Within the last couple of weeks, are project has faced a couple of major changes, which will be discussed in this blog.
Change in Characters/Narrative
Unfortunately, a couple of days before we were scheduled to film, Kylie and Jaimie (are Girls Allowed fans) agreed that they didn't want to partake in our documentary. This was mainly because of time as both characters are very busy with their own lives (one is nearly having a baby) so therefore pulled out as they didn't feel that they would be reliable enough for our filming schedule.
So, we have decided, as a group, to instead focus our project just on our Gaga fan, Jake. We all feel confident enough for him to be a strong enough character to fulfil this super fan criteria, and in fact felt it would be a better decision to just use him and not the girls as we felt they weren't as much of a 'superfan' as Jake is, thus making their story seem weaker.
Changes for Jake
Additionally, just focusing our documentary on Jake gave us some crucial advantages. We could make the documentary seem a lot more personalised considering it is now only focusing on Jake, meaning we can undertake more narrative ideas to generally let the audience get to know Jake better now that the documentary revolves around him. However, it also means we would need to use content carefully so that the audience don't become bored as it only focuses on one character. This means we would need more actuality and generally something more entertaining and interesting to watch. So, we came up with the idea of potentially timing Jake out on a night out. This allows us to add to this personalised feel we are creating as the audience can actually see what he is like when he is out - additionally nothing which is forceful. This will be discussed and organised at a later date as there still may be the issue of having permission to film in a club. Nonetheless, it will be discussed on my blog.
Because of this change, we also now have changed the dates and what we are filming and when. We are instead cutting down the number of days of filming from 6 to around 4-5. This is mainly because we won't need as many days as we are only focusing on Jake, meaning the narrative can flow easier and more importantly be quicker to film. This will be put up on my blog once we have arranged what/when we are filming. I will also put up a post showing exactly what we are getting from Jake as this too will change.
Engaging with Twitter
As well as these changes, we also came up with the idea of making our documentary more engaging with social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. This is where we thought we could engage Twitter by 'tweeting' Lady Gaga about Jake getting his tattoo, and sending pictures of it when he's had it done. We also thought we could create a 'hashtag' so that our audience can engage with our documentary and more importantly tweet telling us their opinions of it, etc. This will be discussed on a new blog post once we work out exactly what we are going to do and how we are going to do it.
Changes to Introduction
As mentioned in a previous blog post, the introduction was proving to be problematic. The way we were going to film (using the montage of youtube clips) was complex as we had to get and confirm copyright infringements - we had to pay to use one of the clips shown in my exemplar introduction and some clips we wanted to use we couldn't get in contact with the owner. This means that we would have to change the montage to something else, so we decided to use an original idea instead.
This original idea was the idea of filming the public asking who they're heroes are why. We were then going to create a montage of these clips to juxtapose it against Jake - showing how he is different from ordinary fans (however not in a patronising manor). To do this, my group and I decided to film in a busy area of one of our local towns - Maidstone. We would set up our camera then draw random members of the public over to sit on a stool and simply tell us their heroes and why. This will then be put together for the introduction to show the audience what most peoples average 'heroes' are, then finally contrast this with Jake.
Conclusion
Although this sudden change in our project has occurred, I still feel reasonably confident about filming and generally about the documentary itself. The idea of having Jake only to star in the documentary however can cause problematic in some cases. For example, the audience may get bored of Jake and want to see something else. Additionally, a bigger problem would be that we now don't have a diversity in super fans. This means that our documentary itself isn't actually investigating all the types of super fans. However, you can argue that this isn't entirely necessary as our documentary's intentions is mainly to show the depths and extremes super fans go to and generally investigating their lifestyles and how they differ from us - not showing all types of super fans, but instead what makes them a superfan.
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