Immersion in school in a classroom today. M6 launches this Sunday, at 9:10 p.m., At the heart of the college, one year at Jean-Vilar, a documentary series with a unique feature. For an entire school year, film crews followed the daily lives of four 3rd grade classes in a REP (priority education network) establishment in Chalon-sur-Saône (Saône-et-Loire). The objective? “Showing the reality of what happens when you drop your kids off at school in the morning,” explained Matthieu Grelier, the director of programs at ITV Studios, at a press conference in June.
“What are the teaching and supervisory staff like, what are the issues and challenges they face on a daily basis? What are their successes, their difficulties, their successes, their failures? What does it mean to be a middle school student today? What are we thinking about in this very pivotal year when we are going to pass the patent? », listed Matthieu Grelier.
On the program: friendships and tensions between students, the place of social networks, harassment, educational support… If the interest in the subject is nothing new (we can no longer count the documentaries on the school environment and adolescents), the form is out of the ordinary. In addition to classic on-board cameras, the production placed still shots in corridors, classrooms and common rooms. A new kind of reality TV? “We are very, very far from it,” defends producer Andréa Palis, who also specifies that she has increased her kindness. “There, we are in absolute truth. We see very clearly that at no time are the sequences filmed,” underlines Ophélie Meunier, who comments on the documentary in voice-over.
It took enormous preparation in advance to bring to fruition this program “both instructive and touching”, “which is worth all the reports on national education”, as M6 promises. Technical constraints, legal predispositions, psychological support… 20 minutes explains this device to you.
55 cameras and real-time image sorting
In total, 55 cameras recorded the actions of these college students. Mobile teams with camera operators followed them regularly for a whole year, from the start of the school year in September to the choice of orientations in June. Then over the space of several weeks, in February and March, production added the famous fixed cameras, in the principal’s office, the teacher and school life areas, corridors and classrooms.
Daily, the technicians also had to equip certain students with lavalier microphones. Throughout the series, around fifteen portraits of children stand out in particular. “We had to be careful not to always give the microphones to the same students,” specifies the producer. “It was cute because every morning they looked at us to see if they were going to get the mic or not. We sometimes put microphones on children just for the sake of equality. »
Obviously, so many cameras maintained for such a long time, that makes a lot of images. To avoid being overwhelmed by rush, the production set up an on-site control room to sort the recordings in real time during filming. “There was a permanent selection, in a funnel. Otherwise it’s impossible to store,” explains Andréa Palis.
Identification and legal authorizations
Who says cameras, obviously says image rights and authorizations. To film the students, some of their parents but also the teaching and supervisory staff, it was necessary to sign agreements, different depending on the degree of appearance of the people on the screen. Some families refused to participate in the program, as did some teachers. Blurred faces will therefore appear during certain sequences. But overall, the producer is delighted with “an incredible success rate”. “It was a lot of work up front,” explains ITV Studios program director Matthieu Grelier. Before filming, our teams came to see the students and teachers, there was a permanent exchange. This also made it possible to better understand the project. We maintained a kind of dialogue, by desire and by necessity, which meant that this entire administrative process, in quotes, could be done, and not in a hurry. »
“We did a lot of immersion before filming with teams who lived there for several months to reassure the teachers and start meeting the children. We knew all the students, their lives, their stories,” adds Andréa Palis. Likewise, certain rules were established, notably with the sequences filmed in the management office. “If at any point I didn’t want them to film, I would tell them. From the moment when nothing could be filmed that disturbed us, the confidence was there,” explains principal Claudie Gaillard.
Finally, the teaching teams and the children’s families were able to preview the final cut of the documentary series. With the possibility, assured the producer during the conference in June, of asking to remove certain sequences.
Support and workshops
A lot of psychological support was also necessary to supervise the filming. “There is enormous kindness and protection towards children. There were psychologists upstream to meet all the 3rd grade classes. There were psychologists constantly during filming, to find out how they perceived the cameras. There is enormous psychological follow-up after filming and there will also be after the broadcast,” says Andréa Palis.
As the producer explains, the psychologist also looked carefully at the program images. “She even sometimes made us remove some sequences. For precisely [garantir] this kindness towards children and how they can experience it afterwards. We really don’t take this lightly,” she says.
The channel says it is very attentive to the images broadcast, particularly with regard to issues of harassment and cyberharassment. Workshops on the use of social networks were also organized for students by production. “The other part of our job as producer or editor, in cases where there are anonymous people who are put in front of a camera to participate in a documentary or a show, is to also explain to them the consequences of that can have sometimes. Or rather to learn to manage these consequences from a distance. This is why we held several workshops throughout the season, and not only with the students who are in the film, to explain this to them,” explains Matthieu Grelier.