results and whether other students are influenced by ones behavior.

We will visit local secondary schools and arrange interviews with the head teacher, teacher and parents. We also decided to speak to students to be able to view different perspectives of the main question.

Week 2

As a group we have now decided on the topic that we are going to focus our documentary... during this week we are going to find people that we can interview ... we are also going to come up with questions that we can ask them ... the blog will be updated every time we have done a piece of work.

Change of idea

After doing bits of research for our topic, unemployment in the Asian male community, we found that the information was very limited. The focus of our topic was something that we would not be able to find out much information on. We also thought that we would not be able to find many people who would be willing to talk about the issue from experience. As the project is a documentary and we would need interviews, cut-aways and all the other features of a documentary, we didn’t think that the topic of unemployment rates in the Asian male community would allow us to be able to include all these features.

Therefore…

We decided to change the focus of our documentary to ‘Is student behaviour declining in secondary schools and what is being done about it?’ … This topic would allow us to be more focused. We brainstormed all the things we could include in the documentary and the possible speakers.