Al-Amn Magazine

option. It was! Our budget did not cover this more ambitious venture, so we had stitch together a patchwork quilt of additional funding from various sources. We also had no notion of what making a film would involve before we started. In costing a documentary into your funding bid, you need to grasp the production work and time involved. Costs will include preparation work, a lighting and camera operator, the film director and/or producer, travel costs and editing suite, as well as likely VAT. 2. Find a production company with a vision you trust We worked with Popping Orange to bring the documentary to fruition. Co-researcher Val and I had little clear sense of what a film about our research might look like. It was the director’s vision to focus on the lives of the sociologists’ wives and reflections from their children. If you’re not a film-maker, what you think might work won’t necessarily. Any nascent ideas Val and I had weren’t half as good as what we ended up with. So it’s important to find a film-maker who you feel understands your research – and to be open to their suggestions. Feeling in tune with your director and trusting their vision is just as important as the budget. If you’re starting from scratch, use your research skills and look at a range of production companies’ websites and past outputs. Find out if they’ve worked with academics previously. 3. Communicate with the film director as your research progresses Once we were on this pathway, we made efforts to keep our director in the loop. This allowed her to evolve her vision for the story as our work progressed. We sent through briefing papers and images, and discussed possible scenarios with her. In turn, we were provided with an overview of the film narrative and for each filming day a call sheet, content document and risk assessment. We also visited an archive together so she could see the research materials we were working with and gauge the venue’s possibilities as a film location. You might build team meetings with your director into your regular research timetable. 4. Be brave! Appear on screen yourself Consider being in the film. An important point of connection for viewers is to see the people who carried out the underlying research, and as researchers we were able to furnish a broader contextual background for the stories about the wives and their children’s viewpoints. We were not keen at first – the film’s director had to persuade us to appear in the documentary. And it’s an understatement to say we were nervous about being filmed and it felt quite stressful. But skilful editing meant that it worked. We were provided in advance with a series of questions in the film content document that the (off-screen) director would ask us, so we could think through our replies. On the day of filming, we arrived in good time to chat, get a sense of what would happen and feel relaxed. This helped us to convey our fascination and excitement about our topic on camera. 5. Think through distribution and publicity Clearly, to reach and engage people, a documentary film needs to be seen. We thought about this carefully in preparation for our film, and we chose to post it on YouTube because this is a stable and well-known sharing website for general access. We collaborated with key stakeholders in our field who either hosted screenings of the film or included us in their events, both online and in person. For example, we negotiated for the film to be shown online during the British Sociological Association’s annual conference and a members’ event, as well as being included in an in-person screening at the BritishAcademy’s Summer Showcase. timeshighereducation.com