Primary research is information that is collected by yourself. You could do this by emailing/writing to people, conducting interviews, sending out surveys and questionnaires, for example. It's information that you have worked on to retrieve instead of trusting and using information that was gathered elsewhere by a different person.
Secondary research can be found in things like news articles, television shows and books, for example. It is information that was not collected by you, and was found at a different location and date by different people, and may not be completely related to the information that you want because you were not the one to find it.
News programmes - such as the news - use primary research. They have someone, or a group of people, who check all the information and conduct research into the news reports that they are going to show before they are broadcast to make sure that the information that they are giving is accurate and reliable. Because they are something that the majority of the public trust and believe, to pass on inaccurate information would be extremely bad and could not be allowed to happen. When I was conducting research for my VT clip about the sled dog racing for the news programme in college, I actually went and interviewed people on location. I recorded these interviews so I could refer back to them, and also emailed a number of people who actually ran the event so that I could get accurate information about the event.
Documentaries, on the other hand, tend to use both primary and secondary research. Although they go out to interview people and research into the topic of the documentary on the location of filming, they also use information that could be found in books and online to add to the film. Because a lot of documentaries are based on things that have happened in the past, they can obviously not travel back in time to be there on the date that the event happened, and so have to use secondary research - for example, news reports and police statements released around the time of the events. Like in 'Bowling For Columbine', for example. They interview people as primary research, but they also refer back to events that have happened in the past, and are recorded in books/on the internet as secondary. They also use secondary information about the amount of gun crime in the USA and Canada, as this was information found out by the government, and not the filmmakers. During my research for my VT clip for my college news production, I researched online to find people's views on sled dog racing, and other, similar secondary research to add information to my VT clip that would be something I could not find out myself.
Research is extremely important when it comes to a factual documentaries or news programme. Because the media has an extremely large reach, and most people believe and trust the information they are given, anything that is false, or incorrect could have bad consequences because it would break the trust that they have with the public, and could cause a panic/uproar if details are wrong. People that work on news shows always conduct research into news stories before they are broadcast, and often there are a team of people that then check again afterwards to make sure that the people conducting the research haven't made a mistake, and that everything they have found out is accurate for sure.
When I researched my VT clip for the news show in college, I used a number of different methods or research. Before I actually went to film, I emailed the people in charge of running and organising the sled dog racing event so I could ask them a number of questions and find out details about the day. I then conducted secondary research by looking at news articles about sled dog races online, and also surveys and sites that include people's opinions of sled dog racing. This allowed me to be clued up on the day, and know exactly what I would need to find out from the people there, so when it came to collecting more primary research - like interviewing racers, organisers and spectators on the day to get information that I could not get through secondary research. It also allowed me to be more confident with the information that I had found, as it is something that I have found out, and don't have to trust that the secondary information found online and in books is accurate as it may not be, and might also not be closely related to the topic that I was choosing to cover in my VT clip. I found out that a lot of people tend to think that sled dog racing is cruel and that they think the dogs are forced into it, but I also discovered that the dogs actually extremely enjoy the sport. It allows them to use up the mass amounts of energy that they cannot burn in other ways, and gets them out and about for the weekend, exploring new places and meeting other dogs/people. I also found out that the sport of sled dog racing isn't that common in England as it is in some countries; such as Canada, but it still exists and there is a close-knit community of racers that are more like a family with each other.
Multi-Camera.
A multi-camera production is completely different from a multi-angle production. With multi-camera films, a few cameras - normally three - are set up to record the exact same scene from different angles. It's typically used in news shows, or on reality television shows such as Jeremy Kyle or Big Brother.
This then allowed the scene to only need to take place once. With shows that are supposed to be reality, this is useful as then the people involved would not need to keep re-doing something to change the camera angles, because in reality TV, it is not supposed to be rehearsed or fake so it would be impossible to keep re-doing the scene. Instead, having a number of cameras located in different places allows the events to only need to take place once, and the angles can be changed by switching between the many different cameras that were set up to capture all the action.
It also saves time. If a talk show has a special guest that has very limited time to actually appear on the show, they would not need to keep repeating a phrase/conversation to get the different angles, and things would only need to be said once. The editing can be done live in a vision mixing studio, or edited at a later date, using all the camera angles that were recorded at the same time.
During my news show that was created for my college course, the following picture is the layout of the studio, where we used a multi-camera layout to record the programme.
As you can see, we used three different cameras so that we could simply edit the show live in the vision mixing room, and cut back and forth between the different cameras instead of needing to constantly stop the production to re-film different parts of the programme. It also saved time to do this, and allowed us to complete the show in a more professional manner.
If we use this episode of the Andrew Marr Show, however, starting at 1:00 minute, we can see that the programme was filmed multi-camera. The camera at first, is aimed directly at Andrew Marr as he is speaking, but half way through, it cuts to the two guests sitting on the sofa as they are mentioned. He continues to speak over this shot however, and it soon cuts back to him talking which proves that this was filmed multi-camera, as they are able to simply cut back and forth between the different cameras whilst it is being broadcast live.
Later on in the show, at 7:25, we can see even more proof that this was filmed multi-camera. The camera is at first a medium shot of Marr as he speaks, but soon cuts to a camera over his shoulder, pointing down towards the newspapers on a table that he is speaking about at the time. Cutting back to a wide shot of him, we can see him moving the papers on the table - as he was doing in the previous shot, but the sound hasn't changed at all. There were no cuts between what he was saying at all, and clearly it was filmed using more than one camera to achieve this effect. It does this a number of times as he continues to speak about the news headlines on the papers. As he introduces the two guest once again, it cuts to a moving wide shot shot of the three of them sitting at the sofas. As the conversation progresses, the camera cuts between shots of the two guests, Marr and the wide shot of all three of them. Through making my news show in college, I know that this would be extremely easy to do within a vision mixing studio, and save both time and money. Because they are having a discussion, it should be natural, and for it to be natural it cannot be stopped continuously to re-frame a shot. This would take up too much time to do, cannot be done live, and would also mean that the three would need to keep repeating and rehearsing the discussion which is not what people expect from a discussion/news show.
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