Channel 4 announces new documentary 'Teens' (w/t)

What’s it like being a teenager today?
 
We asked a group of teenagers to reveal their digital lives - their texts, tweets, Facebook updates, videos and phone calls in the year they turn 17. These twelve teens are brave enough to open up their phones, giving us a real insight into how they live and relate to one another in the ‘real’ world and online.
 
Seventeen is a time when lives change fast, with new relationships, fluctuating friendships, pressures at school and trouble at home. They’ll soon be adults but for now they are just seventeen.
 
Smartphones, social networks and microblogging have revolutionised the teenage experience, supercharging the daily drama, gossip and heartbreak of adolescent life. The contributors span a wide range of teenage cliques - from popular sporty girls to geeky computer nerds - and the series will examine how these teen social hierarchies function and affect those caught up in them.
 
Filmed over a school year, Teens (w/t) is a high-energy documentary series exploring classic rites of passage of teenagers today. With constant coverage from their mobile phones we have access to every moment of drama - drunken misadventures, relationship meltdowns, falling in love for the first time and revising for exams. The multi-media content is seamlessly integrated into the documentary to enhance, contextualise and exaggerate the lives of the Teens – just as it does in real life.
 
•    Teens (w/t) is a ground-breaking observational documentary series, employing a brand new technological innovation which enables teenagers to share their digital lives.
•    The Teens have agreed to share everything with us for the filming period - providing a completely new and modern documentary model.
•    Working in conjunction with traditional documentary filmmaking, the D:Rig enables us to portray contributors’ lives in unparalleled detail.
•    The Digital Rig (D:Rig) sends phone data – including voice calls, text messages,, Twitter updates, Facebook posts, photographs and internet search history – back to a secure central server in near real time. This data is collated and integrated in to the documentary footage.
•    We have empowered a highly media-literate generation to contribute some of their own material to the series and create a new relationship between documentary makers and their contributors.

Teens (w/t)is a 6 x 60” series from RAW, which will TX Autumn 2014. Directed by Bruce Flecter, and series produced by Ben Rumney and executive produced by Dimitri Doganis, Bart Layton and Peter Moore.