Documentary Evaluation

Research

Before I started planning my documentary, I first watched the award winning 'One Day In September'. I thought it would be a good idea to watch this documentary first because the only documentaries that I have seen before have just been ones about Astronomy and I needed a different perspective on the documentaries as a whole. From watching this documentary I found that they generally stick to the theory and it is easy to identify how certain parts of the documentary relate back to the theory. In summary, when looking at the theory and an actual documentary they relate heavily to each other.

My perception of documentaries didn't alter much because as I mentioned before I watched Astronomy documentaries so I had a reasonable idea of how documentaries worked. That being said, I wasn't aware that documentaries could be filmed with a thriller feel to it such as One Day In September.

Planning

When I was planning this documentary I essentially wanted to focus on just the locations I was going to be using and the music which would fit in with what I am trying to represent.

I wrote out all of my plans on paper, because of convenience this time instead of  drawing out a storyboard I decided to do a flow chart as an experiment to see which worked better and which I preferred. 

All of my planning is below. 

Production

In the production process we weren't able to stick to our filming schedule because we kept running into problems. The first being, when we arrived up town for the first day of filming it was apparent that the camera we were given it's battery was nearly dead and we only managed to film about 1 minute or 2 on that day so we essentially lost a day of filming. 

The next lesson we had we couldn't shoot any footage because the camera we were using didn't have any power in its battery so we spent the lesson charging the battery. At this point the deadline was fast approaching so we went out and filmed what we could with what little power we had left in the camera and took the pictures we needed on our phones. 

When dealing with the continuity it might have posed less of a problem if we had used out original plan but due to technical difficulties we had to rush our original plan and we ended up shooting long continuous shots with the intention of adding voice overs and music to the shots and so we added 'fades' so the continuity would be less obvious.

The roles in the group were allocated depending on what needed to be done and who would be the best person for the job, by using the person's strengths and appealing to them.

As I mentioned before, we had a few problems with the camera specifically the battery. This turned out to be a major hinderance for my group and I. This then overflowed into out time management which wasn't good on this project and should be better kept in the future because I realised how important good time management is.

We did encounter a problem besides the camera and its battery, by which I mean we weren't allowed to take pictures or film inside the Harvey Centre but this wasn't too much of a hinderance because we had a back up plan which was to focus more on the Water Gardens and the High Street. 

Post-Production

The editing process was more time consuming than we had previously anticipated. Mainly because since we had improvised the actual production we then has to rethink how we were going to edit the work. But other than that the editing was a smooth process and went of with generally no problems. We had all the material we needed we in fact had too much and had to leave out about 2 minutes of footage.

The post-production skill were fairly new to me but once I understood the basic concept everything was pretty self-explanatory. However we did have a small problem adding stills for the montage, the pictures kept showing up upside down for some bizarre reason and we had to use a lengthy process to get them up the right way which is why we didn't have many more stills in our video. 

As for time I wish we had managed our time better because towards the end we were rushing to get it finished and so it looks rushed.

The skills I learnt from this project were a better understanding of the post-production part of it all, I learned new and better camera work and these two skills are crucial for progression and for me to actually enjoy my coursework. Although I do still need to work on time management and also need to work on planning for the unexpected and always have a back up plan, whether it's due to technical difficulties or restriction of filming, I should always have a back up plan.