Your participants

In our documentary we will interview a police officer and a selection of football fans.

We will be interviewing the officer, as he has had first-hand experience with dealing with football crowds, so he would be able to give some personal insight into their behaviour. However as he is an active officer he has a fairly busy schedule, which can make it difficult to contact and meet him for interviews.

One thing we will have to be aware of when interviewing the police officer is that we respect boundaries, and do not cross a line with our questions, as his experience in this area could be unpleasant, and re-surfacing those memories could be distressful for him. We will also have to make sure we don't ask any loaded questions, as we want an honest, un-biased viewpoint.

The bonus to interviewing some football fans is that they will quite possibly have seen a lot of violence first hand, whether they participated or not. It could also give a completely different viewpoint to the officer which we are interviewing. However a football fan could have a biased opinion as to how they, and other fans alike them, behave at the time of the games. They may also lie to the camera, as they might not want to give themselves or fans in general, a bad name by portraying them to be violent. As with the officer we need to be careful not to ask any loaded questions, as we still want the most un-biased views possible. Again, in similarity to the police officer, we must be careful not to overstep any boundaries. Especially as they could of witnessed or experienced something truly unsettling.

The benefit of obtaining two very different views is to allow the audience to make comparisons for themselves. This will not only engage them more but will also enable them to ask questions and dig deeper. While capturing quick interviews with some football fans to understand what it’s like is good; but on the other side of the pitch, gaining an insight from another perspective on the other end of the spectrum is even better! This will allow me to cross cut and run these interviews parallel to each other, enabling an efficient editing technique. In addition, this does potentially link in with Roland Barthes Code Theory whereby getting the audience to ask themselves questions regarding the documentary indirectly ties in with enigma codes. This encourages the demographic to carry on watching and engages them deeper into the documentary in order to grab their attention.

Done by Aiden, contributed by Paris (font in bold).