When you begin your project you may have a brief telling you what kind of film, TV or radio piece you are being asked to make. Your first task is to come up with an idea. You may have a really good idea immediately; however, a lot of groups need a little time to come up with their plans. This can be quite a daunting task if you are not used to it.
The first thing you will need to do is carry out some background research. You need to know something about the type of piece you are going to make and about the audience you are making it for, so before you start thinking about your own idea you should do more background research on your brief.
On the website you can download some checklists (an example is illustrated below). You should keep the checklist and your notes together in your folder. The checklist will remind you of the types of questions to ask but also prompt you to think about the aims of your project.
When you are doing your research you should be keeping notes. There is no set way of keeping these notes; some producers tend to end up with notebooks full of scribbled notes, and others are very methodical.
You should also be clear about your objectives for your research. It’s true that you may often need to do some background reading around a topic, which won’t be particularly focused, but when you start the kind of research suggested in this chapter you should try to have an outcome in mind. Ask yourself:
Big broadcasters have very elaborate and expensive methods of getting audience feedback and researching their audience. When you start your project it’s worth thinking about your particular audience; in particular you can start to think about their behaviour when they are consuming media.
Template 2.1 Audience research checklist
The answers will be different depending on the audience you have. This type of research helps you think about the kind of approach you might take with your production. You can start to build up a picture of your audience. However, you will need to be careful about stereotyping your audience; try and canvas some opinions rather than just guess.
Whatever project you have, a good thing to do is to start to look at some examples of work in the same genre. It will help you to think about your own project and give you some ideas. If you look carefully at similar types of work you will start to see how they are constructed. You will start to be able to deconstruct a piece. By deconstructing a piece and looking at its component parts you will get a better idea of how to construct your own piece. Depending on what type of piece you are making there will be different questions to ask. Try to find as many examples as you can.
Remember: keep a note of what you have looked at and where you found it. Later on it may be important to cite your sources.
If you have been asked to do a trailer, start to look at trailers on the internet; they are very easy to find. If you know the type of film trailer you are going to make, look at three or four different trailers in the relevant genre. Try to answer the questions below for each of them. See if there are any common factors in each of the trailers.
Template 2.2 Researching trailers
Again, if you know the genre of music you are going to be using, do some research into music videos using similar types of music.
Template 2.3 Researching music videos
Try to watch or listen to commercials from a number of different sources and channels and at different times of the day.
If you log onto the website you’ll find links to lots of advertisements on the web.
Template 2.4 Researching advertisements
You should try to listen to or watch news reports from as wide a variety of sources as possible. If you are doing a radio piece, try to listen to reports from both commercial stations and public service stations and reports from local radio and national radio. You should try to listen to a number of very different news reports on the same day. This will give you a good idea of how different stations are approaching the same news content.
Template 2.5 Researching news and current affairs
Factual: A factual piece can be a short magazine item in a longer programme or it can be a long form of documentary. Since you are likely to be making a shorter piece, it’s worth listening to or watching short factual items. Again it is useful to vary the types of programme you listen to, from local radio to national radio and commercial to public service. On TV it’s useful to watch a range of factual items from the lighter end of factual entertainment, to the more serious types of programmes. Comparing how the different pieces work will help you to understand how they are constructed.
Features: These tend to be associated more with radio than with TV, although TV has similar types of programmes. A feature will be a factual piece but would also include other material, possibly poetry, readings and music. It tends to be used for more impressionistic pieces or biographies, or slice-of-life-type stuff rather than the more current affairs end of programme-making. It is the more “artistic” end of factual programme-making.
If you go to the website you’ll find some helpful links.
Now that you have done a little background research, you are ready to start thinking about your own idea. One way of coming up with inspiration is to do a creative thinking session. In this kind of work a group of people get together to try to come up with as many ideas as possible for a project. There are lots of ways to run a session such as this; however, sitting in a group and shouting at one another isn’t one of them. Although a creative thinking session is supposed to allow lots of good ideas to surface, there needs to be some sort of structure if it’s going to be effective.
Creative thinking should be a collective, group activity and have a positive feel, but it’s easy to get so passionate about your own idea that you stop listening to others. You may well have the best idea, but at this point you don’t know that.
‘NO’ is not a good word to use during a creative thinking session. The best ideas come when everyone feels that they will be listened to with respect. If members of the group feel that they will be shouted down or embarrassed, then they won’t come up with ideas and you may miss something. Try to add to an idea rather than dismiss it. As you listen to someone’s idea try not to find fault with it. Ask questions and if you have further thoughts try to add to the idea.
You can download this exercise from the website if you wish.
EXERCISE 2.1 Yes and ...
The exercise below is to help you to get a feel for how a positive approach to creative thinking can bring out the best ideas. This is a kind of improvisation exercise. In this exercise you shouldn’t be thinking about your own project; instead choose something completely unconnected with it.
EXERCISE 2.2 Creative thinking
OK, back to your production: the following is one way to structure a creative thinking exercise. If you want to you can download a separate sheet for this exercise from the website.
Once you have all this in place as a group you should go through the sections below. Remember: the facilitator needs to keep everyone to time and remind the group which section they are considering
The parameters are all the things you can’t change: the restrictions or rules you know you are going to have to work with. This shouldn’t take very long as everyone in the group should already know them. However, it’s worth starting the session by making a checklist of what you already know about what you have to do. With a student project you will normally have been given some of these parameters. You are likely to know the genre of the piece and who it is aimed at, namely your target audience. You may have been given other parameters as well. It’s worth stating what these are.
At this point anyone who wants to should suggest ideas. It doesn’t matter how wild or impractical the ideas are. The main thing is to come up with as many ideas as possible. The person taking notes should start making a list of all the ideas that are mentioned.
IMPORTANT: At this point no ideas are bad. Use the Yes and . . . technique. If a member of the group comes up with an idea, however impractical, you should add it to the list. At this point in the session no one should be raising objections to any ideas; just write them all down. Let each person speak about the idea and give the rest of the group a sense of how it might work.
You should now have a list of different ideas for your project. You now need to go about the process of selecting which of the ideas is best for you. Depending on how many ideas you have you can begin by making a shortlist.
You should try to get down to a shortlist of about three ideas. If you don’t have that many to start with don’t worry; just go to the next stage. If you do have lots of ideas you need to find a way of narrowing them down. There are many ways of doing this but one way is to give each member of the group one or more votes on which idea they think is the best. After each person has voted, adopt the ideas with the most votes.
You should now go back to the initial list you made yourself and check each of the ideas against the criteria you set out. How does each of the ideas match with what you already know? Does it fit your brief? Will it appeal to your target audience?
NB: Just because an idea doesn’t fit one of the criteria, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to drop it. It may be a good idea which just needs a bit of adjustment. However, you need to know this early on so that you don’t start giving yourselves impossible tasks.
How you make the final decision is up to you. It may be that there is already one idea which really stands out. However, it may be that you want to work through each of the ideas a little more thoroughly. If you have three ideas on the table then as a group you should go through each one and try to come up with ways of making each of them work. Alternatively, one person could speak for each idea. Give each idea time to get a fair hearing. Once all the ideas have been discussed, you will need to come to a final decision. One idea may already have the support of most of the group or you may have to vote again. Once you have made the decision, carry out a final check against your parameters: is there anything which doesn’t fit the brief? Make a note of the ways in which your idea does fulfil the brief you were given; you will find this useful later on in your evaluation.
However you come to the final decision it should be the decision of the group. Although each person should have felt that their ideas had a fair hearing, once the decision has been made you all need to get behind it. You all need to support it.
At the end of this session you will have some rather messy scribbled notes with thoughts and ideas jotted down as you went along. However messy and incomprehensible they seem, hang onto them and put them into your production folder. You won’t need them very much for the rest of the production but they will be useful at the end of the project.
