The other contributor.....

Due to the fact that our contributor with the bad story didn't want to appear on film we were left with a story without a picture. We had a lengthy discussion as to how we could possibly make this a little bit more interesting. Here are some of the ideas:

1) Actress/reconstruction:
In many documentaries where the subject is unabtainable (such as drama and history documentaries) an actor is often used to transport the viewer back to that situation. When I worked on the filming of the Crippen documentary last year I was amazed at what length they went to so that the reconstruction was as realistic and as historically correct as possible. We need not have recontructed her surgery but have shots of an actess so that we could over dub the story and allow the audience something to watch and connect the story with.

This could me that we would simply shoot shots such as these:

Woman walking in a park, several shots for cutaways like the beginning of our news piece edits.
Woman looking at herself in the mirror or a sequene where she wakes up like Chris' opening sequence in the documentary.
Woman sat for interview with a shaded face (Holly suggested that we could use this to our advantage, for an audience the idea that the contributor is too horrified to even appear on camera would feed the idea that this is really quite a horrific story)

Our attention then turned towards other options. There were discussions in the group that suggested that shots likes the ones above could look tacky and they are also a very widely used format. Especially on programmes such as crimewatch, there was a general concensous that we didn't want out documentary looking like crimewatch. I'm glad as a team we were able to bond on that fact!

So what other options are there, I am a fan of the use of graphics in documentaries. It could be especially effective because our documentary is very person oriantated, by this I mean that we have Interviews and reconstructions and cutaways that all involve people and real footage. We discussed the idea that having a section of graphics 3/4 way though the film would break it up a bit and allow the audience to have something else to stimulate their minds other than just an interview.

Over a muffin and several coffees our team frantically discussed the possibilities. One idea that came up and was imediatly above the others was to draw up a comic strip to illustrate the story. This idea seemed perfect, it broke up the documentary from real footage, added more interest and allowed us to explore our artist sides a little bit more.

We all had contacts for artist who would be able to do this for a minimum charge, if not free. The most promising suggestion came from Chris, his friend Donnie was a recent graphics graduate and after a small explanation Donnie agreed to come on board.

Fantastic!