Evaluation of my role during the production of Pocket Money

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Yasmine Djédjé

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Evaluation

My role during the production of ‘Pocket Money’ was to be the protagonist in the documentary. Like Michael Moore, the star of Bowling for columbine who investigates the fear of guns in America, by playing an active role in the in the documentary, I decided to carry out an investigative role.  My group and I felt that my presence in the documentary through conversational interviews was an effective way of achieving verisimilitude because we were giving a voice to various young people. Also, in our brief at the beginning we decided that the purpose of our documentary was not only to investigate what the government created EMA for, e.g. books, travel, equipment etc but it was to expose the truth about what exactly students spend their EMA on e.g. trainers, phone credit etc and whether students actually spend EMA for educational purposes.  In order to communicate this truth to the audience we varied our use of cinematique techniques by using reconstruction footages, archive still images etc, which reveal how young people spend EMA. Our use of non digetic sound such as 50 cents upbeat ‘I get money’, relates back to the title of the documentary ‘Pocket Money’ and at the same time it represents the young, upbeat students who receive EMA.

Even though the hidden agenda behind ‘Pocket Money’ is to show that we are on the side of those who spend EMA on what they wish, we also wanted to create a sense of sympathy amongst the audience,  therefore I carried out a close conversational interview, with a male student who struggles without the financial support of EMA. This sense of sympathy reinforced the agenda of ‘Pocket Money’ in the sense that it explained why we feel that students should be able to spend their EMA freely. We did not feel that it was fair on the student who did not receive EMA, so we agreed with the fact that students who are entitled to it should make the most of it.

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Something we were aware of whilst editing and producing ‘Pocket Money’ is that documentaries should be subjective to a certain extent seeing that characters in documentaries should be given a voice to achieve verisimilitude and to enable the audience to make their own conclusion based on what they see. We wanted the purpose of our documentary to be represented in a realistic manner so rather than using an animation footage which represents what students spend their EMA on, we decided to use a reconstruction footage. This enabled our target audience to relate to ‘Pocket Money’ as the reconstruction represents real ...

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