Evaluation

Overall, I am pleased with how my documentary turned out. I did what I set out to do and I believe I’ve made a thought-provoking piece, as well as spreading some awareness of mental health and the stigma that surrounds it. I aimed to make something that would make people think about the way the media portrays mental health and I believe that I have done that well. There are obviously things I would change but overall, I am proud of what I achieved. 

My idea was to make a documentary about the stigma surrounding mental in the media though things like films and TV shows. I was able to interview 9 people and they all gave different opinions, and all had a different understanding of the topic, which is what I wanted as it allowed my documentary to be filled with different views and opinions, as well as making a piece that isn’t too one sided. I chose this idea as I made a piece very similar last year and wanted to recreate it as I wasn't happy with the way the last one turned out. I believe this one is a lot better as I have more interviews and asked better questions. I’m happy with my overall idea and I’m pleased that I managed to stick to it. 

For research, I looked into a few documentaries to see what things I needed to include, as well as seeing what others have done and see what things I could’ve incorporated into my own piece. This research was helpful as it allowed me to get some idea as to what I could potentially use in my own piece as well as seeing what my documentary needed to include. I also researched into the modes of documentary which was also helpful as it gave me some options of how I could present my documentary to my audience in a way that fits well with my theme and allows me to present my work in the best way possible. This also allowed me to think of different ways of presenting my documentary and think of how different ways of presenting it could change the way it’s viewed by my audience. 

My initial idea was to make a powerful documentary that discusses the stigma surrounding mental health in the media and the way it effects people who are genuinely suffering from some sort of mental illness. By doing this I wanted to create something that would make people think about the way mental health is represented and whether it’s a good or bad thing. I personally believe that it’s represented very badly, but I wanted to see what others thought and why, hence why I chose this idea. It allows people to really think about what’s right and wrong and how we can improve the way we represent these people, and even how we can help them speak out. One of my questions was “how do you think that we as a society could support people suffering from a mental illness?”. This question gave many different answers, which shows that there are many ways of improving the lives of those suffering from mental illness, and further shows that the media need to be doing more in order to help represent these people in a more uplifting and honest way. Many people who I interviewed sad that they thought the media represented people very negatively, and that they think they need to be more careful and truthful with the way they show these things to audiences, but others said that they thought it can be uplifting sometimes, depending on what is being shown and how. 

My overall documentary went quite well I believe. It gets straight to the point and uses a variety of different views and opinions throughout, and even uses archival footage to back up what people are saying in the interviews. I am aware though that I did go over the 10% of archival that we were allowed though; this was due to me not having enough footage to use between/over the top of the interviews. Despite this, I think all the archival I used was relevant and fitted well with the overall piece.  

I also was very happy with the way my interviews turned out. Although I had to edit the white balance a bit on some and a few weren’t framed properly, the sound quality was good, and they are all focused and shot well. All interviewees had something different to say which meant I had a lot of footage to choose from and therefore had many different views to go off.  In order to find my interviewees, I put out a few social media posts asking for help and thankfully, a lot of people were very willing to help me which meant I was able to interview a total of 9 people. Again, this allowed me to have more footage which meant I was able to include a lot of their answers in my documentary.  

The reason I used a lot of newspaper headlines throughout the piece was to show the audience how the media negatively portrays mental health to audiences and proves the point of what most of my interviewees are saying. This helped to validate my documentary and show people that the stigma is very real, and that the media does portray mental health in a very negative way a lot of the time. To improve on this, I could've used more clips from news reports/TV shows/films to get a better picture of the ways in which mental health is portrayed within media. This would allow my audience to get a better idea of the subject and make more of an opinion for themselves. 

If I was to do this project again, I would ensure that I had more footage and allowed myself time to do that, as well as maybe looking into more similar documentaries and interviewing a wider range of people so that I have a wider range of views, as people of different ages may have different opinions on the matter. As I said before, I am happy with the documentary but there are definitely things I would have changed if I had the time to do so.