Media Censorship: Should we be concerned - Proposal We will be making a short 10 minute documentary about Media censorship and whether it’s needed in the world. It will a balanced documentary that looks at the advantages and disadvantages of media censorship and comes at the topic from an moral, practical, political and creative stand point. We intended to make a comprehensive documentary on media censorship which explores 4 of what we see as the major negative and positive aspects of censorship as a microcosm of the completely bigger subject of censorship rather than pick a specific area of media censorship such as films and examine a list of particular cases like the British BBC made documentary ‘Dear Censor’ which simply examines film censorship. We will be using a mixture of vox pops, taking headshots, on screen graphics and archive footage in this documentary. Our primary target audience will be an older 40 and upwards age of reformist, A to C S.O.C class people however we are hoping to attract a younger secondary audience of 16 to 39 years old, reformist, of the D – E on the S.O.C class, as we want to make media censorship current and relevant today by examining modern involving media censorship such as the recent Batman Killings and the News of the world scandal. This will be a no budget short student documentary which will be exhibited online on video sharing websites such YouTube and Vimeo however if this were a full length documentary with a high budget that was made for TV we would like it to be aired on BBC 1 2 in the 9pm to 10pm slot on a Saturday evening. Previous documentaries on the subject of media censorship haven’t gained the highest ratings in the past for example the BBC documentary on British Board of Film Censorship (classification) got audience figures below 239,000 as it wasn’t even on the list of the highest viewed programs on BBC 4 the week it was aired. However we feel that our documentary will be more impartial, more general to the wider topic of censorship than to a specific area of the media and therefore hopefully more informative, accessible and interesting than previously made documentaries on media censorship so it will attract a previous younger less educated audience who hadn’t to much knowledge on the subject prior to watching the documentary. We also feel that our documentary will attract a large audience, as it’s incredibly topical now with the news of the world scandal and the incident in which an Australian radio station allegedly played a part in the suicide of a nurse. We are using the subject’s relevance as a selling point by featuring the case in which the Australian radio station allegedly played a part in the nurses death as part of our segment on media censorship helping protect people from media witch hunts. We also further state media censorship’s relevance in the voice over. Since this is a school project we get to use Thomas Tallis Schools filming equipment and facilities to make it however if it wasn’t a school project and it would cost £6132.58 to rent all of the equipment, the facilities, pay staff and pay for the tapes we would use. We aim to finish this documentary by the 25th of March. We feel documentaries such like the aforementioned BBC documentary ‘Dear Censor’ are too singular in their choice of topic and therefore less interesting. Of all the documentaries we’ve watched on the topic of media censorship we don’t feel any have comprehensively tackled the subject head on a general sense but rather just gone into the detail of a specific area of media censorship. This caused to make this documentary, which we feel achieves that. Furthermore of the documentaries we’ve watched none of them seem to be impartial they all seem to be made from anti censorship standpoint like the channel 4 documentary ‘Hugh Grant: Taking on the
Tabloids’. We want to make a documentary balanced by breaking down the documentary down into 8 major segments/chapters four segments will dedicated to examining the four factors which are more pro censorship factors and 4 segments will be dedicated to examining the 4 factors which are more anti censorship factors. The four factors we will be exploring that are anti censorship are: whether media censorship could compromise freedom of speech, could media censorship limit entertainment and creativity, could media censorship distort peoples view on public events, could media censorship help aid/create a dictatorship. The 4 factors which are more pro censorship are whether media censorship could stop radical ideas or politically incorrect ideas, could media censorship help protect the easily influenced, could media censorship help protect people from media witch hunts, could media censorship benefit nation security. We plan to structure the documentary in order for every positive point to be followed by a negative point and every negative point to be followed by a positive point to keep the documentary balanced at all times throughout the documentary. Even if two pro censorship segments or 2 anti censorship segments are played in conjunction we will make sure that a segment making the opposite argument proceeds it and follows it so there will not be a significant chunk of documentary which presents just one of either viewpoint exclusively. We will not give more weight to either argument and no opinions will be expressed through the voice over all opinions will come from the interviewees. The voice over will be used exclusively to give the audience facts and background info. We will also leave an open ended conclusion to the documentary stating ‘is media censorship right, we can’t tell you that. You have to decide that for yourself’. The intent behind this documentary isn’t to convince the audience of a particular viewpoint like documentarians like Michael Moore and Bill Maher. We intend to present the audience with all of the major arguments for and against this media censorship explain these arguments with our interviewee’s opinions on the topic and real life examples and leave the audience to decide whether they are for or against censorship. We aim to inform not pursued. We have also structured our documentary so that if the audience doesn’t even have any prior knowledge of media censorship they should be able to understand what it is, how it works and how important the topic is after they have watched the opening 6 segments of our documentary so they can approach the following 8 segments on the pros and cons of media censorship and the conclusion from a more educated and informed viewpoint. The first segment of our documentary will simply be a voice over played over a mix of archive and actuality footage stating the importance of media censorship, followed by a segment in which we ask what is media censorship to which we feature the answers of our interviewee’s and members of the public from the vox pops, the next segment will then state who enforces media censorship and how they enforce media censorship, the next segment when state the point that censorship works differently in every country and taking the UK as an example explain how it works in the UK, the next segment will then state methods of censorship and give an example of when media censorship has gone to murderous extremes which further states the importance of the topic of media censorship which is then followed by a segment which clearly introduces the argument that is examined through our documentary by gathering our interviewee’s answers to the question ‘Do we need media censorship’ as well as the answers from the people in our vox pops. This is then followed by the previously mentioned 8 segments that state 4 arguments in favor of media censorship and 4 arguments against media censorship and a
conclusion to bookend the documentary and put the 8 segments stating pros and cons into an impartial context we want to present the audience. To make this documentary we will be using a Cannon 550 as our camera, a directional mic to pick up sound, a Samson Zoom H4n Recorder to record the sound onto, 3 tungsten Fresnel i.e Arri 650 pluses as our in studio lights and a deflector when we are filming on location. We plan to edit the majority of the documentary in Final Cut Pro, however we will be using Adobe After Effects to create the special effects and we will be using Adobe On location to capture the footage of the interviews we film in the broadcast studio. We will use a small crew of one sound man who will monitor sound, one boom pole operator, one camera man and one interviewer who will ask the questions. We aim to film at least 6 interviews in the broadcast studio, two interviews in class rooms of the school and at least 5 vox pops on the streets of London. Plans may change if more people we contacted agreed to an interview. When conducting the interviews we plan to mostly interview professionals wearing smart cloths such as suits in the affluent parts of London such as Oxford Street as we think they are the people most likely to give the most educated informative responses. However we do aim to get responses from variety of people so we also interview people who fall outside of that specification. Our full length interviews we conduct will mostly be filmed in the broadcast studio in Thomas Tallis School however as it’s the place where most the equipment we are using to film the interview is kept usually such as the studio lights and it’s also easier to control sound and light interference in the broadcast studio. We will however be filming some of our full length interviews in class rooms as we don’t want our documentary to just look visually boring. This is also another reason we wanted to conduct vox pops outside on the streets of London as they will give better visuals than just a person against a black backdrop. We will only use one camera to film the interviews and actuality footage as it’s a short documentary and no interview or piece of actuality footage is on screen long enough to include a shot variation without just distracting the audience and ruining the relaxed pace of the documentary we aim to sustain through the editing. We will ask more questions in the full length interviews than we will in the vox pops as the people in the vox pops will be less likely to have a lot of free time to spare as they are likely to be on their way somewhere. The questions we will ask in the vox pop are: • What is media censorship? • What effect do you think the media has on people? • Do you think media censorship is needed and when? However we will ask a lot more questions during the full length interviews. The questions may change from interview to interview and follow up questions may added during the interview it’s self but here are some of the questions we’re goanna ask during the full length interviews: • What is media censorship? • What effect do you think the media has on people? • Who do you think censors the media? • Why do you think we have media censorship? • Do you think we need media censorship? • What do you think it would be like if we didn’t have censorship? What’s the worst that can happen? • Do you think there’s been a time when we really needed media censorship? • Has the media affected any opinions that you hold?
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Do you think media censorship has ever been harmful or bad?
To stop our interviews being due to formulaic we will ask more general questions so we get a more diverse range of answers, however if our interviewees go off the point completely we will ask them some of these questions to get them back on topic: • Can media censorship compromise freedom of speech? • Could media censorship stop radical or politically incorrect ideas? • Could media censorship limit entertainment and creativity? • Could media censorship help protect people who are easily influenced? • Could media censorship distort peoples view on public events? • Could media censorship help protect people from media witch hunts? • Could Media censorship benefit nation security? • Can censorship help aid/create a dictatorship? We may also include some of these questions in the vox pops as well. We will of course slightly change the questions for different interviewee’s depending on what area they specialize in. For example when we are interviewing Janine Shelly a history teacher we will try to ask questions that get her to talk about how censorship has previously been used to create dictatorships as part of our segment on whether media censorship can help aid/create a dictatorship? For example we may ask the above question ‘can censorship help aid/create a dictatorship’ and if we don’t get an answer we’re happy with we will ask ‘Can you think of a time when media censorship has ever helped create an autocratic state’. The number of questions we ask an interviewee will depend on how much time they have to spare and how patient they are. We will of course try to prompt all of our interviewee’s before the interview so they have time to think of good answers. This is not however possible to do with the vox pops as we are going to be meeting random strangers we have no previous contact with. Being in a school allows us access to a huge range of expertise in various areas. Being in a school also means we have access to a huge range of well educated informed people. We’ve took advantage of that and interviewed media teachers who would be experts in the field of media censorship and media in general, film studies teachers, history teachers and the students themselves, particular media students. Furthermore a majority of teachers have degrees in more than one subject so they may able to give good answers on questions outside their field of expertise. For example we are interviewing an English Teacher for our documentary as I know he would know a lot about art creativity, history and politics so he may able to give answers we can use in any of our segments could censorship limit entertainment and creativity and can censorship help aid/create a dictatorship. Students as well as are great to interviewees as most of them are also already very educated and have a diverse range of interests as they are at the experimental stage of their life where they are interested in finding out about different things. For example when we interview a media student Chris Walsh as well as asking him questions relating to Media censorship such as ‘who censors the media’ we will also ask him questions about wrestling becoming more PG through the years as part of self censorship ruining entertainment as part of the Could media censorship limit entertainment and creativity segment. The primary research was what led us to the conclusion that we should interview
students as well as teachers for our documentary. We conducted some test interviews in the broadcast studio so we could test sound, our questioning, lighting and camera positioning. We had only originally planned to interview a media teacher called Tom Denison White however a media student was also in the room called Louis Lydon who was there to be interviewed for another groups documentary in our media class. After we finished our interview with Tom we decided to interview Louis and he gave a really good interview. From that we discovered that students could give interview as well. We also learnt that we got good answers that would work really well in our documentary if we asked more open questions such as ‘what influence if any do you think the media has on people’ because we got more general philosophical answers that work in this documentary which is less specific to a particular form of censorship or particular cases of censorship. Also when we asked Tom and Louie very specific closed questions such as ‘have you ever been personally influenced by the media’ we got very similar answers. However close and defiantly direct questions do also provoke good answers if the open questions haven’t provided good answers. We then conducted further interviews with Louie and a few others students that we shot on location. From this we learned that it’s better to use a directional mic to record interviews than a omnidirectional mic as an omnidirectional mic is very sensitive to all the noise in the zoom whereas a directional mic almost exclusively picks up the noise from the interviewer who would be sitting in front of the mic. Our secondary research started before our primary research. In the process of decide between which of our final ideas to produce into a documentary we read a lot of debates about media censorship and watched documentaries others had made on media censorship. This helped us to decided to finally pick this idea rather our other ideas we really liked such as: • Can we trust the news? • How different are the political parties? • Are benefits right? • Is privatisation a bad thing? Researching media censorship made us realize we are much more interesting in media censorship than we are in benefit fraud or the differences between the labor party and the conservatives. We also realized by reading all the different debates and going on websites and blogs that talked about the pros and cons of media censorship that media censorship was a project with much more different areas and aspects to explore than the relatively narrow topics of the reliability of the news and privatization. Furthermore more watching several documentaries on media censorship we realized no one documentary had really encompassed all these different debates about and issues relating to media censorship, they had been mostly rather narrow minded in their subject matter just examining a particular mode of media such TV or Film and non of them really made to much of an argument for the use of media censorship they all seemed to be very anti censorship. So we then drew from this conclusion that we had something really different to bring to media censorship coming from our impartial point of view and we could place arguments side by side that weren’t previously such as the lack of media censorship’s threat to national security and media censorship’s role in an autocratic state. Combined with our previously mentioned primary research we also noticed that none of these documentaries really included many young people in giving their opinion, which we saw as a potential resource of information being lost and a potential target audience being lost. Our secondary research was also very useful in filling the content for our documentary. We had to research background info
on media censorship such as different types of media censorship and different ways it’s imposed such as bleeping, cutting, pixilation and even murder. We also wanted to address how media censorship was different in other countries but explain how media censorship works in one country in particular. We decided to take the UK as that country as the documentary is set in the UK and may therefore be more likely to attract a British audience. We researched what the main censorship boards were for the different strands of media and how they operated for example the fact that TV is censored by Ofcom another statutory corporation approved by the government after the communications act of 2002. For each of the 8 points raised in the documentary through the 8 main segments we wanted to have an example from real life to illustrate that point. For example to illustrate the point that media censorship can be a threat to national security we researched when lack of censorship has actually been a threat to national security by researching the Mumbai Terror attacks of 2008 in which the position of India’s security forces were given away on live TV. As part of attracting a younger audience we wanted to make our documentary show how much media censorship relates to today, a way of doing this we decided was to also use more recent events as example to illustrate points in our documentary. How example we researched into the incident in which an Australian radio station’s prank allegedly caused the suicide of a nurse as part of the segment on media censorship protecting people from media headlines. We also used older events from history to illustrate points made in the documentary for example we decided to use the killing of Victor Jara by the Pinochet government for singing songs that were found to be anti Pinochet, to illustrate the extremes that media censorship goes to. We used these older events to still attract our primary older audience. The most difficult aspect of researching this documentary was deciding what to leave out, as there is so much interesting information and events relating to media censorship. The research was incredibly interesting and enjoyable and educated us enormously on the topic of media censorship, which I think will help us make a documentary. Since we would aim to get this documentary we had to look into the Ofcom broadcast codes. Here is our main concerns, their implications and how we’ve dealt with them: •
1.17 Material equivalent to the British Board of Film Classification ("BBFC") R18-rating must not be broadcast at any time. This means we can't show any films that were given the R18 - rating by the BBFC as an example of what the BBFC censors. We may have to just show a film still as on screen graphic while mentioning what is censorsed if we want to talk about the specific
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3.1 Material likely to encourage or incite the commission of crime or to lead to disorder must not be included in television or radio services. It means I might not be able to show any clips of films that are said to have inspired crimes. 2.2 Factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the audience. We have taken special care not to be accurate in our facts and not to enforce our opinion on the auidence or promote our opinions to the auidence. We try to get all our facts verified and will not present anything as fact that we’re not certain is true.
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A lot of the rules concerning programs shown the watershed don’t really
concern us if this was to be aired on TV it would most probably be aired after the watershed which is 9 pm. We also had to look into copy write laws as we play a large amount of archive footage in our documentary. We are covered against any legal action under the use of fair dealing under the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act (UK). These are largely the same as the laws of fair use. I'm covered under the 1st rule 'Research and Private study' and particularly 'The copy is made for the purposes of research or private study'. Here is the specific guidelines taken from the copywriteservice.co.uk. I. Research and private study Copying parts of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or of a typographical arrangement of a published edition for the purpose of research or private study is allowed under the following conditions: · The copy is made for the purposes of research or private study. · The copy is made for non-commercial purposes. · The source of the material is acknowledged. · The person making the copy does not make copies of the material available for a number of people. We are also cleared under the criticism and revue rule as we would be criticising or reviewing whatever archive footage we use, the material we will has been made available to the public and as we are covering such a big topic in a short 10 minute documentary we wouldn't quote more of the material than is necessary. III.
Criticism or review
Quoting parts of a work for the purpose of criticism or review is permitted provided that: · The work has been made available to the public. · The source of the material is acknowledged. · The material quoted must be accompanied by some actual discussion or assessment (to warrant the criticism or review classification). · The amount of the material quoted is no more than is necessary for the purpose of review.
Here is our Gantt chart. We started generating our original ideas on the 26th of November, at the same time we were making swot analysis for these ideas which helped us to come up with our final idea, this process only took a week as we were happy with our final idea and we wanted to get a start on it straight away. Immediately after we decided what our final idea was we started to conduct primary research in the form of our test interviews. We spent four weeks conducting intense secondary research so we could get a solid basis for what our documentary will be like. Our research consisted of watching documentaries on media censorship, looking at websites online to find out what were the major arguments for and against media censorship and reading some books. At the same time that we were researching we were developing interview questions, deciding who we were going to interview and 4 weeks in we conducted some test footage interviews. We started writing a shooting script on the fourth week of these 4 weeks we set aside for secondary research however we believe research will continue throughout the course of the documentary, we were even conducting research when we were in the stage of coming up with initial ideas. The shooting script took 2 weeks to write, we then spent a week on the location recce, the storyboard, collecting the contact details and gathering the archive footage. We then spent a week filling in the risk assessment and an extra week scheduling the interviews. We are just about to start our 2 weeks of making the pitch. We anticipate it will take a week to rehearse the pitch, which we will have to deliver on the 14th of February. We also have some interviews scheduled for week 11, which is when, will be in the last week of making the presentation. After the presentation we will then spend a week filming some in studio interviews and spend a week filming some on location interview. However interviews can always change depending on the interviewee. We then expect to spend the next week recording the voice-overs and making the on screen graphics. This should be relatively simple so we have also scheduled a day to go into London and conduct the vox pops. We have dedicated the following three weeks to editing. We wanted to solely focus on this in the three weeks because we will have amassed a lot of footage and we may have some difficult decisions we need to make that we may need to dedicate time to focusing on. We have already filmed a few of our in studio interviews so we are ahead of schedule. Our deadline to finish our film is the 25th of March so we shouldn’t have much trouble getting it finished on or schedule.