Documentary Film Proposal – Lauren Birch

I have chosen to conduct my film on psychology as a whole, but more specifically into a personal experience with learning it. My younger sister, Olivia, has studied psychology for almost three years and so we spoke on her experiences in general with more a much more personal and relaxed approach rather than as fully factual. We do include facts too, more specifically experiments and studies conducted to keep the topic interesting but for her to add her own spin and opinion to it. Main questions include, what she’s learnt, how portrayals in films are accurate and inaccurate with psychological parts, her favourite experiments etc. 

As a psychology student, she is by no means an expert but I think that makes her experiences more interesting in a way. Her perspective stays factual and we talk more on her opinions if she enjoys something and if she doesn’t, so overall the attitude of the interview is completely positive throughout. We talk about psychology topics such as social groups, mental health and narcissism and perfectionism, and though they are deep topics we keep it lighthearted and fun. I want to animate this with a fun optimistic view and make it funny if I can so it’s entertaining to watch but could be either educational or personal. I conducted the interview in a casual way though sticking to the questions. It took a while to get used to it so towards the end we have eased into it better. 

We can’t really research different points of view for this because as I said previously we kept it more personal than factual. Originally, I was gonna keep it factual and wrote lots of questions about psychology topics but I reread the brief and it seemed to want a personal approach so I changed and adapted to that. I chose to interview my sister about psychology because I think it’s such an interesting topic with so many different roads to go down and talk about. Personally I find the social group stuff very interesting so that’s what appeals to me and all the personal stories are what makes the interview different that to any other one about psychology. It’s an important topic that should be commonly talked about and I feel like this is a good way to do it.

From the specific two minute interview I will use in my film, I think I’ve chosen my question to be what films or TV shows influenced her to learn more about psychology. I personally find that an interesting topic and also would be really fun to animate to. She talks about split, a film about dissociative identity disorder and how well or not well they do the portrayals and Hannibal the tv show and Hannibal as a character and his psychotic actions. These would really work to animate to because people remember the films personally and I can use funny parts about them to animate to, such as for Hannibal we talked about him feeding parts to police officers and can imagine that would be a funny/odd sequence to animate.I’m gonna keep it light and fun, trying to put it in a comedic view because that’s the kind of interview I would like to watch. I think I will do it with a black background throughout as I like how it looks and obviously animate to what is said with a different spin on it.