Documentary Research & Planning

Oct 31, 2018
2 min read

To start planning our documentary we made a list of potential themes and the structure that we could create within those themes. The initial theme we decided on was famine and disease but as we researched this topic further we felt that there was not enough information to create an interesting documentary. Therefore, we decided to go with our second choice, Global Warming. We decided that global warming would be relevant enough to current issues whilst also being a feasible cause for a dystopian future. As we started to research the topic further, we quickly realised that plastic waste was a good route to go down as it is one of the biggest current problems and has a lot of people around the world talking about it. This would mean that we could have a much bigger target audience and create something that would be engaging.

In order to fit the documentary into the dystopian genre, we first had to invent a fictional future based around the issues we had chosen. We started by looking at dystopian films and the worlds in which they were set. Whilst looking at other films I noticed that Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials featured scenes where San Francisco was semi submerged in sand. I felt that we could create a similar submerged world, but one that is covered in plastic not sand.

Once we had come up with the idea we needed to research facts and figures related to plastic waste and then develop a script from it We decided to split the script into two sections; the potential dystopian future and how we can prevent it.