Ideas for The Documentary + Group roles

Documentary Idea
Our main idea for the documentary is to base it on a girl called Hannah Louise Jones who had a brain tumour at 15 and after numerous surgeries and treatments, she finally beat cancer. Even in these unthinkable circumstances, Hannah kept up hope and was brave enough to afterwards speak about her experiences and how it had effected her, her family and friends throughout the years. She spoke in the Houses of Parliament on behalf of the Brain Tumour Charity and after getting awards for bravery from the BBC and carrying the Olympic Torch, eventually set up her own fund called The Hannah Louise Jones Fund for the Brain Tumour Charity and has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to date. We want to create a documentary that reflects on her past, present and future in regards to her involvement with charities, fund-raising events etc. as well as looking at how this whole experience has effected her life and her families.

Secondary Ideas
Although the whole group is very excited and happy to do both tasks on the first idea, we also discussed potential other areas we could look into. One was on a local Sheffield band called The Sherlocks, another was on the building complex in Sheffield that is being renovated called Park Hill and the final idea was on the Sheffield local Ice Hockey team called the Sheffield Steelers. We have a rough idea of what we would like to do for these ideas, however we have already got conformation that the contributors for our main idea will be available, so we are focusing more on that.

My Role
These are the roles in our group:

• Luke Finch - Director/Sound
• Ellen Bounds - Producer
• Nathan Harkin - Cinematographer
• Matt Brunton - Post Production

As cinematographer on this project, I want to be focusing on interesting compositions, well exposed shots and the overall quality of footage we obtain. As I am doing the cinematography production skills strand this semester, I will be using what I learn in it to apply into this documentary. For now, my main focus is on planning our shoot and what I will have to do on it, composing a rough shot list and location list (along with the director and producer) to make sure we have a variety of different shots to use to cut away from in interviews. As the poetic piece is in before the whole length doc, I am exploring ways in which to use the poetic mode when shooting and I think I will be using a variety of tracking shots, extreme close-ups, focus pulls and hopefully some contra-zooms to expose this theme more. We have also been discussing the use of stills and connotations of imagery to use in our poetic piece which has lead me to taking a number of photographs with my own camera to explore this further.

However, it is early days at the moment and our group as a whole is just planning the trip and scouting out locations for now as well as reflecting on our own roles and what jobs we will potentially have to carry out leading up to and during the shoot.