Our ideas as a group and pitching them...

After meeting as a group and sharing our ideas we discussed which 2 ideas would make a strong documentary in 5 minutes. These ideas stood out most to us, especially Eleanor & Jaydens story. We developed this idea more than the "Fifty people" as that was more of a contingency. We chose this idea as we thought that creating a video would really help Eleanor online as she has many pages set up to raise money and awareness and a video would better tell her story and the 5 minute cut off would make it more hard hitting. We created 2 pitches for both ideas where we presented both ideas to teachers and class members and tried to sell them both.We did this by creating 2 presentations. When it came to feedback on these ideas, people voted more strongly towards "Fifty people" even though we hadn't really developed the idea or had a strong enough question. This was because we had no definite people in place to do the Jayden documentary although, Eleanor was on board it wasn't confirmed. Also, people wondered how we would tell this story in 5 minutes as it's quite hard and emotional.


Our first idea focused on a story we came across on The Liverpool Echo website.

This story is about Eleanor and Jayden Donnelly from Speke, Liverpool. Jayden is 8 months old and has been diagnosed with the rarest form of cancer in the world - Botryoid Rhabdomyosarcoma.
This incredibly rare form of cancer affects only 60 children under 10 every year. Eleanor is trying to raise the money for Jaydens treatment as it is currently only available in France. The key point of this story is the rarity and how crucial it is that she raise the £55k needed for Jaydens treatment in France. As a group we were touched by the story and all felt compelled to help her and create a video to put on her pages and websites to raise awareness. We wanted to create awareness via a short documentary from Eleanor's point of view where she can explain how its affected her life and how you can help. We wanted it to be important and straight to the point rather than focusing on the sadness. Eleanor is a positive person and straight away replied to our email saying that she would love for us to go and film her, her daughters and Jayden at their home. Through choosing certain questions we intend to interview her and her eldest daughter, Rebecca about how this has affected them personally and how their lives have changed.  This idea was really important to us and the one we focused on more.

Our second idea:

50 people - 1 question.
This was based on a documentary we watched that focused on very short interviews with people in the street where we ask them "what is your best memory?" This is a broad question that could provoke some really interesting replies. We thought that this might get people to think hard and tell us interesting stories. Using a single camera set up in a particular Liverpool location would give a little narrative to the documentary. We found a documentary called "Fifty people, one question" which inspired us to use this outline but take a new approach and make it more hard hitting. We thought that this idea would better fit into 5 minutes as we could use lots of cutting to shorten the interviews and have more variety of people. When watching the original version we wanted to recreate this idea and make it Liverpool focused.