Filmmakers must ask the right questions

When producers ponder whether young people are interested in documentaries and if they’ll bother to watch them, I suspect they’re asking themselves the wrong questions.

In 2007, having helped secure a season of BBC3 documentaries called Born Survivors, I produced a series of “minisodes”: self-contained short form versions.

One of the films, Cut Up Kids, was about self-harm. At the time, based on intel from Radio 1’s Surgery, I knew it was the most important issue that concerned young people. We released the video into specialist forums and after a rabid debate about the title, the online community discussed the video, then alerted people to the documentary, and the season, on BBC3.

A decade on, young people are still concerned about self-harm. BBC3’s Amazing Humans strand’s short Tattoo Artist Who Turns Self-Harm Scars Into Art has racked up an impressive 52 million Facebook views and counting.

Both these examples suggest that for a documentary to appeal to young people it needs to be short, yet that’s not necessarily the case. Hour-long episodes of Planet Earth II attracted more 16-34s than The X Factor, though of course, it created short-form hits too: the iguana chase was a Bafta award-winning must-see moment.

Docs demand

There’s also a lot of chatter about young audiences being more prone to watch on-demand. This may be true, but it’s more important that documentaries demand their viewing - and that can be done in a myriad of ways.

Take twenty-something documentary maker Benjamin Zand, who shoots, edits and reports. There’s a tone and visual style to his Dictatorland series for BBC3 online that feels distinct from the work he does for Panorama on BBC1 and Unreported World on Channel 4. Why? Because it needs to demand the attention of its audience in a crowded market.

5Star’s Maya Jama and Aaron Roach Bridgeman may sound like unlikely documentary talent. Maya made her name as a presenter on a Rinse FM, a radio station in London; Aaron got his break interviewing the biggest names in music on YouTube channel SB.TV.  Aaron and Maya already have the attention of young audiences on other platforms, so why not TV too? 

All4’s recent music documentary Pirate Mentality is another great example of entrusting young talent who know their audience to make programming for your platform.

This weekend, Elijah Quashie aka ‘The Chicken Connoisseur’, makes his debut at Sheffield Doc/Fest to discuss his hugely popular YouTube series The Pengest Munch.

This might sound like traditional producers can’t attract young people the old-fashioned way, with a well-crafted hour long film, but I don’t subscribe to that view.

Breaking The Cycle, an hour-long documentary made by Finnish broadcaster YLE about whether it’s better to punish or rehabilitate prisoners, has just been picked up by Netflix in all English-speaking territories.

Before the film was shot, the producers worked out what young people cared about and where they had those conversations. They actively cultivated an online community and created additional material to engage them.

One such place was Reddit, 87% of whose audience is under 35 and 63% under 25%. Reddit has lots of “niche interest” forums called subreddits. The documentaries subreddit has 11.9m subscribers.

The young people who discovered Breaking The Cycle there cared about it so much that they emailed Netflix and told them to buy it. And they did.

Perhaps us producers should be asking ourselves: do we really know what issues young people care about?  Are we making documentaries about those issues? And perhaps most importantly, how much effort are we making to demand that they view it?

Derren Lawford is creative director of Woodcut Media