Voiceover Explanation for my edit

I wrote the voiceover ideas together with Harry awhile ago.

I think it was important that we colloborated on this as the voiceover was produced after the edit was in place. I found I could give good guidelines as to what I wanted to be said and we scripted the documentary together. Below I will set out which shots were coupled with the script we had wrote.

"Media students. We decided to make a documentary to find out what Sheffield has to offer them by way of a career. First we asked the public".


"People in the industry"

"And found out what it takes to get a foot in the door in an industry that's increasingly difficult to break into."

So with over 25 media related courses in Sheffield alone, surely the public have some idea of what a media student actually does? We ventured into the city centre to find out.

This was the opening for the montage presenting the findings in short highlights. I felt I maintained a decent pace to this opening, but also took myself away from the more truthful verite approach here, because I misconstrued the context behind what the people in these short snippets were talking about to make it sound like they were slanderising media students- which wasnt the case for some people.

This was so the audience could maintain interest in the documentary and want to know the truth behind what was being said in the highlights.

Further, this helped live up to the title "making trouble for public good", as I later corrected the wrongs during the main segment of the documentary, when the actual truthful interviews were presented.



No one really had an opinion. Until we met this man.

Here, I wanted to draw attention to the individual with strong opinions on media students. I feel he is a real character and provides the negative connotations I suspected would come out during my research. This was the whole reason I was making the documentary, to try to educate and inform individuals like this. I added a bit of humour to the film by using the Jaws music in the build up to his interview.

It was beginning to look like no one had anything positive to say about media students.

This was directly after the man with the strong views had labelled media students as "frauds". I feel it helped convey a negative more depressing mood to the film (which started quite optimistically). This was a bit of a metaphor for the ups and downs we encountered in our investigation- the success stories and the media students who hadnt achieved anything and had been left £10,000 in the red having finished the course.

So with all this negativity hanging over us we decided to head to the Workstation, home to several cultural and media companies all supporting each other. We spoke to Tom Gatis former Media student and currently working as a Project Co-Ordinator for the Sheffield DocFest about his experiences.

This was an introduction to Tom Gatis. Tom was pretty informative but I felt his interview dragged on initially which was why I cut him from 2:30 to 1 minute. This was because some of the things he was talking about was not relevant to the investigation into how worthwhile university courses are.


The message was coming through loud and clear, work experience is the key to success in the Film and Media industries and we could see the struggle facing media graduates. With that in mind we packed up for the day and headed back the next morning to meet Hussain, film programmer for the International Doc Fest held every autumn.

Introduction to Hussain. Hussain had very strong views, he sympathised a lot for students undertaking media degrees and we learnt that work experience was key to the industry. He informed us of success stories which I used in my edit as I found it would be interesting side story to some of the issues being discussed about success in the industry.