Letter to Mr Clarke

Today I have written a letter which we are going to send off to Mr Clarke's office (Ken Clarke). Here is a copy of the letter:

Dear Mr Clarke

We are a group of 6th Form media students from Heathside School, Weybridge.
For our media A level coursework we have been asked to film a section of a documentary. We have chosen to create a documentary on the recent Wikileaks story and how the government have been handling it. In the section we would like to include a description of what’s happening and why, and include an interview with a well respected politician such as your self.

The interview will only last 15 minutes and will include questions on what control the government have over breaches like these, we would be very happy to send you a list of the questions which we have prepared.
We feel as though you are the most relevant to our documentary as you have a lot of experience in politics and are the current Minister of Justice so have a relevance to how the government should deal with criminal offences such as Julian Assange’s.

Unfortunately this is a no budget shoot however it would help us greatly in completing our media coursework and we would be very grateful to have the participation of such a well known public figure such as yourself. The documentary will only be seen by our fellow media classmates, teacher and examiner and will not be shared publicly.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Yours sincerely


Calum Bowen, George Nicholls and Zoe Woodbridge

Heathside A level media students

The Documentary Plan

Since we have had the idea of our documentary we have started storyboard.

Here are the scans of our storyboard:

The storyboard shows how the documentary starts with flashing headlines which outline the topic (wikileaks) and give factual information. The presenter throughout will be Zoe and as you can see we have decided about all of our locations. We have also had the thought of doing the introduction speech outside Parliment and so during our London filming we will see how it looks. So far our documentary looks as though it will include a number of engaging shots, interviews and information which will be really exciting to edit and put together, however now we need to plan for filming.

Does the government have control over the internet - Documentary Plan

We have decided on what we want to include in our documentary:

• Introduction of what the documentary will be on - this will be done by Zoe who will present infront of parliment - good location as it links with politics and government
• Shots of London - more specificly of Parliment/Big Ben
• Interviews with the public on what they think of the Wikileaks story - do they think its right? Do they think the government can control issues like this? etc.
• An interview with a politician - we want someone credible and relevant so have been thinking about Kenneth Clarke. I have started structuring a letter to send to his PA asking about an interview. I feel Ken Clarke will be relevant as he is the current Secrety of State for Justice and has been one of Britains most famous and well thought of politicians since 1970 when he joined Parliment. If we cannot obtain an interview with a politician we have decided that we will use an actor who will pretend to be a member of parliment.

Change of Plan. Again.

Throughout the past few weeks our group hasn't been agreeing with each others ideas and thoughts and as a result we haven't been working to our full potential. It is clear that we do not all want to do the documentary on 'Phobias' and so we have come up with two choices: either split up or come with another idea.

After a couple of hours debating and thinking we have decided to stay as a group and we have chosen a new idea which we are all really excited about.

We wanted to do a documentary on something more current, something which is interesting and in the news at the moment. So we looked through some news channels and found a topic that interested us all: WikiLeaks.

On Sunday 28th Novembre 2010, Wikileaks began publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into the US Government's foreign activities. The documents that Wikileaks has released has caused a massive commotion around the world, starting groups of hackers attacking popular sites such as Amazon, and conspricy theories towards the government.

Our documentary will be about whether the government has control over the internet and we plan to interview members of the public and hopefully a politician on their views.

PLAN FOR THE FUTURE:
1. Come up with ideas to include in the documentary
2. Start a storyboard
3. Plan location
4. Compose scripts
5. Think of who to interview

Change of Plan

Recently the group has been having different ideas as to what we want to produce as our documentary. We have decided that our idea at the moment (global warming trip to Antarctica) wasn't strong enough and so we are deciding on a new idea.

We have had many different ideas but have narrowed them down to one which we are happy to go through with. Our idea is to create a documentary on people with strange phobias, as we have friends with phobias of 'Wotsits' and 'Balloons' we would have plenty to film.

Here are the notes that I was writing whilst we were coming up with ideas, the first page shows our general thoughts on what we could use and the second page shows more on our idea of phobias.