Pitch Answers

• Your idea and why it is important to your audience?

Our idea is to make a documentary about how childhood has changed. it is important to our audience as teenagers can understand how lucky they are and adults can re-experience what childhood was like for them.

• What type of documentary would it be?

It will be a historical documentary which also explores the issues in society.

• What other documentaries inspired you?

The documentary Excluded inspired us as it is about children who go to school in the 21st century. From watching this we wondered what life was like for our parents generation.

• Is it viable? prove it. How will it be filmed/managed?

It will be viable as we have already got the equipment to film and real life photos to use in our documentary.

• What locations will you use? Who will you approach to interview?

The locations we will use include the school and possibly a retirement home. We will be interviewing senior citizens, teachers and students.

• How will the five-minute extract fit into a larger whole?

We have decided to film the beginning of our documentary. This will introduce the idea of how childhood has changed by getting real footage and pictures to show just what a persons childhood was like in the 20th century compared to that of a 21st century child.

• What research will be required in order to be well informed?

We will be researching online and also gaining information from our parents and grandparents to get a clearer insight into their past. We will also need to research other documentaries to get a better idea of what techniques and layout to use in our documentary to attract the audience.

• Who is your target audience? Include audience research

Our main target audience are teenagers but we would also like adults to view it as they may be able to relate to it. Over 70% of the teenagers we asked said that they would watch a documentary about childhood.

• Why would C4 or another channel want to commission this documentary?

Channel 4 is well known for their popular documentaries. Everyone has had a childhood, therefore everyone would be able to relate to our documentary. C4 would want to commission our documentary because there would be a lot of viewers of all ages watching it.

Research into similar products

The cbbc documentary called evacuation is a reality/historical documentary which is about 12 modern day children aged 12 who are taken to the country side to experience the life as a 1940's child. This is very similar to our documentary as it explores the behaviour of what children were like in the 1940's as well as the 21st century. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr_KY9dxHcQ

The historical double take on kids games of life by the Guardian explores what childhood was like in the 1950's. It describes how child games have changed and how much freedom children used to have. This documentary uses a lot of real footage which we aim to apply to our documentary.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/dec/02/children-play-documentary-off-diary

The documentary 'Who do you think you are' by the BBC is about celebrities who explore their childhood as well as their ancestors past. He reveals to us what his childhood was like back in the day and what he experienced. We also want to include interviews of what others past experiences were.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007t575

The BBC documentary called panorama- addicted to games explores the life of modern day teenagers and their dependancy on technology. We are going to include the idea of teenagers being obsessed with technology in our documentary but we will be comparing this to the life of a 1950"s child who would then have been playing board games or outside exploring the world.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00wlmj0/Panorama_Addicted_to_Games/

Children who are dependent on technology are taken outside into the wilderness to experience the wonders of nature for the first time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1567665/

Questionnaire to audience with feedback

Questionnaire Results:

We asked the audience which type of documentary they prefer, 15 respondents replied that they prefer reality TV while the least popular documentary was health with only 3 respondents.

Within our group we had a dilemma of which documentary to choose. Therefore we asked the audience which of these two types of documentaries they would prefer to watch. 19 people choose 'how childhood has changed' as the documentary they would prefer to watch. However only 9 people replied that they would prefer to watch a documentary about piracy. As a result of this, we have come to the conclusion that 'how childhood has changed' is the best documentary for us to do as it seems like a more interesting topic.

We discovered that the majority of our audience are interested in seeing real life footage in our documentary.This is also shown in many people commenting that the last documentary they saw needed more footage.Most of the respondents stated that the last documentary they saw was to do with animals.Many animal documentaries showed real life footages that might appeal to a larger audience , so we will incorporate real life footage in our documentary.

Documentary Definitions

Arturo: A documentary can be defined as real life footage of actual facts, that explains and teaches certain aspects about life.

Hollie: A documentary can be seen as realistic and factual footage of occurrences in our world that portrays peoples points of view and may aim to change ones opinion.

Georgina: A documentary can be defined as a mixture of realism and creativity which aims to portray a truth about life and / or other points of view.