Diversity and the Documentary    Photo by Allstate

By Andy Gibson

 My proposed documentary will look at people who do crazy things and who do not have their own reality show prompting craziness. People put themselves in harm’s way and out of comfortable economic status’ way for a “fix”.  Why?  My project will attempt to look at what drives people to take unprompted risks for social reasons.

There is an inherent interest in the unfamiliar, just as there is blasé with the mundane.  We will always gawk at people different than us.  This particular subset of society, that takes physical or lifestyle risks, is appealing because most of us would never dream of giving up a career to chase stardom or chancing bodily harm for glory.  Not everyone would give up a sure thing for a chance at something different.  The people reflected in this project have done just that.

In Tom Huang’s article Diversity in the Digital Age: Complicated Issues, Sophisticated Storytelling on Poynter Online, he describes diversity as “the journalistic value of representing in our news coverage a wide variety of people -- faces, voices and perspectives.”

The impact of diversity on my project is not crucial in telling the story of my proposed subjects.  The subjects that I have in mind currently are very diverse, however, they are also all white. Diversity would not influence the selection or inclusion of subjects. I think it would be a disservice to the story to include a subject in the documentary because of his or hers race, just as it would be a disservice to the story to exclude someone who has a great story but isn’t the color you are looking for or are comfortable with. As it is a documentary film and not an experiment or survey, I don't think that diversity will influence much of what happens in the pre-production, production, or post-production process.