Moving Image and Sound Evaluation

Moving Image and Sound Evaluation

In evaluating the process of completing the assignment, I firstly done the case studies for the three documentary styles, which were exploratory, observational and participatory and find the definitions of them. For all three of them, I had to do a seperate case study and talk about the techniques used and why those techniques were chosen for example; touch ups, close ups and voice overs, as well as explaining why the producer uses those techniques.  

Our teacher put us into different groups of three, and we had to brainstorm different ideas for the documentary we wanted to produce. For each of the different documentary styles, I had the choice of working with a different group or the same group as before. We had to come up with ideas that would have features of the style of documentary for example; exploratory has voice overs, which is commonly facts, figures and statistics. The positive aspect of working in a group was that it helped us to share different ideas and coming from three different outlooks, it helped us with the guidance of our ideas for our documentary.

According to the style given, we had to create three different type of documentaries. For the participatory documentary, we could do it in groups but I decided to do it by myself because I didn’t want to rely on others to do the work and wanted to feel responsible for my own but also, the other reason for this, is I had planned to interview Elodie about what she feels and knows about photography. A difficulty that occured, was that I had to make sure that timetabling was essential as Elodie has a different and full timetable than mine so, I had to ensure that the interview was in my free time and hers. Lastly, for the observational and the exploratory documentaries, I feel like my group worked really well in the process of making this documentaries and the reason is because that we all decided that it was going to be about me and my disability and how I mobilise around the college and the difficulties I face in my every day journey.

When I decided to interview Elodie for my participatory documentary, she told me  during the interview, how she feels about ‘analogue photography’ and claimed that “there is not much people valuing the process that goes towards creating a photograph”. This then gave me inspiration for my five minute documentary and I started to concentrate on my interview questions whilst the class brainstormed their own ideas on their personal documentary. However, I believe I was a step ahead from the others because I already had decided what the topic of my documentary would be and what to include in it.

Before starting our work, we had to find a target audience to appoint this to, therefore, the intended target audience for my documentary will be photographers, students of photography or people who are interested in photography. Because I intend to interview students who are aspiring to become photographers in the younger generation - perhaps this will be my target audience and would appeal more to young people because I am young and I could relate to their thoughts and opinions.

After this process of deciding what my topic will be and who my audience will be, we had to devise a treatment and give a brief summary about the ‘idea’ I had proposed and created. My ideas was on ‘how people feel about the difference between analogue and digital photography’ and their opinions on this matter. Furthermore, when writing up my treatment, my original idea was to combine all three of the documentary styles and interview both a digital photographer company and an analogue photography company. For the analogue, I decided to choose the company ‘Snappy Snaps’ because Elodie mentioned it in her interview, which helped me gain an idea on who to interview. After doing some core research, I emailed them and informed them about my idea and topic. I received an email back claiming that my idea was good and inspirational however, unfortunately they did not allow me to film or talk to their employers due to privacy.

So after this, I decided to speak to my teacher Amy and inform her about the situation and she stated that I could interview ‘the A level photography students’ at the college, the reason is because they have a dark room and develop pictures in this room.

After research, Amy gave me a production schedule to help me schedule what I can and have to do for the production and give me an insight on what I have done everyday. This was helpful because it was time efficient and gave me a lot of time to organise my days.

The problem that arose during the production was that during the planning stage of the topic, I had to email Holly about my idea and ask her if she was willing to allow me to do an interview with her students. However, as she is only work three days a week, it was hard to find a day that fitted both our schedules. After negotiating we found a day, which was the third week of production, on a Monday. However, this was mistake, this is because, Holly knew about the interviews, and already had two people that were willing to be interviewed by me, this was a great advantage, but when I decided to go get the equipment, I failed to book a camera and mention to Julian that I would need his help with filming and setting up the camera and environment. So I decided to go to the dark room and set up there and ask the interviewers some questions about the process of the development of the photos and just generally taking shots of them working in their environment. Julian was of a great help in terms of setting up everything for me and I thank him for that. After we finished filming, I decided to get both the interviewers personal numbers, this was essential because this is a quick way to communicate to schedule timings for the interview.

Once settling on a day, I booked the photography studio and informed Scott about my idea and the reason for this, is because him and his student work with digital photography, so this would enhance my ideas with different feedback and views. However, unfortunately, there were other people wanting to use the studio, thus why my teacher advised I should use the TV studio in order to start and finish my interviews. It is essential to advise teachers and technicians about what equipment is needed, in order to save time and be organised a bit more.  

I also decided to film Hamardeep (photography student) doing her portfolio, because majority of the people in Scotts’ class did not show up, besides her. She was devising her portfolio, so I decided this would be a great time to film her because she explained the process of her portfolios and was being informative, hence why I interviewed her.

Lastly, during the editing process, I really struggled with my structure, so I spoke to Amy and she advised I should start with editing the interviews first. So I had to sync the two recordings of the interviews and edited it so it flowed but this was time consuming. I feel like during this process, I feel I lacked motivation because I spent majority of my time filming. I was left with two weeks only to edit because the filming took place at a later stage that what I had planned it originally and this was an advantage because it took me a lot of time to edit due to my fine motor skills which I lack of. Knowing what the date of assignment was due, it was gave me motivation but put me under lot of pressure to complete it. Once editing the documentary, I have realised that the time was 15 minutes therefore, I had to cut some parts out which resulted in the time being 9 minutes and 50 seconds. This is not 5 minutes, however, I chose not to cut the essential parts as this was needed for the documentary.

There was also another issue that occured is that I forgot to add credits at the end of my documentary to thank the people that corporated with me and participated to finalise it.  I have analysed what I need to improve in the future and do differently if I have to film and edit again a documentary. Then, I would ensure that I don’t work under pressure and plan my timings better to make sure I include the simplistic parts such as voice overs, credits and music.

The finished product of the documentary did not go as planned however, there was many pros and cons about the process such as:

The pros were the process of planning the documentary and putting my ideas out on the table to be analysed and decided on what was suitable to record. Another pros would be the filming and scheduling, despite some complications, this went smoothly as I overcame many obstacles by being organised and ensuring that the people included and needed for the documentary were put in my schedule.

The cons was mainly about the structure and editing. I needed to ensure that I fixed my structure beforehand and be organised. The editing was the most time consuming as I had many complications of using Adobe Premiere Pro however, the more I used it, the more I noticed that my skills were gradually starting to get better. Another cons is that it was just a observational and participatory documentary without music simply because I ran out of time to use music in the background.

Guidance:

• Evaluate the process of completing this assignment; practice tasks, planning, filming and editing your own 5 minute documentary film. Use your blog to help you remember what you did and when.
• Evaluate each aspect =  think about what went well and what could have gone better.
• Be honest about how you overcame challenges (don’t just say everything was fine!)

Include the following:

• What is your documentary about?
• How did you come up with your idea, why did you choose it, did you idea change and at what point?
• What documentary mode(s) did you use? E.g. observational
• What documentary techniques did you use? E.g. voice over, interviews
• What skills did you develop through this project? (consider practice tasks, planning, filming, editing)
• How did you manage your time?
• How did you work with others?
• How did you work independently?
• What problems did you have? How did you solve them? (consider practice tasks, planning, filming, editing)
• Evaluate the finished product (your 5 minute film) - what went well, what could have gone better and why

Deadline for film to be exported and uploaded to your blog: Thursday 14th February (must be uploaded even if incomplete)

Deadline for evaluation to be typed and on blog: Monday 25th February