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Sunday, 24 September 2017

Week 3: TIE (Storms)

Researching SToRMS

We started off the lesson discussing the aim of our TIE piece and we found out that a company called Storm DMC wanted us to do our piece about the way boys communicate or don't communicate and the problems that boys feel when they don't communicate. I researched the company and I found their website. http://stormsdmc.org/ I was reading through the information about them and they said that they are "a small organisation based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire and set up in July 2015. It is a fund within the South Yorkshire Community Foundation, a registered charity whose goal is to improve the lives of local people. Storms was set up in memory of Dan McAllister who unexpectedly took his own life in May 2015 aged nineteen." Storm stands for "Strategies to Reduce Male Suicide".

We also learnt that our age range was Y10-Y11 boys which means they are 15/16.  We agreed that we need to point out that there are certain male stereotypes that aren't healthy and talking about your problems or even just expressing how you feel in whatever way you can is important, as is acknowledging that other people might be feeling the same way or worse and there are problems that not communicating can arise. Our target audience is very close to our age and we discussed that it will be very difficult to approach as we are a whole cast of girls and so we don't actually know what it's like to not communicate and the stereotypes/expectations that there are for boys. We know of them just not what it feels like to have those placed over you since a young age. We could actually use this to our advantage and make a joke out of it especially if we establish that at an early stage because we think that boys of this age have quite a jokey nature but we then have the risk of taking a joke to far and if we have such a light feel to the piece then they won't take any of the things that we are talking about seriously and we need them to because it's about them and their lifestyle. We established that we need to do some research on the different ways that boys communicate or their lack of communication. 

I found this website that highlights the ways that men and women communicate differently and I found it very interesting.


It highlighted the ways that men's minds view things completely different to women and men's minds are always looking for a problem that needs to be solved so they use communicate to find out what the root of the problem is as soon as possible so they can deal with the aftermath. Whereas women are more concerned about the emotional side of the problem. They're not saying that men don't know how to take other people's feelings into consideration, they're just making the point that the different genders have different aims and approaches to every situation. A man's is to find the problem and deal with it, a woman's is to assess the feelings of everyone in the situation and then find the problem.

So this meant that we can't have the audience thinking we are accusing them of being inconsiderate but we can't go to the extent where we are making them feel weak as they will become defensive about the topics we are discussing. The Storms website says "In 2013 male suicide accounted for 78% of all suicides, which was the biggest cause of death in men aged 20 - 45 in the UK. The silence around suicide means that this statistic goes largely unrecognised." We want to raise this awareness and allow boys/men to feel comfortable with expressing how they are without feeling like they are weak or like they have to become defensive and guarded.

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