The Secret Life of Students

•    The Secret Life of Students is a ground-breaking observational documentary series, employing a brand new technological innovation which enables students to share their digital lives.
•    The 12 students have agreed to share everything with us for the three month 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.
 
Every year, thousands of fresh-faced students head off to University for the first time.

The first night out without parents to come home to.  The struggle to make a student loan last beyond the first few weeks of term. Romance.  Re-invention. This is the life of a university fresher.

But student life has changed radically from what you might remember. Smartphones, social networks and microblogging have revolutionised the fresher experience, supercharging the daily drama, goings on and heartbreak of undergraduate life. It’s no coincidence the world’s biggest social network, Facebook, was born on a university campus…

The Secret Life of Students is  a ground-breaking observational documentary series, employing a brand new technological innovation which enables students to share their digital lives, giving us a real insight into how they live and relate to one another in the ‘real’ world and online.  By loaning phones to 12 students for the duration of filming (the phones were returned at the end of filming) 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.

With constant coverage from their mobile phones we have access to every moment of drama - drunken misadventures, relationship meltdowns, failed exams. The multi-media content is seamlessly integrated into the documentary to enhance, contextualise and exaggerate the lives of the students – just as it does in real life.

Filmed over the autumn term, The Secret Life of Students is a high-energy doc series exploring classic rites of passage. By tracking their digital and real world lives we’ll see how social networks fuel and shape the highly charged goldfish bowl that is a modern university campus.