Task 1: Matt Social Documentary

Social Action/Interview Techniques – Task 1

I had selected a few issues and things that were happening in my community. I could find a lot of things happening in my area so I decided to expanding to places where visit a lot. My first idea is based around a topic from an article from the Streatham Guardian saying 'Drug dealers from Nine Elms and Streatham who shipped class A drugs from London to Kent by rail have been jailed. Kish Redmond, 25, of Heath Road, Nine Elms, and Benjamin Harvey-James, 19, of Besley Street, Streatham were sentenced on December 3 at Blackfriars Crown Court’. With this topic I would have talked about how young these drug dealers, are people turning to drug dealing because of lack of employment, why is drug dealing effecting working class areas?, who is this affecting?, the effects of these drugs? And what can we do about this problem? I could have interviewed parents in the area, young people on their opinions on drugs and selling drugs, police, NHS and the MPs. My next idea was stray dogs in my area. There has been a rise in stray dogs around my area that have been lurking around people’s bins and messing up the area. I could talk about why these dogs are on the streets and should you have a license to buy a dog? I could interview shop keepers and neighbours that have been affected and also interview Battersea shelter on ways of preventing this happening. My last idea was the Westfield shopping centre has been agreed to be built in Croydon. There are a lot of benefits to Westfield being built in Croydon like more income for the area, more employment and new homes. But this could also affect people’s jobs for example while Westfield’s is being built a lot of people is going to unemployment. Is this a good place to build Westfield because of previous events like the riots and also a lot of businesses are going to get closed down? Already business men like Marco Cash who last Saturday opened up a low-cost goods store in a disused department store refused to sell.

I have chosen to do the Stray dog idea as I think I could gain a lot of information to form a good documentary compared to my other two ideas, it is also quite unusual topic to talk about because we don't really hear about stray dogs in this country. The westfield topic isn't really much I could try to change because a social action documentary is subject that I am trying to change and Westfield is going to be built in Croydon regardless of what I say or the community say about this. The drug idea I don’t think I could get a lot of people’s honest opinions on this topic.

Potentially the running order of my documentary could start off with a background of Westfield showing some footage of the opening of the first store (Westfield White City). Next we could interview people in Croydon Town centre. I am going to avoid using presenting because I think it could either go two ways the presenter could be very confident or it could sound very nervous and could ruin the whole documentary. Then have a background of Croydon, talk about the riots hitting croydon.