Ideas | Development

The First Thought

• When I first heard the brief, my thought process went straight to my favourite type of animal which are Giraffes. I have recently started watching 'The Secret Life of the Zoo' on Channel 4 and on the programme you not only see the development of the animals but you also see the development of the zoo keepers.
•  The programme shows how the animals are looked after and what the zoo keepers have to go through to keep the animals safe. The keepers go through a lot with the animals - from seeing births and deaths - and the programme shows their emotions realistically.

• This programme gave me the inspiration for my idea but I want to focus mainly on the Giraffes and how they are looked after. 
• After discussing this with Helen she suggested that I contact Howlett's Zoo and ask them if there was a possibility that we could potentially film a documentary on their Giraffes.

Research

• Before I contacted them I decided to do some research on the zoo itself and see what kind of experiences they provide to the public. 
• I found out that they have a overnight stay where the public are treated to dinner and then the next day they can go on a safari and experience the animals up close. 
• I talked to my group and we discussed that we could possibly be able to do this experience if they let us film. We placed a 'Booking Inquiry' for the three of us to get the price of the overnight stay, but the result we were given was fairly high. 
• We discussed as a group and decided that we would directly contact them and see if they could gives us some sort of discount if we were to film there.

I emailed the zoo's media contact:

Other Ideas

Within our group we had two other ideas:

• Nisserin thought about doing our documentary on the Peacocks at Leeds Castle and how they get looked after. This was a good idea as it's something that not many people think about and it would be quite interesting to find out what the staff at the Castle do with them. She also contacted the Castle about the possibility of filming there about that specific subject. 

• Sammi thought about doing our documentary on how the climate change is happening faster than it naturally should. This was also a good idea as it's something that, again, not many people think about and it would be a large subject which means we would have several Segway's that we could venture into. She also contacted a local farm shop about talking to one of the farmers and filming our documentary there.