Assignment 1: Presentation

As part of the course, in groups we had to do a 15 minute presentation on a Documentary director. Many came to mind however as a group we settled on Louis Theroux. I watched his documentary 'The City Addicted to Crystal Meth' which I found really interesting. I found a few things online about Louis Theroux and did some research which I would bring along to our first group meet up.

Below I have copied my research from the word document that I was going to bring to the group session:

Introduction
We have researched in to Louis Theroux for our presentation due to his extreme choices in subjects. He is interested in the hard hitting topics and is not afraid to ask sensitive questions. "The subjects I'm interested in are quite extreme. They're so far beyond the pale of normal human interaction that you're never going to get a reality show on that territory."

About Him
Louis Theroux works for the BBC and is most known for his documentaries in television series such as 'Louis Theroux's weird weekends' and 'when Louis met...'
He has also created many other documentaries. The most famous being "The most hated family in America".
Theroux has won 2 Baftas for his television show and won the Royal Television Society Award for his documentary - "A place for Paedophiles".

Ethics
Louis Theroux researches and films his documentaries on very sensitive subjects. For example, his documentary on Paedophiles, plastic surgery and more recently "The city addicted to Crystal Meth" which shows him talking to people who have lost their families and people having to turn to prostitution to fund their addition. We noticed his interview style is more conversational and he actually sometimes uses leading questions rather than open questions. As mentioned, Louis Theroux looks at hard hitting subjects and is not afraid to take chances. Statements and questions such as "You've chosen drugs over your children" are common.

"...Well, I really do like to be open, I don't like that feeling of holding back difficult questions. I feel like the more I can be transparent in the way I approach a story, the more it makes a satisfying programme" - Interview from The Guardian

However, as I have mentioned in a previous post, our group was given an extension due to personal problems. In week 5, the other groups both presented on Louis Theroux. Melissa, Laura, Adam and myself agreed that we didn't want to follow in their lead as we didn't want to seem like we were being lazy and just copied them. We also wanted to be a little different from everyone else.

Instead we chose to look at Morgan Spurlock. I watched his films 'Supersize Me' and 'Mansome' in order to be ready for our first meet up which went smoothly.

Overall we met up 4 times to do the presentation and practice. On the day of the presentation our group met up at 10am to make sure the presentation worked on the mac computers and to practice once more. We were able to get all the facts in and although I believe we did well, it didn't go as smoothly as we'd hoped considering the amount of time we had spent working on it. The negative aspect was that we unfortunately got the mode of documentary wrong, stating that Spurlock had done a participatory and reflexive documentary when doing 'Supersize me' when in fact it was performative. This made me look back to my notes so myself and the group won't that mistake again.

Now we have completed our presentation it will be nice to fully focus on our documentary 'The Sea'.