Friday 23rd April

Today for our FMP we were able to get permission to leave early, and go into the radio room and add more to our FMP pitch slide show and presentation. We decided to discuss about what everyone was going to talk about during the pitch, we decided I was going to talk about the things I know about which is our contacts and the company which we are using to help us.

FMP Documentary, Pitch ideas

Today we didnt really get a chance to talk about it much but I was able to reveal all he contacts I was able to get through someone which would really help us when we needed to film, the company was Carillion, they are a building company and they offer programmes to youth offenders and help them to get jobs and qualifications. I was able to have some initial contact Jobcentre Plus, David Massingham who runs the course SkyBlue and it was looking hopeful that we were not only gonna get an interview with a youth offender but also be able to get behind the scenes at some of the courses that are offered. I was also given a powerpoint presentation about SkyBlue from a contact and I was also given case studies on people who had used the course and benefited from it, but because of confidentality I cannot reveal who the people are and if they were youth offenders or not.
This helped us alot as were able to start out powerpoint which we were going to use in our pitch.
The golden rule 'its what you know but who you know'!

FMP Tues 20th April

Today we had a lesson with Phil Middleham and the groups were telling him there idea, he quite liked our idea but said we needed to choose a certain subject path to go down, he told us about the River House project. We also managed to speak to John Simpson and Tim Losinski about it and they gave us some contact number. We spent some time speaking about the different subejcts and we decided we would look at what courses and programmes are offered to young offenders as we found out youth offender institutes are a dead end and we werent getting anywhere with it. In the second lesson with John Branney we spoke about different types of documentaries before we were aloud to leave and I tried to get into contact with the River House Project and Onley Prison but none of them answered when I rang. So we started to look at plan B.

Pitch Research

Today, we really started to finalise our idea. After being told our orginal idea of visiting a prison and a youth offenders institute looked unlikely, we decided we would take a look at the charities and schemes being offered to recently released offenders and how they help. Joe Hibbert is going to put us into contact with someone he used to work with who works with a company called Soundbase and they are a charity music video making company so hopefully we can arrange a phone interview with him.
We also started our research for the pitch we have to next tuesday, so we started to look at what different local schemes their were around the local area and how many there are around the country, I started to research the young offender institutes and we were going to include all this information in our pitch.

Start of FMP

Today at college we started to go through our FMP assignment brief with Phil, he was telling us what he thought about our orginal ideas, he wasn't too keen on what we had first thought of, so he mentioned some ideas to us. He said maybe we should do a documentary on the RSC or University/Colleges cutting places.
We werent too keen so we talked to Graham and we agreed that something about young offenders would be a good documentary. Graham said that the SBS part of college has links with young offenders and they offer courses to them such as catering, buliding and engineering.
We liked this idea so we started to look at what ideas we could do. Lisa knew someone who had recently been released from a young offenders institute and we were hoping to get an interview with him. We were also looking into visiting a young offenders institute and a main prison so we could see the differences between them both and hopefully talking to an ex-offender who spent time in both and can tell us the differences between them and how it changed him.