4. Initial Research

• Witchcraft
• Disabled Sports
• Underage Sex
• Swans
• The human centipede
• Sexuality
• Underage Drinking
• BNP
• Drugs
• Smoking

We decided on these ten subjects as they were all things that we we’re familiar with or that had connotations of the teenage age range and therefore we would have the facilities to produce them. Some of these were topics of interest of ours as individuals, and things we already knew a lot about such as sexuality, and others such as witchcraft were things we didn’t know a lot about but would like to know more.

We eventually decided on sexuality as it was something we thought would be easy to do due to the thriving gay culture of Manchester, which would help our production along and is easy to get to. We researched GBLT events in the area in the next two weeks and soon found that we had just missed most of the pride events which made it harder for us to think of ideas of where to go and what to use as cut shots. We thought of putting a twist on the plot of the documentary and basing it around homosexual idols in society today, and so we sent emails to people who we thought would be significant and accessible, our first thought was Kieron Richardson who stars in local soap opera “Hollyoaks”.

After getting no reply from these emails we had to change our idea as we couldn’t delay filming anymore and so we chose the idea of witchcraft, as in the initial planning we couldn’t decide between that and sexuality. We again, looked for local events that related to our topic but all that we found was psychic readings and convents. Because of this we decided to slightly alter our idea of witchcraft which we planned to put elements of other supernatural activity in anyway, to psychics, as there was a vast amount of psychic events in the area and a group member had access to “Mystic Bell” who works locally.

After researching what documentary channels there is, we decided that our documentary would be shown on something like Living TV. We first considered discovery channel and channel 4 but these channels mostly shown scientific programs or entertaining documentary’s such as “super size me”, as our piece fit neither of these we decided to look elsewhere. We found that Living TV displays everyday things in different cultures such as “My Indian Wedding” which slightly concerns our piece, plus they show other supernatural programs such as “Most Haunted” which would convince people that the documentary would be of a high standard. It would be shown at around 7’oclock as the older and teenage audiences would be home from school/work but it isn’t too late so viewers who may be interested but still in school, we considered putting it later but then thought there was no need for it to be beyond the watershed as it was quite a welcoming subject.