DOCUMENTARY

This week, we continue investigating what makes a good documentary.
Yesterday, we watched a winning entry about the effects of sleep deprivation on the Media Magazine site. We decided that it was nearer an advertisement than a documentary in genre, despite being excellent entertainment value.

Today, we follow up The Times newspaper's selection of Documentaries That Changed The World.
We watch three openings and analyse how features of camerawork, editing, sound and setting deliver meaning to the audience.

PREP Watch again the opening to Supersize Me and ,on your blogs, make a bullet point list of the features that we have observed. This will remind us of good professional techniques when we make our own two-minute documentary. For example, to start you off:

• pull quote from MacDonald's founder
• voiceover of presenter
• montage of visuals illustrating presenter's comments

If you are not sure what a technique is called, look at our Documentary Page on the blog. This is the link.

Yr 11 OBSERVER ONLINE Q.9

REVISION Answer q.9. Copy /paste the writing below. It contains your sentence starters.

Study the online newspaper extract to revise exam Q. 9 (below).
To make this prep quick and easy, all you have to do is copy / paste the text below and identify all relevant articles or features that represent the newspaper's values:
1.  The major use of newspapers is to offer a sense of knowing
what is going on in the world.The Observer knows that its readers are serious and interested in international affairs. This is evident in hard news articles about.....
2. The Observer meets its audience's need for a range of cultural, sporting and artistic news. It provides these with...
3. The Observer does not shy away from 'difficult' issues that could make uncomfortable reading, such as...
4.  The Observer has sections which are designed to appeal to
different types of readers.The Observer reflects the diversity of its readership in articles on...
5.  Newspaper readership can still be used as a symbol of one’s social identity. The term ‘Guardian reader’ connotes a certain type of social attitude and The Observer  similarly reinforces

a set of social and political attitudes, and thus identity, in its representations. For example, Observer  readers like to think of themselves as open-minded and this is reflected in the Observer’s practice of allowing both sides of an argument equally to be put when the newspaper is clearly on one side of this argument. There is an example of this in....

6.  The entertainment function of newspapers may take the form of humour.  It may take the form of diversion into

a celebrity world of ‘glamour’. It may take the form of human interest stories in which readers are invited to sympathise with the subjects of the article. Newspapers further offer games, puzzles, crosswords and the like. At the higher end, sections such as the New Review in the Observer may offer the pleasure

of extremely well-written think pieces and literature reviews. An example of this is....

Yr 10 OBSERVER CLASSWORK

We looked at three front pages from The Observer from the 1960s to study how social and political contexts influenced the paper:
(SEE POST BELOW FOR TONIGHT'S PREP)

• Gender relations and roles, in particular, the absence of women in positions of influence in public life (except for one byline of a woman journalist and The Queen as Head of State); women depicted in relation to men rather than in their own right (Jackie Kennedy); women represented in relation to shopping for knitting, lingerie, stockings)
• The absence of representations of diversity, with few references to multicultural Britain (inter-racial marriage depicted as enough of an exception to make the front page)
• Deeply conservative culture with article on possible changes in divorce laws seen as a potential threat to the fabric of society
• The Observer reader's interest in hard news and current affairs includes concerns about The Cold War, fear of Russia
• The Observer reader's interest in the Special Relationship between the UK and the US (Jackie Kennedy defending her decision to marry Onassis, a Greek shipping magnate; representation of JFK's brother)
• The Observer reader's Interest in foreign news extends to Europe, in particular, places beloved by middle class, cultured British people who travelled for leisure (Florence, the Alps)

The Observer 30 October 1966

The Observer 6 November 1966

The Observer 20 October 1968

We make links between what we had noticed in The Avengers and The Observer in terms of social, historical and political messages and values in both texts.

We note that the modern Observer reader continues to share similar values with some new ones that reflect our current society: 

• interest in hard news (as opposed to soft news like celebrity gossip); 
• interest in foreign affairs;
• wide range of cultural interests (features on art, literature, music, theatre, ballet, exhibitions);
• interest in a wide range of sports;
• diversity of representations of different ethnicities
• women depicted on equal terms