The story line

In each scene a different topic should be touched. I want the first scene to touch on the idea that if your life at home or situation with your parents is bad then your decisions throughout the day could easily be affected. In scene 2 I want to express how easy it is to be persuaded into doing things like smoking weed. Scene 3 I want to express the idea that a lot of college students are broke and some resort to stealing. I want the end to talk about how all these things together can be




Scene 1 - Sebs room
Cinematic shots of Sebs room while you can hear Sebs parents start to argue.
Main character (Seb) is woken up in the morning by his arguing parents. He rubs his eyes and sits up (looks frustrated) stands up, puts a tee shirt on and walks down stairs. A montage of Seb getting ready for college with parents arguing the whole time then starts and finishes with him leaving the door (parents arguing is inaudible). Seb then gets his bike from the garage and we have a shot of him slowly bike off towards college.


Scene 2 - Rec bench
Seb pulls up on bike to see luke and beth on a bench. They greet each other but Seb seems to be upset or annoyed by something. Luke brushes it off and starts talking about his night last night mentioning he has some weed left over. he pulls it out and sparks it. Beth gets ups and says she needs to go to college and asks if Seb and Luke are coming. Luke says no, Beth then asks Seb and Seb stops to think (Can hear his thoughts) "go to college and be miserable or stay with Luke for some weed which will make me forget about my parents". Seb chooses to stay with Luke. Luke says he has decided not to go in either as he hasn't done the work and doesn't want trouble. They talk for a little.
Scene 3 - They get hungry and go to a shop. Seb explains that he hasn't got any lunch or money for lunch as his parents were arguing this morning and he didn't want to be near them. Luke says its fine and goes to distract the shop keeper while Seb goes in and takes some food. The shop keeper notices them but they run off and do not get caught. Luke "mission success".

Aims and Intentions

I am producing a social documentary about life as a teen at college and how life at home can affect someone's behaviour outside of the house. The key idea is to mix concepts from a documentary and a drama together. I took this inspiration from a producer called Larry Clark who created a film that was filmed with some actors and some non actors who would reacted to the story line based off of their actual personality. I like this idea as, to the audience, the people are real people and the stuff happening to them is also real. This will make the audience feel more for the person and will grip them in, this is the unique selling point. This idea will also give the audience a good idea of what a teen is actually like outside the home which creates the documentary aspect. I will be using a documentary format but using dramatic elements to create suspense and too make it more interesting. I plan to use low-key lighting to create a dark tone to the visuals. I plan to use a variety of shot types and angles to make the video aesthetically pleasing and interesting for the audience. Another typical trait of a documentary is hand held camera shots, this adds a real life feel to the video and will make it feel more as if what they are watching is real life.




I will not need to construct many representations of people however I will for the people I choose to use as actors. However I will construct the most real and truthful representation of young people in the video as I want people to see that although some might do bad things their is a reason for this be it for attention, because they are struggling mentally or to try and fit in. I plan to give a balanced view on the topics shown as I feel that this is what a documentary should do. I plan to show that teens can and will be trouble makers however a lot of the time there is a reason for this and that there could be an underlying issue with the teen.


My target audience is 18-30 YO millennials and I intend to target this audience by using taboo topics that they can relate to. I plan to use this video to give viewer a nostalgic feeling and to remind them of how it felt when they were a teen.




My final product should conform to channel 5s industry context as channel 5 airs a lot of documentary videos and I feel that as mine is unique with the aspect of drama it would stand out. I decided to choose channel 5 as I feel my idea fits into its style. To decide this I looked at channel 5s commissioning page to see what type of programmes they are looking for.

Pitch

Title: TEENS


Logline: A documentary about a teen who struggles at home with his parents and we look into how this relationship effects his behaviour outside of the house and the knock-on effects this has.


Genre: Social Documentary


Audience: 18-30 YO Millennials who went to college/ sixth form and have indulged or experienced some of the topics touched on


USP: My unique selling point is the idea that most of the people in my piece are improvising scenes based on their real character this tells the audience that what is going on in the persons life is real giving the audience more of a feel for the character.
Convergence

Brainstorm for storyline

This page is going to be used to try and come up with a fitting storyline for my documentary.

• Teens preparing for a party the following night

• Teens with nothing to do looking for something to do (end up going and getting themselves in a bad situation)
• Teen struggling at home with parents and goes out to see his friends (how his relationship with his parents effect his decisions when with his friends)
• Teen falls out with mates and finds new friends that are a bad influence
• 
  

I will keep adding to this page until I have decided which story line I will use.

Treatmeant page

The Show: Urban Youth: Outside of closed doors
Channel 5
Target Audience:18-30 YO
Form and Style: (Genre) Fly on the wall style documentary
Duration: 2 minutes 30 sec to 3 minutes
Visual elements: Natural lighting (documentary style), and low-key coloured lighting for party environment.
Settings: recreational grounds, houses, college (maybe)
Audio elements: Diegetic sounds, non diegetic voice over
Inspiration: KIDS

I want to create a short film/ documentary style video that captures youth under unsupervised conditions and follow some people through day to day life and other environments. The aim of this documentary is to enlighten the audience into some important issues that teens face in and out of college. I will be planning a rough story line for the video but want the story line to seem natural (to create the documentary aspects) so I will be leaving some of the storyline or script to the people in the video and tell them to act how they would without the camera.

As the target audience is 18-30 year olds I think this idea will be very interesting as it will make them reminiscent of their teens and will show them how times have changed since they themselves were teenagers. Considering the audience is quite young I am expecting them to be quite open minded to some of the stuff that will be seen (especially some taboo topics) as I will probably touch on things such as drugs, alcohol and sex which a lot of people can relate to but not a lot of people talk about especially for my age group.

Documentaries

Looking through a selection of channel 5 documentaries I see a lot of them contain recreational videos that are created by actors. I plan to change this for my project as I want to look into using non actors that still express the views and facts that I want to perceive in this work. I want these people to be as natural as possible to show how teens actually are around one another. I feel that as a teen myself, for adults, I am usually a very PG version of myself which would rub off on the documentary and would give a false view of what life is like. I may even use a hidden camera at some points to give the audience a real insight.

Another thing I noticed about these channel 5 documentaries is that a lot of them do cover controversial topics and topics that have an obvious meaning. This tells me that I need to come up with a clear idea of what I want to get out of this documentary for the viewer. I think that if i went into detail about one of the taboo topics I am going to expand on it would fit nicely along with the other channel 5 documentaries.

Also in these documentaries most of them have a "voice of god" or a voice narrating the video. I think I will find someone with a good voice for this and go to a recording studio and record these clips. I will write a script for this and I will makes sure these facts are strong and contain interesting numbers/ statistics that make the walk away from the documentary thinking about these facts.

KIDS 1995

Kids is a film by Larry Clark that is about the youth of New York in 1995. The film touches on subjects of STDs, drugs, stealing and other issues that the youth of this era have to deal with. The film is given a main story line where one of the characters is faced with conceiving the HIV virus from another main character (Telly) and the film is about the girl trying to get hold of and find Telly to notify him about the STD. The film includes a mix of actors and non actors that would improvise to create the documentary feel to the film. This is the aspect that I am hoping to take for my idea. I want to create a piece that touches on subjects that the youth of today have to deal but with a story line that grips the viewer.