Firstly we feel we have portrayed many interpretations & ideologies of obesity through many people in our documentary. Due to our topic it was very hard to remain impartial as it would be irrational to say being overweight was good. Due to this, it was hard to get two sides of the argument. However we did ask many members of the public their views and there were a few mixed answers including people saying to 'look past it' and people that just disagreed with the subject 100 percent.
We feel we have strayed away from the stereotype of the happy overweight person and the nice looking and tasting unhealthy food, and rather portrayed a much more realist view of reality, as in terms this is real life. However we added an element of comedy to it as we feel it takes the sting off the controversy and makes light hearted viewing but still shocking. A real media example of this stereotyping is off the 'family guy' sitcom: It portrays obese people as zombie-like people that will never stop eating, we feel we have strayed away from this as we have explained how obesity is formed and how we can tackle it. Furthermore, the Family Guy sitcom also integrates comedy into the subjects that they cover, to make it less insulting and lighten the controversial subjects. We believe that we have taken to this quite well, when we did our first test screening we got the responses that we hoped for. People laughing and looking a bit shocked and serious. We believe that mixing these three feelings into our documentary fits perfectly with our targeted audience of teenagers ages 16-21, because we let them feel at ease and happy; while also getting across quite a serious message.
The subject that we chose to do our documentary on challenges the forms and conventions of documentaries almost straight away. Obesity is a very one-sided subject, because there is no good way or reason for being obese and therefore cannot have a counter arguments saying it's 'not so bad'. The conventions of a documentary is to be impartial, giving the audience two sides of a argument and letting them decide which side of the fence they sit on. We challenge this convention because we wanted to show people the reality of obesity and not sugarcoat it like much of the media usually does. An example of real media of this is in the magazine called 'Heat' - they had a article on the front cover saying 'Large Bodies makes Large Love'. The two lovers were extremely obese, however, the title suggested that having large bodies was not really that bad. We wanted to break away from this convention of sugarcoating subjects and show our audience the raw reality.
The media product that gave us the most inspiration was the documentary called 'Supersize Me'. This documentary also challenged the conventions showing their audience the reality of what eating too much and being obese does to your body. We used this documentary as inspiration and developed on the way he addresses his audience. He decided to take an active role in the documentary and eat the fatty foods himself and test to see what this will do to him. We decided to show our audience what they are eating, giving them shocking statistics of how obesity is spreading in the UK and giving information from the public and professionals on what they would do and how it is effecting them and how to hopefully deal with the problem. What we have done develops the real media product 'Supersize Me', however we did not get to take a active role in the documentary as much as we wanted to because of time restrictions. If we had more time we would have done a similar experiment to that of Morgan Spurlock and shown the audience what happens when you eat too much unhealthy food.
Before we could start our filming we had a few complications. Being no manuals or instructions set for us we had to figure out how to work the camera and tri-pod by ourselves and certain parts of the tri-pod fell off. After five or so minutes we managed to figure out what all the parts were used for and started to get to work straight away to make up for lost time.
In our establishing shot of Mc Donalds we had the beam from the sun behind the Mc Donalds sign. The reason why we were waiting to get this shot is because the light signified how the media have portrayed Mc Donalds, as being 'heavenly'. We wanted to show our audience that we were breaking this stereotype and portraying it as wrong. Instead of showing the food in a 'showcased' or 'glamorised' way, which is the way their food is advertised all over the world, we showed the realistic view of it. We do a close-up of the food, as this will disgust and shock our audience, which leads on to the set of clips of us eating Mc Donalds. This will repulse our audience even more. The reason why we do this is to grip our audience and to keep their attention. After they see us eating the disgusting food, they will want to see what happens next. This is a common convention for most documentaries, whereby they try to shock their audience into wanting to watch more and to keep them interested. We believe that we have done very well in gripping our audience.
We filmed ourselves presenting the opening to the documentary in a medium shot as this causes the audience to engage or connect with us more as our body language and costume shows we are not formal and will have a more casual outlook, something that our audience will be able to relate to. On the first try, we were not prepared; we were still new to talking directly to the camera and the nerves were getting to us. Like so many documentaries, we didn't get it right the first time around. We created many unwanted jump cuts and 'bloopers' causing a lot of wasted time and footage, however this was a steep learning curve for us and enabled us to move on with more experience and confidence.
At first we tried to film inside and introduce our documentary due to bad weather but once inside, we had sound distortion. Instead, we went for the observational approach to help our audience understand where we were and what we were doing by filming outside the entrance to the school. This was meant to follow on to the interview we had originally planned with the principal. However, we had to improvise as she failed to attend the interview promised for five weeks in a row. We improvised by interviewing other members of staff from lea valley high school, this was not preferred but had to make do!
The interviews we had were all improvised, no answers were scripted and no teachers were warned in advance to prepare their answers. The reason for this is to make sure we do not influence our audience or those that we questioned in any way, because this is one of the key conventions that all documentaries have to follow. This way we feel we have broke the bias convention in every way we can, but however as said before it is very hard to say that being obese is 'ok'.
Audience Feedback
For our audience feedback we asked many questions in order to get our audiences opinions and to see if we had to change any part of the documentary in order to satisfy our audiences wants.
The four main points/issues raised for our documentary to be improved were:
Listening issues with some of our interviewees: as we had a very loud abrupt lady first then a very quiet lady- this made some confusion and the audience felt they couldn't understand the quiet lady- in order to improve our documentary we re-evaluated our interviewees and rearranged the interviews order, and also increased the volume of the quiet lady. This was a minor change but a very effective one.
Another issue was the statistics within the introduction- 25% of our audience agreed they were either too fast, small or long to read. In order to overcome this we shortened the statistics to make them more clear and concise and we paused the statistics on the screen longer in order for the audience to read them properly, therefore ensuring that they can obtain the facts rather than skimming and missing out on valuable information.
42% of our audience also agreed our interviews were too short and there were not enough points made, this made us lengthen our interviews but also add another question in order to get more points across. However one of the problems we faced with this was to do with our time limit as we didn’t want to exceed the five minute guideline. This caused us to re-evaluate our interviews and choose the most important points but also keeping it varied rather than constant with one person talking.
Another feedback suggestion was to have more public views as the audience felt we had too many professional views, this caused us to have one last trip to the street and ask a few more people what their view on obesity was. The problem with this was our time limits, however we cut out unnecessary points and chose the most important and by doing this hopefully fulfilling the audiences expectations.
