CDM 301
Documentary
Producing

Our task for this project was to prepare for a portrait documentary on a certain aspect of someones life.
I had two ideas lined up.

My first idea was to do an ex director of the Samaritans charity. Its a plausible idea as she's a family friend of my dad which means she's already well familiar with me and my family.

My second pitch idea was to do a member of the united bible society who had recently just organised the world assembly where people come from all over the world and have a meeting. He's been to countries all over the world and is a realistic idea as I am well known with his daughter.

In the end, I decided to go with my first elevator pitch

Moodboard

Click here for My elevator pitch

Pre-Production Docs

Risk Assesment

Call sheet

Production

The day started off with Helen arriving early in the morning, and made conversation first to get her comfortable. Afterwards, I had placed the lights and camera in front of her and just ran over some questions without recording her just so she had time to think of a detailed response for later on. This helped to be very effective although in the actual recording, there were a few pauses. I had just a general list of questions, such as;

Who are you?

How did you get into this position?

Have you faced any difficulties?

Is there one piece of advice you could give to anyone watching?

Collecting B-roll was a bit more difficult than expected. I had originally planned to get a few shots of her with physical photographs in her hand, some of her wandering around her home and a few in the kitchen.With a couple exterior shots as well. However, I found myself with a lot less time than planned and only managed to get the B-roll done in 30 minutes with only half of the amount I had planned. The archive footage interview I was planning to use could not be found anywhere online at all and there seemed to be little to no trace of the radio show at all. Neither could i find any pictures of Helen of when she’d been the director as it was too far back when stuff was rarely backed up on the internet. They weren't able to find the tape either.

This then meant I had to change the schedule last minute and gave Helen a shorter break, which meant she had gotten tired towards the end.

After Completing the shoot, I colour coded the good and bad clips with Green for good and red for bad/ unusable. I then had a look at the transcript and decided to order the clips so that they fit together to make a story, with Early life, how she got started, then a message she'd take away from her experience. I had then put them all into a timeline with clips on the bottom, and the B-Roll and Archive footage

I had to use my own (very dated) microphone equipment for the filming process. The sound ended up only coming out of one side of the headphones, which meant that the other side was left with a really loud droning noise which disrupted the music I had put in a lot later. This was then fixed by muting the side that the droning noise was on, however it didn't completely go away as it was on the other side as well. I could either turn up the music a bit more and risk Helen being too quiet, or just stick with what I had, which is what I decided to do.

As for the music itself, it took a long time to find music that went with the video because some were either too intense, too quiet or didn't match the overall feel of the documentary. This was straight forward to edit however, as i only used the fade in and out transitions to slow down the pace when she would talk, and when Helen would stop talking, i would turn the volume up so that it matched with the rest of the audio.

I found one that matched the best out of the options I had and added that to the timeline.

There quite a few times where Helen pauses and says "um" which disrupted the flow of the documentary a lot. The times where she gave her best answers either had a pause or an um at the end or the start. To fix this, i had cut these bits out and faded the audio so that it would be a gradual decline in her voice volume which meant that it didn't sound weird as a straight cut

My documentary

Evaluation

Production:

For the first start of the day, I was focused on getting Helen comfortable which I found difficult at first. But as I had her friend with me in the second half of the day in the room, she began to speak more comfortably. I also found the B-Roll more difficult to do, as i had less time. What i had found was that i think ruined the documentary after filming the first bit of footage where Helen had given really good responses, the camera hadn't focused properly so i had to reshoot, which meant she gave less passionate answers that felt scripted. I think generally i didn't ask more in depth questions, so the interview didn't feel too special and felt as if it was just generally quite lacking.

As for the documentary itself, i think it was just lacking a personal feeling and felt more like a informative video than a documentary, i think because i didn't know her particularly well or she didn't have much to say personally about herself and spoke more information on what the organisation is. I think if i were to do this again, I'd either choose someone who has more personal things to say about the topic of discussion, or i would try to ask more personal questions. I think due to it possibly being a sensitive topic, i was too afraid of asking deeper questions as to avoid making her uncomfortable. I've realised that getting the right balance of asking deeper and interesting questions and not getting too personal was harder to achieve than imagined.

As for the actual editing part of this, I disliked how the sound turned out and i didn't think the music fit much with the documentary itself. But in terms of the problems i was facing with panning the audio, i think i did the best i could do with what i was working with, as i muted the droning noise and then balanced out the side with actual sound. The rest of the editing i found was pretty easy, i just think if i had known my way around premiere, then i might have been able to do things with easier methods and had better outcomes. Compared to all of my projects so far, i'd say this is my least favourite as i wasn't able engage as much as i did with the others and consequently didn't have much interest in it and i didn't work on it as much as the previous ones.

Overall, I think this was one of my weaker projects, i think if i were to do this agin, i would research more topics of what could possibly interest me more so i could engage with it more.