Post-Group Meeting

We have held our first group meeting with our focus group. It was quite interesting as most of them were comfortable with each other. They were very suggestive and open. There is 8 people, 4 boys and 4 girls. We have 3 Christians; A Catholic, Anglican and an Orthodox. A Buddhist, a Taoist, A Judaic, An Agnostic and a Muslim.

Our discussion lasted about 30 Min's, which we also recorded. We introduced our ideas to them such as for our ancillary products; The poster and magazine interview. We also made the suggestion of visiting the Kings College Chapel and they all thought it was a great idea. The group was quite shocked about our findings in the results from the survey. Particularly about the part that 73% of people in our college thought that Religion was a positive influence in the world today. Many of them seemed to agree to the fact England is not as religious as it once was, as it was also found in the Article in the Daily Mail.

Here's a clip of our discussion where two people talk about their faiths:

 

VICE

We want use a more vice-documentary style. They look at things through different angles, they are able to get a younger audience to wtch these things as they make them in an interesting way. Seeing as our documentary is based on the lives young people aged 17,18 or 19 this is the best way of learning how we would attract a more younger audience.

Focus Group 1st Meeting

We have arranged our first meeting between us and our Focus Group. Our intention for the first meeting is mainly focusing on getting to know each other, so that everyone can be more comfortable with each other. In this meeting we will also make a suggestion to the group about doing an activity together, again increasing comfort ability around each other. Introduce the main ideas of the programme, make it clear to them what the idea of the programme is and discussing the ancillary products as well as our findings in research. After we do this we will then offer them the chance to voice their own opinions and suggestions, for example if they have a different view as to how we should do the documentary.

Another thing that we thought would be could is trying to get them on Twitter and put a 140 character statement about their faith and why it is important to them. Then we will make it clear to them about our selfie idea and what we plan to do more with social networks. Our selfie idea is that we will change it every week so the parts of the face look different. Our plan is to film in a period of four weeks, so we will meet every Tuesday at 14:00 with an update.

Facebook, Twitter and Production

We have now set up Facebook and Twitter pages to spread word about our documentary. Our intention with both pages is not only to spread the word about our documentary but also to collect new ideas and feedback from our audience to see where we could improve etc. These are the links:
https://www.facebook.com/#!/GanzeDaviesProductions  https://twitter.com/FaithOffCCSS

 

The pages will also be used to introduce our characters on the show and more about their faiths e.g what is good about their faith? what makes their faith different? Our idea for our poster will also be presented on the page. The poster idea which is similar to Channel 4's ''Seven Days'', where apart of each persons face is attached to form one face. So we will ask our participants to take a selfie (a picture with just them in it, preferably a close-up of their face) and a 140 character statement about them and their faith on Twitter. Twitter will also be used for more discussions using a hashtag. For example, people who find out more about the show and want to offer their views on characters and the show will be able to comment using the #FaithOffCCSS hashtag. Facebook is used more for information and advertising, such as videos.

 

 

When we meet with all our characters, we will allow them to make suggestions about what they think the documentary should be like. Our intention at this first meeting is to put them in pairs to do different activities so they can become more comfortable with each other to make our documentary process easier. There might be a trip for us to the Kings College Chapel in Cambridge to hear the choir sing. Another idea is to maybe attend one of our participants places of worship if no there is no issue with the other participants. 

 

''Faith Off''

Faith Off is the working title of our documentary about religion. What we are planning to do is a mini-series where we bring together different faiths and put them against each other in situations and discussion about views in their religion. In the first programme or episode we will introduce what our idea is and also introduce the different religious faiths present in the world today and talk about them. After doing our religious survey this influenced us to go down this route. We were interested in how despite people saying they had no religious belief, they still thought of religion to be a more positive than negative force with 73% of our target group (student at our college) saying religion is a positive influence in the world. This may be our way of investigating as to why people think this way. In the follow up programmes or next episodes we plan to bring two people from different faiths together to discuss why they think that more people say religion is positive rather than negative in contemporary society, and also to talk about what makes them apart of their particular religious group or faiths. The idea is to use the 8 people from the people who answered the questionnaire (1 from each faith).

Our two ancillary products is what we are using to promote our programme. One of the ancillaries is a Poster. The poster we have decided with the help of looking at 4creative, which is a way in which channel 4 promotes and markets their TV programmes. The poster idea involves taking a selfie, a picture with each of the 8 people and combining them in strips of different parts of their face to make one face. The poster idea was influenced by a programme on Channel 4 titled 7 days who used this same method for the poster.
here is the of the Seven Days poster:

 

 

Our other ancillary product is a magazine article, giving an in depth detail on what the programme will be about. For this we looked at different magazines that had advertised religious programmes so we could get and idea of how it works. We looked some magazines like TV Choice and we found they advertised some religious programming like the new TV programme called Pilgrimage With Simon Reeve and another programme called The Bible. We saw how these programmes were advertised for example, they were some written parts where the actors gave an insight to the programme as they had experienced it first hand. This is what we could also do as we could interview our chosen group of  8 people and interview them and ask about what they thought about being in the programme and what they've learnt, mainly about experience, and we could gather images from the programme and send it to magazines like TV Choice. However we also looked at The Radio Times and we decided maybe this would be the best magazines to advertise our programme as it can give us a 2 page slot which magazines like TV Choice cannot and we are required to do this. Radio Times would be the better option.

 

 

Radio Times magazine:



 

TV Choice Magazine:

Finidings in Research

We have put the data of the people who have responded to our questionnaire together and have made an interesting discovery.
For our questions this is the information we obtained from our 3 questions:

1.       What is your religion?  (Even if you are not currently practicing)

Christian - 50%

Islamic - 9%

Hindu - 1%

Orthodox - 5%

Buddhist - 8%

            Other - 9%

               None - 17%

 

2.       How important is your religion to you?

               Very - 30%

              Quite - 33%

              Not very - 37%

 

3.       Do you think that Religion is a positive or negative force in the world?

 

Positive - 73%

 

Negative - 27%

 

 

Our interesting discovery was how many people thought religion was a postive influence in the world today. Most people who said they were not religious still thought it was a positive influence in the world today. Another result that was quite interesting was how important the religion was to the people. We had more people saying it was note very important to them than people saying religion was very important to them. Most of these came from people who said they were christian. This may agree with the article about the church becoming extinct as it is becoming less of an influence, de-instituionalised.

Brief

An extract from an original documentary TV programme, lasting approximately five minutes, together with two of the following three options:

• a radio trailer for the documentary;

• a double-page spread from a listings magazine focused on the documentary;

• a newspaper advertisement for the documentary.


This is from the specification of our examination board, OCR, and we have decided to do the last 2 options; A double page magazine spread and a newspaper article