I really enjoyed working in a team of people, because it meant that we could all share ideas and help each other out when needed. We could each be assigned a role and then that meant that everyone was doing something, and nothing would be forgotten. Although I don’t think that it is always necessarily a great thing, when you don’t always agree on things. I also think that sometimes people can rely on their other teammates a lot, and not put in as much effort as they could and I find this really frustrating. I think that communication is vital, and that maybe sometimes we struggled with that, however you have to try your best and come to a compromise and that it something that I believe we did.

I took part in all stages of the production process. I helped decide who was going to be the subject of the documentary, I also contributed to the writing of the treatment. I set up the main interview camera and was behind it during the interview process, also doing some of the filming at the bands gig, I also took some still images. I helped set up the 3 point lighting and was there during the editing process, I did a lot of the physical editing on the computer.

As a group, we all had ideas at how we wished the documentary to be edited and at the beginning we didn’t all agree, a couple of people wanted it to be really punchy and quick paced, where as others wanted a much more mellow mood. We knew from the start that we were going to focus on the stories that were being told, and not so much the visuals and this is something that we all agreed on, so we worked from this idea and worried about the visuals afterwards. I thought that this was quite risky; however we managed to cover up all of the jumps between scenes with lots of cut-aways, such as close ups, and footage from gigs and band practices. One member of the group didnt know how to use Avid, so the rest of us ended up doing all the physical work, I found this really frustrating. Editing, I thought would be much more difficult that it was, I hadn’t previously done any physical editing before, I had been there for editing yet I had never used to computer and had a go. I thought that I actually did really well, and I have gained so much confidence in editing.

I think that during the making of this documentary, I have developed both my soft and technical skills. I feel as though I have grown in confidence, as I have always struggled with talking to strangers, whereas during this module, i’ve had to go into the home of a stranger and film him. Technically I have learnt so much, I have never before, had sole control over a the setting up of a camera, so I did feel very pressured to get that right, yet I think I coped well. I had also never set up the 3 point lighting, and I now know exactly how to do that. I am now confident in my editing skills and feel as though I have learnt so many new things such as how to make titles and credits. I have also learnt the importance of being precise, you can’t say that something “well do” when editing as it will look so out of place and obvious. I have felt very under pressure to make this documentary as good as possible, because I am friends with my subjects’ son and didn’t want to just make any old documentary; I wanted it to be perfect. I believe that the documentary that I have created is just as good, or even better than I imaged that it would be, and I am proud that I was a part of it.

We watched through the documentary and made sure that it ran smoothly, and we used the dissolve effect a couple o times, to get rid of the bits where the footage jumped between shots. We added in the images from the subjects wedding and honeymoon, to use as cut always, as their honeymoon story is too long, and we didn’t want the audience getting bored of just interview footage.

It was then time to add some credits and a title, this proved to be trickier than we imagined, and the title was pretty simple once we worked out what we were doing. But we wanted to put a box on the left hand side of the credits, and have some video footage of the band playing in it. We couldn’t even get the scrolling credits to work, never mind trying to add the picture in picture effect. After trying to do scrolling credits and failing, and then trying to have flashing credits and also failing on that, we decided it would just be easier to only have one page of credits. It was then time to get on to adding the picture in picture effect. We expected doing that to be easy, but it took us at least an hour to work out how to do it, and it was so simple it was frustrating when we realised how to do it. It took a little while making sure that the box was in exactly the same place, for each bit of band footage, so it didn’t jump but once it was done we were really pleased with it.

After that it was finished and it was just time to export it, we compressed it and that was really easy to do so we thought that maybe the rest would be, apparently not. Again, none of the tape decks would work, so we kept trying to do a digital cut and it looked as though it was working, but it wasn’t as there was no footage on the tape. We eventually managed to get it to work, after using 4 different tape decks and were glad to know that all we had to do was put the footage on DVD and then that was it. That didn’t prove to be too tricky as Joe did it.

Overall I was glad to get these days over with, I was glad with the overall look of the documentary and I feel very proud of it, although I don’t like the way that on the DVD, the documentary starts to play on the start up menu, I find that a bit pointless and annoying.

Next it was on to the visuals, and we worked our way through the footage we’d ordered, and decided what bits we wanted where. We agreed that we would like there to be still images of our subject in his band at the beginning and we wanted them to be close ups so we worked through all the images we took and found the perfect ones.

We looked through the footage, to see the sections where there are small chunks of footage that dont visually fit together very well and jump. We used the cut away footage we have ie the close ups, gig and band practice footatge. We did find it quite tough though, because we needed some of the footage that Joe taped over and it was a bit of a pain trying to find other things that could use instead.

We ripped the music off our subjects bands CD and decided that we would only use a little bit of it for the credits, we agreed that we wanted a piece of the song that had music, then a little singing and then music and this was really easy to find, we cut this bit out and then the music for our credits was complete.

We hoped to be able to capture the footage that we filmed at our subjects house but for some reason the tape decks werent working so we were unable to use those bits to edit with. We believe that we have almost finished our editing other than the bits that we still need to capture.

I think that we had a really productive 2 days and that we have gotten a lot of work done, I think that the documentary is really starting to take shape now and im looking forward to seeing the finished piece as i think that it will look really professional.

Aswell as this we tried to film our subject with his family, spending time together and helping eachother out. We were really worried about this and thought that Alfie might just play up to the camera and we wouldnt get any natural family shots. This initially, was the case and we tried to make Alfie do natural things but we didnt get much footage, though we did manage to get a few shots of Alfie with Sarah and Tat which looked really nice. I was really pleased with these shots and hope that we can fit them into the documentary somewhere.

Overall i think that it was a really worthwhile trip and we managed to finish off all of the filming that we hoped to. We managed to take all of the images and film all the footage we hoped to, so it was overall a good day.

As a group, we all had different ideas about what we could create our documentary on. One was a postal strike, and we decided not to do this, because we thought it wouldn’t be very original and other people might do it. We also had a people who was affected by the recession, however we also decided that this might be a little boring. We had an interesting person who had been to prison, yet he wasnt accessible. Our final person was someone who was a family man yet was also a punk, we thought that this was a brilliant idea and really wanted to run with it. We decided that we would go with the theme of recession and how he was being affected by it and how he as coping with that, and his punk lifestyle. After filming our documentary however, we realised that we needed to go more for the angle of him being an outsider, as after we’d spoken to him, we realised that people didn’t see him as a normal human being and we thought that this would be more interesting than doing the predictable idea, of the recession. I think that the changing of theme was crucial to our documentary, as it is now much more interesting, and people actually want to hear about this man, instead of just feeling sorry for him as he doesn’t have lots of money.

Sources

Our documentary solely relied on primary research. Our main source was that of our subject, we went and spoke to him and gained an insight into his life from his angle. We asked him questions about his family, his punk life and what other people thought of him. We gained so much information from him, and this was really helpful as it gave us most of the information that we needed. We also spoke to his wife and we managed to gain an insight into what kind of man he is, from her perspective too, also we spoke to his children and they also gave us a little information about our subject. We also know this man personally, so we already had some information ourselves, so I guess we were all sources of information, as we knew the basics about our subject before even starting to talk to him. Because of the fact that he was so open and told us so much, we didn’t have to use secondary research and look or other sources of information and this was really helpful as it meant that we didn’t need to mess around trying to find information about him.

Inspiration

Throughout this module I have looked at various documentaries, to get an idea of what they are about and hopefully gain an insight into what looks good. One that I have found particularly interesting is “This Is It” This documentary is about a musician and a performer and this is partly what mine is about, so I think that I have gained some inspiration from it. I liked the mix of interviews and performance, and I think that this is something that has definitely played a part in my documentary. The fact that they showed footage of rehearsals also stuck in my mind, and this is something else that I thought could be incorporated into me and my groups’ documentary. Another film that I found quite inspiring is “Presumed Guilty” I had never seen such a cutting edge documentary that grabbed my attention so strongly. I loved the fact that you weren’t given all of the information initially, and they slowly gave it to you, little by little. I found this fascinating and thought that this is something that has to be used in my documentary. My group and I agreed that we would only have a voice over at the beginning of our documentary and not give too much information away, and I believe that “Presumed Guilty” definitely inspired this idea.

Process

As a group we agreed that it would be a good idea to have individual roles, specifically during the filming process. To begin with, I helped out setting up the Dedo lights, and making sure that they were in the right place, and that the subject was comfortable with them. After this I then became the camera operator for the static interview camera, I had to set it up; white balance, shutter speed, sound levels and angle. I had never set up the camera alone before, however I think that I did a good job. During the interview process I was really just making sure that the camera was in the right place and keeping an eye on the footage that we were filming, as it was static there wasn’t a lot to do. As a group we have edited together, however I have done more actual physical editing than I ever have done before. I used to just sit and watch and give ideas however this time I have done a lot of the computer work and have learnt a lot whilst doing this.

After that we agreed that the cut away footage was much too dark, so we thought we would have a go with the colour correction tool and realised that this is also something very easy. All we had to do was change the gain, and make sure that it was consistant in each peiece of footage. We compared it with the colour in the main interview and it matched perfectly, so i was really pleased.

We also decided to try and make the bands gig footage lighter because it was so dark, it was hard to make out what was even happening in the shot. We tried to do the same as we did with the interview footage and it did make it a little lighter, i would have liked to have been able to make it more lighter,  however it wasnt possible.. We asked other people if they thought it was too dark, and they said they didnt think it was, so we agreed that it would do, and we would only use a little bit of this footage.

I had never really done anything with syncing or colour correction, so i was really pleased thst we had, had to do this as it was another thing that i have learnt. I thought that it was pretty easy and im not glad that this is over with, so we can blitz our editing next week.

Initially i thought that the documentaries we were shown of thr Spice Girls were documemtaries, they have all of conventions; interviews with the girls and their families, archive footage, talking about real people. I was so sure that i was a real documentary, however i didnt want to openly say it and embarrass myself so i kept my mouth shut.

Other people also agreed with this idea and were put in their place by others who argued that it was not a documentary. These people said that the Spice Girls werent being temselves, they were being characters and were acting their way through the “documentary” so in fact it cant be a documentay, because it is not about real lives. Also, even thought it is archive footage, it is archive footage of theme characters, not real people so again this disproves the idea that these programmes are real documentaries.

All of these arguments realky confused me, because initially i was sure that it was a documentary, and now my thoughts had been shaken up by some really good points. I do agree that they are characters on screen, however when they talk about their past and what they did in their lives before being a Spice Girl and during their carrer, they are talking about real life events, things that actually happened, so surely that counts as a documentary? However,  i dont know what i think about whether it is or isnt a documentary and i cannot decide whether it is one or not, so i guess ill have to just remain confused until i make up my mind.

Instead of editing this, we agreed that we would do the interview transcript. I actually thought that it would take forever, to write down everything thats said in the interview, however it was no where near as bad as i thought. Me, Amy and Carly did this as a group, one starting and stopping the interview footage where needed, one note taking and the other helping out where needed, we decided to rotate every 5 or 10 mins to make it fair. I thought that this worked really well and it didnt appear to take very long to do. After doing this, we went home and i decided that i would type up the notes for the group and make it look like a script, and this didnt take too long at all.

After that disappointing session we went down to the basement to show Ken our documentary footage and still images, to see what he thinks of what we have done so far, and hope that he has some feedback to give us. After showing him all our work, he pointed our the contrast in light between our film footage and still images, and how the mood of both things are entirely different. He liked the lighting in the interview, so this meant that we needed to either re-take all our images or try and use the colour correction tool on the Avid Suite. We decided that we would try and do the latter, as it would be a bit of a pain taking all of our images again, however if it doesn’t work we will have to try and change this.

I was really glad that we had generally received positive feedback, however we had been given some pointers 0n how to improve our film and we appreciated this, and will act accordingly to make our documentary as good as possible.

In the next editing session we decided that it would be a sensible idea to cut down the interview footage, and delete any bits that seemed irrelivent or boring. We went through the main interview footage in the order that it was filmed and decided what we were and werent going to keep from it. Me, Amy and Carly all took it in turns to use the editing software, as Joe didnt know how to use it, we all had input as to what we footage we intended to us. I think that we did have to be quite critical and get rid of some of the bits that we liked, however it was only a rough cut so it wasnt perfect. I think that i actually quite like editing, more so now rather than when i have taken part in the editing of other pieces.