Our Approach/Analysis of 'Still Born, Still Loved'

We've decided that the approach we want to use will be partly observational and partly poetic as we will use quite a few observational shots, but will also include interviews and structured cutaways.

A film that uses a similar documentary style to the one we would like to use is Debbie Howard's 'Still Born, Still Loved'. This is because it uses all the elements that we would like to incorporate into our documentary.

The observational shots that we will use will be of Jayden's mother, Eleanor, doing the normal things she does around the house. This will include shots of her doing things for Jayden, e.g. preparing his food or giving him his medicine etc. Below are observational shots from 'Still Born, Still Loved'.

Most of our documentary will consist of interviews with both Jayden's mother, Eleanor, and his 15 year old sister, Rebecca. We've decided to use two camera to film so that we can get both a wide shot of each interview and also so we can get a close up shot of the interviewee's face. We could have done this with one camera, but as we cannot predict what their responses to the questions will be, we don't want to get the wrong shot for the wrong question. Therefore by using two cameras we can guarantee that we will have all of the interview filmed with both a wide frame and a close up so that we can see the emotion on the interviewee's faces as they respond to the questions.

Similarly to this documentary we will also be using a lot of cutaways during our piece to make it seem more interesting to watch. The actual cutaways we are planning to use are also very much like the ones in 'Still Born, Still Loved' as our documentary is also about a baby. The cutaway shots we are planning to use are things like Jayden's toys, his bottles, medicine etc. Other cutaways we want to shoot are things like the family playing with Jayden and establishing shots, such as the front of Eleanor's house.

Another idea we want to use as well as the footage we shoot on location is the use of text in our piece. We want to add information about Jayden's cancer in the piece, and we feel the easiest and most effective way to do that would be by including text in our documentary.