Week 1- My Deciding Process

Deciding what I wanted to do for my final major project was extremely difficult for me to choose; I have recently returned from Tanzania and had gathered a large amount of footage. I felt like I should focus on creating a series of documentaries for my FMP but I prefer writing scripts and based around drama’s.  At this time I wasn’t sure on what the rules were on amount of projects we could create so I had a brief chat with Jamie Holman, asking if I could create a documentary and a drama which he said yes to but as long as the projects are both themed the same. By this I mean if I were to do a documentary on the Masai Mara tribe I interviewed, my drama would have to follow the same theme as the interview so following poverty, culture and/or marriage.

However when trying to think up of possible ideas, feasibility was a major issue in each aspect of the drama.  Planning ahead I wouldn’t be able to find a suitable location and also I really like accuracy when it comes to any film and find it lazy when a narrative set in a foreign country has everyone speaking English. I understand the purpose of that is to reach a specific target audience in England but it isn’t something I am interested in doing. 

I spent the rest of the week deciding what would benefit me most to make, reviewing some of my previous work in both drama and documentary. To be honest my final footage of the documentaries I worked on was better than some drama work I had produced but in the end I decided to develop a drama for two reasons.

• The first being that I really enjoy the process on constructing a drama, with all the writing and producing.
• My second reason is that I believe that working on something where I have to write a script will benefit me more considering that is the main profession I want to work in.

Seeing as  I decided that I wanted to work on a drama, I spent some time researching  other drama’s that may inspire me but during my research I read one of my own personal scripts I have been working on and realised that this is what I really wanted to work on. I have been developing this script thinking that I could be able to pitch when I am older and more experienced within the media industry. I decided that I would use this now because the concept is scoped on such a large scale and if I make mistakes now, it’s something I can learn from and improve.

I spent most of Saturday reducing my original script so that it becomes more feasible to make. Considering I want to make my idea into a drama series, it is roughly a forty five minute script; we have only a short time to create our FMP so I cut down the script to the bare essentials which makes it a length of roughly twenty minutes.

Whilst working on the pitch I started to have some concerns, which I shared with Jamie. He told me not to worry and if I was really concerned we could have a practice pitch to see if I was working to the right standard. So now I am going to spend most of next week changing my script to make it more feasible and start developing my pitch.