Formal Proposal

Formal Proposal for Documentary

Topic

The topic of our documentary is takeaways and fast food. We feel this is an appropriate choice in today’s culture; people are moving further away from home-cooked meals and swaying to ready cooked meals, which have a much lower nutritional value yet are convenient for the busy lifestyle of many people in modern Britain. This entails comparing takeaway culture to more traditional ways of eating; for example, Sunday dinners at home, which are a tradition to many people of Britain. Has this died out? This is what our documentary aims to answer.

Type of Documentary

Our documentary will be a mixed type; we will be mixing vox pops with formal interviews, cutaways and voiceovers. In order to do this, we will edit the documentary with fast paced cuts and use minimum use of transitions such as dissolves and fades. Vox pops will entail short interviews with random members of the public, in which we can cut answers together rapidly in order to show general public opinion in a quick manner.

Style of Documentary

The style of our documentary will be informal; this will be conveyed through voiceovers and informal interviews. Throughout the documentary, the language used will be influenced by slang and friendly language, in order to ensure that we are truly contacting our audience and not belittling them with a formal news style programme. This is further proven through the scheduling choice; Channel 4 uses a lot of different ways to contact a younger audience, even through advertisements which are targeted to our audience and idents which are casual and mysterious. Contributing to this, ‘Take Out’ will interview and feature people from a sample which includes people from many walks of life, in order to not intimidate the viewer and make the whole documentary more accessible to everyone.

Channel and Scheduling

In terms of the channel and time that we will schedule and base our documentary on, from primary research which we have carried out, we found that the most popular channel for our target audience is Channel 4, and the best time for our target audience to be watching would be around 8pm, in the centre of a primetime slot. Ideally, we would place our documentary between the Channel 4 News and a popular comedy slot, such as Ugly Betty.

Target Audience

Our target audience for ‘Take Out’ would be a young audience, aged 17-35. This target audience is one who is regular eaters of takeaway foods; for convenience and popularity. We have noticed in our primary research of takeaway customers that a lot of members of our target audience enjoy takeaways with their friends; they order pizza when going out at night, they have a Chinese for a girls/boys night in and they have a takeaway on their way home from a night out. Our target audience have grown up with takeaways as a treat, and have grown up buying food casually with their friends from pizzerias and chip shops.

Primary Research Needed

Primary research we need includes questionnaires issued to members of our target audience; these questionnaires are related to takeaways, yet also fit the participant into a demographic through enquiring on their age and gender. Other primary research we will use includes the interviews we conduct and film, and vox pops which we film


Secondary Research Needed

Secondary research which we will use in ‘Take Out’ includes newspaper articles, internet surveys and other past research which has been carried out. We will also use past adverts from fast food chains (e.g. Dominos and McDonalds) in order to show how attitudes towards takeaways have changed. We will also compare and contrast primary and secondary research, in order to see the similarities and differences between the two.


Narrative Structure

The beginning of our documentary will centre around the exposition – is home-cooked food becoming undermined by the more popular and culturally relevant takeaway? This will be illustrated by interviews with people in takeaways, and with vox pops of people talking about takeaways; this will also outline the overall theme of how dependent we are as a culture on takeaways.
The middle of the documentary illustrates the conflict between the takeaway and home-cooked meals. It also shows how people’s choices over their calorie intake and their attitudes towards dieting have changed over the last decade, through interviews with young people and old people, contrasting opinions and creating deeper conflict.
The end of the documentary answers the withstanding questions about the fast food industry; ‘why is it so powerful’, ‘what makes our culture want them’, and ultimately ‘Are takeaways more popular than home-cooked meals?’

Outline of Content

Content within our documentary is all directly involved with the fast food industry and takeaway style meals. We will use a variety of cutaways, including extreme close ups of people within our target audience eating takeaways, and to contrast this, home-cooked meals. Other cutaways we will use include close ups of takeaway signs, with zooms and MTV style camera work, in order to make the documentary more up to date and more accessible to a wider, younger audience. Filming takeaway wrappers will also achieve this, as it will reinforce the theme, while contributing to a running theme of consumer culture throughout. Archive footage will also be used in a similar style; we will use various older figures from related secondary research in order to represent the conflict currently in society, and will use newspaper articles as cutaways to back up or contrast what interviewees are stating.
We will also use interviews from fast food owners and fast food purchasers and interview science professionals, in order to compare and contrast opinions and further themes of conflict between the generational gap within the narrative structure. Vox pops will be running along the same theme, and although used in moderation to illustrate a point of general public conflict, we will show that people who could be role models to viewers (they may look up to them as their appearance is something that they aspire to.) Voiceovers within ‘Take Out’ will also fit along with the theme; the voiceover will not run throughout, but simply between content in order to make the narrative flow more smoothly. A clear, female narrator will talk over the action – this will make the audience more comfortable and will encourage more people to continue watching the documentary; they are not ‘uncool’ for watching a documentary.

Resource Requirements

• Camera
• Microphone
• Stills camera
• Green Screen
• Tripod
• Permit to film vox pops