Charlie Brooker's Presenting Style

Research into Charlie Brooker’sPresenting Style

The main feedback from our first draft was that it looked to much like the presenter, Charlie, looked too much like he was reporting. This is due to the plain and dull background, the use of a microphone, and

monotonous speech. We sought to rectify this – in order to fit within our target channel, and appeal to our target audience.

A show which we have taken great inspiration from is Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe. Elements we noted, and therefore liked, was frequent injection of deadpan humour, fast edits with frequent shot

changes, underscoring music and various locations.

The audience really feel involved in any Charlie Brooker piece due to him being the forefront of any shot he is in, varying from talking to

himself or looking directly at the audience – enforcing a point.

Brooker frequently uses other contributors within his show, not only does this break up the action but it shows a different side to the

story/discussion. We have replicated this in our documentary with Adam going round the egg farm.

The first decision we made was to have a variety of backgrounds and filming locations. We deliberately chose light, summery locations –

due to the documentary having connotations of spring. Any location we chose would have some sort of foliage, or a building with farm

collocations (a shed).

Having recently discovered the new features which iMovie (our editing software) have included, we decided to make the most of

these features. The one feature which we would like to make light of is the ability to put ‘picture-in-picture’, we have therefore superimposed pictures of eggs as I’m talking about them.

In order to make the piece more appealing to watch – we adjusted the editing to make it faster, making full use of ‘jump’ and ‘snap’

cuts. This technique could be used to mark certain words – for example, in the screenshots below Charlie puts emphasis on the

words ‘very, very’ by the constant change of shot and positioning of his eyeline.

Brooker successfully shows the light and the shade within his programmes – highlighting negative points with humour. We were

unable to show the darker side due to our documentary purely focusing on the free range side – therefore the whole subject being lighthearted. We have therefore frequently used humour – like in

Crackin’ Cooking.