Documentary - Ideas

Documentary Ideas

We have been given the subject of community for our documentary, clearly this is a very wide spectrum to explore. as a starting idea my group discussed going away and all listing some ideas we could have for the documentary. so I went away and brain stormed some ideas that I thought would be possible to create as a documentary. here is the mind map I created initially:

this is an over all view of the mind map, next I'll reduce it down into smaller chunks so I can discuss and analyse my ideas and thought process.

 this section of idea's came to me because the first thing that came to mind was the community I live it. I've lived in Farnham my entire life and know the town very well. Farnham has always been extremely traditional in its layout, shops and scenery. as well as the people living here adopting a traditional attitude to fit. living in a town such as Farnham, residents tend to share similar views on some topics, and so I thought it would be interesting to look into their views as a collective on some subjects such as LGBTQ, students, ext. this could then lead onto talking about smaller subject areas such as student housing, or fair representation. I thought this could work because we live in the town so it wouldn't need travel expenses, its easy to get to for my group, we know the town well so we understand where everything is, and we are also familiar with the attitudes of the community so we know what questions to ask. there are many more reasons as to why these idea's would work, such as being familiar with all the news of the area and knowing what's best to research to get the answers we want, however, I personally feel that doing something like this would be an easy choice, and I enjoy more of a risk or a challenge, so I began to consider other directions.

 this one I thought of because I am disabled and it is a topic that has effected me personally in my everyday life. I also know lots of people with other disability's from the work that I do with my mother. and so this is a very personal topic for me, that makes me more invested in the topic because I know a lot about it already and I would love to raise awareness for these amazing people who I feel deserve more respect. however I also consider that this might be too personal or hard hitting for other members of my team, so I then went further to think of other options they might enjoy.

 this is again a personal topic for me as I used to have a mental health dog, he wasn't trained but he was there for comfort and to help me when things became harder for me to manage. I also feel like this topic would be worth discussing because of how unsupportive some community's can be of assistance dogs, particularly mental health assistance dogs as there is no physical disability to witness. one example of this would be UCA, there have been discussions on trying to support a dog room at university where support animals would be so that people could seek help and emotional support from animals.
I was very shocked and disappointed to find out that the university does not support dogs of this support for people who live on campus. I understand a no pets policy but they are assistance dogs for a reason, and there are students who need their animals to cope, but instead are put in horrible positions where they are left without the companionship of their support animals. although some may think of this as a mute point due to a no pets policy, I would love to support the fight to service animals staying with their owners in university accommodation, no just my university but all university's.
I care deeply about this topic as you can see, and I think it would make a beautiful documentary. however, due to the fact no service animals are allowed at the University it would be incredibly hard to try and find people and their animals who would be willing to help us, but like I said I do enjoy a challenge and it could be achieved with dedication, passion and hard work. whilst I am fully enthusiastic about this topic, I understand other members of my group may not be, so I chose to consider one more idea.

this is my final set of idea's. I am also a member of this community and it runs very close to my heart. I have recently come out as pansexual and bi-gender to my friends and family and so this is an important topic to me, as well as being an important topic in today's society. more and more people are becoming able to come out as who they really are without being ashamed. its a wonderful thing. but I would love to dive deeper into the thoughts of this community as to, how a whole, they feel views have changed for their community and how things have developed. I know a lot of people know about this community and it would help/inspire others to accept it and support the cause. it is so well known that I think we would have a huge target audience to go along with this, and I think members of this society at university would be interested in featuring or just watching and supporting a film like this.

after a lot of discussion between myself, the group and Anne (our tutor) we decided we wanted to do something based around mental health and how it effected us in the form of a reflexive documentary, I am fairly doubtful about this idea because it will be very sensitive for some members in the group who I doubt will be comfortable doing it. currently there is a lot of confusion around this, but hopefully we will become more informed as this progresses.