research into similar products/inspirational texts

Is It Better To Be Mixed Race



For our documentary we looked into similar products to help us gain inspiration, however once we started to look into it, we found that there is not many documentaries based on 'being mixed race'. We found one documentary similar to our idea,which was called, 'Is It Better To Be Mixed Race' which is a Channel 4 commissioned Documentary. Geneticist Aarathi Prasad, who plays a proactive part in the documentary, considers the theory
that Mixed Raced Humans are blessed with innate advantages, something farmers reconginse in plants and animals as a hybrid vigour. This idea is disagreed with those who are named racists and as Prasad discovers, many mixed race people object to being defined by their skin colour.
As we watched the documentary we realised it was based on a scientific approach rather than a social one, which is the opposite of what we intend to do.
There was a few similarities to the product, that we would like to use in our own documentary, such as The Historical background of mixed heritage. We would like to use this in our own production because we want to start at the roots of 'mixed race' and we want to know what society thought about being 'mixed race' in the past and the stigmas that were attached to it. Another similarity would be the personal interviews. We would like to interview many people, as our documentary is based on social feeling so talking to society is a big part of it. Also in 'Is It Better To Be Mixed Race' they use several images of mixed race celebrities, we would also like to use this, to show the variety of mixed race people in society.
The differences between our documentary and ' Is It Better To Be Mixed Race' is that we will have no expert knowledge nor scientific input this is because we are not interested in who is genetically superior, we want to find out people's opinions on how they are accepted in society based on their skin colour.








SuperSize Me







Another inspiration for us was supersize me, for a few reasons. mostly for the layout of the show and some of the techniques they use which we would like to able to use in our documentary.
Differences between supersize me and our own documentary is that we will not use the observational approach neither the reflective for the fact we don't want our documentary to have that fly on the wall style. Another differences is the main the one, which is the topic.
Some similarities i think our documentary may have to supersize me, is stereotypes. Morgan Spurlock uses a lot of stereotyping a lot of people, mainly americans and how they eat a lot of fast food. in our documentary, stereotypes may come up, but not purposly, they may be a stereotyoe of mixed race people and this is what we want to show. Also we may use Visual conventions too, as in, if we are talking about the past and then we show several images to do with that historical information, and it can also be used when we are relating back to a celebrity. As supersize me, we will be using interviews. in our documentary we will be using a narrator unlike, instead of it being a proactive all the time, we will have a presenter but not through out the documentary.