Ethical

Ethical

Fair: Being fair means to not take sides and be biased but to have different opinions and not just on fixed view. Fair is also when a range of different ethnicity are used as well as ages and genders. If these aspects are not looked at it could result to people tacking offence or not finding the documentary appealing. In terms of being biased, this would not allow the audience to have the opportunity to decide for themselves what they believe is the right answer.

In my documentary I had to ensure that I was being fair. This is evident as I have used people from different ethnicity in my focus group and interviews also, people of different religions. Because I have a fixed target audience of young teenage females, it was important for me to ensure that the people who participated in my documentary where young adults/teens if I was to include males this would be going of topic and would take away the concept of the documentary.

Balanced: balanced means giving equal time and space to different opinions, it also means to treat people with respect in terms of what they wish to say, if some one has a negative view and another has a positive one should not be shown stronger as this would not be balanced and could result to conflict.

In my documentary I had to ensure that I had made it as balanced as possible and thankfully this was not much of a problem as my the topic I am covering does not have a negative side and is more of a investigation into the solutions people could take instead of buying new clothes. However it was important for me to make sure that when I put the documentary together that I I didn’t talk to much about why I thought the idea was good but left this more to my interviewees.

objective: objective is when a documentary maker influences what content is shown in the documentary for example if there was a documentary about students in a school and the producer only wanted to show positive aspects they would only film things that would make the school and pupils look good however the bad aspects would not be filmed.

In my documentary it was important that my opinions didn’t over power what the expects and interview had to say this is so that I was not being objective and letting people have their opinions as well as mine.

Non-manipulation through editing: A documentary editor could edit in a way to influence a message, for example if someone started a fight the documentary maker would not show the boy starting the flight but only the man reacting so it looks as if he is aggressive this can send false information to the viewer.

In my documentary it was crucial that I edited in a way that endorsed clothes swapping and the view of my interviews this is so that I did not give a negative impact on the topic. I also had to endure that all the people staring in my documentary where viewed as they where intended to e filmed and not edited for any other purpose.