Documentary Plan

In preparation of shooting the documentary, I have created a plan of what I aim to capture in the documentary with my group. First of all we have decided on what we are basing the documentary around; a man named Enoma (or Noma for short) who works as a night club toilet attendant.

Second of all, we had to choose what style of documentary we as a group wanted to shoot. The options were between an observational or participatory documentary as specified in the module guide. We have decided to shoot a participatory documentary as we plan to interview Noma which we would not be able to do if we had chose observational. We feel as though we should use interviews so that we can aim the information gathered around what we want to know about him.

After deciding on the type of documentary I thought about why we have chosen to put the focus on Noma and what we are aiming to show through the Documentary. Noma has had a very interesting life, from being born in Nigeria where he was part of a political party and owned his own timber factory to moving to the UK and working in the bathroom of a nightclub. However, as it is a short documentary that we have to film, we have decided to use his life in the UK as the main focus so that we can get a lot of information out of him. The things that we are hoping to hear from Noma is information such as how he finds the work he does, how does he cope with working a job that isn't very appealing as well as asking about his spiritual beliefs and whether the meditation that he does helps him in the workplace.

Below are a series of Questions that I believe to be relevant to ask in order to gather this information:
-How long have you been working as a bathroom attendant and how did you get into it?
-What does the job consist of you doing?
-What problems have you had to face whilst working?
-Do you find this work stressful and if so how do you deal with this stress?
-You have a website that promotes positive thinking and self empowerment, what do you mean by self empowerment and how is this achieved?
-Have you always been spiritual and does your beliefs and meditation help you with thinking positively in difficult situations?
-Do you believe that you have reached empowerment and how is it achieved?

We also discussed as a group what cutaway shots we would like to use. We have decided that we want shots from both his workplace (Bathroom) and his workstation, the actual club on a busy night, shots of him meditating and shots of where he meditates (in an open field), shots of nature (Birds flying past etc.) which can be used as a comparison to the busy night club.

Finally, we thought about the narrative of the documentary and what order we would put the shots in. There are a few ways which this could be done but we have decided to either shoot a day in the life of Noma- starting with his routine (Getting up, meditating and other things during the day and then ending with his work at the end) or opening the documentary with the nightclub scene and his workplace and as the documentary continues we come to see that he deals with his difficult work situation by meditating and thinking positively during the day. However, we will decide which one of these we will go with after we have all of our shots.