For my practical production I worked with 3 other people and produced a social issue documentary called ‘The Lavish Life”. It’s an MTV style documentary based on the lives of people who over spend on items such as clothes and accessories and also investigates how we are influenced by the media. We thought it would be necessary to use ‘The Lavish Life’ as our title and emphasise the word ‘Lavish’ as it is something that most of us aspire to have as a lifestyle. We all want a ‘Lavish Life’ therefore we are drawn to the latest clothes n fashion to fit in and feel accepted in society. The title and style of the documentary conformed to our target audience of male and females of a late teen (14-24) age range and by using the word ‘Lavish’ in inverted commas it created a sense of enigma as to whether we are able to reach this lifestyle. This would draw our target audience into watching our documentary.

Within the planning stages of our practical production, we decided to assign everyone with equal roles with everyone having responsibility over all of the production processes such as research, filming, and editing. This was so we would all as a group be working together and be able to recognise each others strengths and weaknesses and apply this to the completion of our production. We had a few difficulties with people not being available for editing such as myself at the beginning stages but picked up on more editing sessions when it was coming towards the end and worked very hard to get it finished. I think everyone contributed well in the production as a whole even though more was contributed from others.

In the opening sequence of our documentary we chose to do a MTV style montage including extracts of the glamorising ‘D&G’ TV advert with edited shots of real life shopping from ordinary people on the high street with low angle shots of the mainstream retail outlets to give the impression that shopping is dominant over most of us. This is there to emphasises the growth of the women and men buying excessively and to introduce the problem arising with money in which we hope to investigate as the documentary progresses. We kept the original sound to the advert as it was up beat, grabbed the audience’s attention and fitted into out MTV style theme that we wanted to create. We also overlapped the title with the sequence at the end of it to reflect these images as being ‘The Lavish Life’ that we all aspire to today. We also used Vox Pops to ask other people what they think and to see how such things as the media have affected their spending habits. We mediated these Vox Pops and only selected scenes with people looking as if they ignorantly spend money without looking at the consequences which is the image we wanted to convey to the audience to not only reinforce our point but to relate to our target audience who are more than likely to be shopping in this way. We used a lot of fades throughout our production to construct a continuity effect which demonstrates the problem with over spending as a continuous social issue.

Our professional, who put across his view on the issue, further over looked this. We constructed the scene and paid close attention to detail as we sat him at a computer in an ‘office like’ room to flow his image as a professional where we then had his speech lead to the climax of the documentary where it all concluded to the blame of the media. This was a particularly well structured part of the documentary as it posed a question from the professional, then with the use of a montage to answer the question to create closure however there is a slight problem with the volume of the professionals voice as it seems to stay low and is overcome by the next montage scene and music, but we hope to get it solved before submission of the production.

Our documentary relies on the montages that we produced as the group thought that this was the most effective way to put our point across to our target audience. Our influence came from Module 2 when we were studying ‘Bowling For Columbine’ and ‘Man With A Movie Camera’ who both used these techniques to serve the same purpose. We merged a few of the different techniques together such as our main focus which was our university student with our montages of credit cards and receipts and placed a parallel sound with it to reflect the ’real life’. The song wasn’t conventional to appeal to our audience but different and sets the tone to the way we think today as a mellow non-thinking society. The university student was being perceived as a naïve and narrow minded student to emphasise the trap that we all fall into to think that we all have a back up plan (the credit card) but then are reassured that she is in trouble with her money and cannot manage it with all of her students debts on top of her overspending, this is a problem that a lot of students have which we wanted to make clear to the audience.

‘The Lavish Life’ will be shown on channel 4, a commercial channel, as they target to similar audiences as our target audience and also show programmes and documentaries that tackle these types of issues we have raised in our documentary. As we interviewed people of different ages and ethnicity’s it is clear there is a secondary audience where we are appealing not only to teenagers and students but everyday middleclass, working class, middle aged people as the problem occurs to many more others.

In conclusion ‘The Lavish Life’ serves its purpose to inform and educate as well as to entertain with the use of our MTV style fast paced editing shots. We posed many questions and answered them using different styles and techniques to conform to the documentary style we wanted to create. I think we were successful in the stereotypes and tones created by the soundtrack and the MTV style we prioritised to create.