Thursday, 6 March 2014
Personal contributions
I've personally contributed a lot to this documentary and feel I've been a great team player in this production. I've clocked up hours and hours of time in the editing suite making sure this Documentary is as good as it possibly can be. We had many set backs on the way to completing this production but working closely with the rest of the team the piece has really blossomed into something we are all really proud of. I had to spent countless days looking through shot after shot, developing structures, approaches and techniques to ensure the success of the documentary, and to produce an edit that would show of some of the great skills me and the group have obtained through out the course. Overall I'm really happy with the piece as it stands today, considering the time scale and resources we had to use, and I'm proud to have my name on the work.
Personal evaluation
Overall I think as my role as editor I've done a great job with the time and resources we had. There were hours of footage to scan through before I could get together with the rest of the team and start making a structure for documentary. over the past couple of weeks my documentary as taken on a range of different forms with different angles and approaches but the final edit is the best of the bunch. We all agreed collectively as a group we've shown a great range of skills in this documentary and are all really happy with the outcome, especially since we had to change our idea on multiple occasions due to unforeseen circumstances. For hours on end over the last couple of weeks I'd been editing both at Uni and in my flat trying different approaches and structures but working together with the Director (Oscar) and the Producer (Luke) we all agreed that the piece we have made is up to a near professional standard and works really well as Both an Interesting and informative piece of Work.
ANALYSIS OF 2 DOCUMENTARIES THAT INSPIRED PARTS OF OUR DOCUMENTARY
Documentary 1 :
Apology line
I really enjoyed this documentary the first time I watched it and have recently watched it again just to remind myself of its content. I think it has a really raw feel to it and some of the admissions from the people were really deep, personal and interesting. It's strange how the people felt like they could be so honest with an answering machine, yet struggle to talk about these subjects with friends or family. The visual aspect of the documentary didn't over power the eye, and didn't deter away from the sound of the phones and I personally thought helped the audio and helped complete the piece in a interesting way. Overall I really liked this documentary and the style of it. It was for these reasons we decided to use a telephone voice over in our documentary as we thought the style of the sound added to the Doc, making it a more well rounded and professional piece of work.
Documentary 2 :
Eric's secrets
This piece was more down to earth than some of the other documentaries we watched. It started off happy and jolly, but faded and got more emotional towards the end, the story of Eric and his wife really pulled on my heart strings, and made me think about myself and how I take the people That love me for granted. In this modern age we don't realise how good things are until there gone. We used aspects of this doc in our own piece as we used Archive footage and photographs with our film. Overall I think this documentary is great as it has it's ups and unfortunately it's downs, but takes you on a short journey through the life of a lovely old man and secrets.
ROLE AS EDITOR
As my role being editor I've had to look through Hours of footage both footage we filmed on the canon Xf100 and Oscars Canon 550D and in contact with the Director (Oscar) speak with him about which shots, interviews and cut aways we wanted to use and which structure we wanted to use for the Doc. The structure of the Documentary was a heavily debated subject between the member of the group and as edit I had to be the mediator trying to come to a resolve between the different inputs and ideas within the group. The documentary would start to take shape but then abruptly change due to new concepts and ideas thrown around from group members. As the editor this did become slightly frustrating but we all wanted the best for the documentary. After several long discussions both in person with group members and the Facebook group we finally came to a conclusion that we all felt gave the documentary a professional and authentic feel. We feel that the footage we used highlighted our groups individuality and style, and are all collectively proud of the piece.
FILMING IN LIVERPOOL (Liverpool Trip)
The first day once we got to Liverpool, we dropped of the gear and started going to the some of the locations we knew we'd be traveling to the day after so we could plan shots, cut aways Etc. We got to several different locations on the first day which we were all pleased with. The next day we were all up bright and early, ready to be picked up by "Stevie T" at 9am. Through-Out the day we went through lots of different locations including Church Street, The cathedral, Town Hall, and many more, we filmed at the Majority of the locations and we all pleased with the footage and the interviews that we got after a long day.
We got all of the footage that we needed in One day which was a great achieve in regards to the vast amount of locations we had to travel to and film at. So after a long stressful day we "as a group decision" decided to go home after the entire group all had, had a terrible nights sleep the night before due to the poor facilities at the hostel, admittedly the decision was made in haste but after filming all day and having little to no sleep the previous night the decision might have seemed like the right decision at the time but in the bigger picture we possibly should have stuck it out another night and spoke again in the morning about our next step. Although we had filmed almost everything possible the first day we could have tried harder for another interview or more cut aways. Overall we all thought the footage brought back from Liverpool was great and enough to work with to make the 5 minute documentary with.
TITANIC DOCUMENTARY
After clearing the situation and aim of the documentary with the rest of the group we started searching for contacts and people we could talk to in regards to Liverpool's link with the titanic. We got in touch through email with the Manager of the Maratine History Museum in Liverpool who referred to himself as "Dickie" we asked him if it would be ok to film within the titanic exhibit of the museum which was great as we could film lots of Cut aways within the museum which we could later refer to later in the documentary. The main contact which we got in touch with was a man who referred to himself as "Stevie T" he was a tour guide in Liverpool who did Both a "Titanic Tour" and "Beatles tour" within Liverpool, this tour would take us around the city visiting lots of different locations in which we could get information on and lots of different filming opportunities.
NEW IDEA
With both of the original ideas both having fallen through due to misleading contacts and lack of resources to film, we decided that we needed to come up with a new idea. We all started looking through page after page of news articles online and we weren't getting very far. All was looking Grim until Chelsie out of the blue asked her flat mates if they happened to know any interesting topics on Liverpool that we might haven't known about or missed when searching online, fortunately one of her flat mates told her about a story on the Titanic and it's link with Liverpool which we hadn't heard. So after a long phone call on with Chelsie we both started doing research so we could pitch the idea to the rest of the group and to our luck they all loved the idea.
INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH
A few days after our original meeting we had all done some research into our topics and came back with some good ideas and contacts. Rhiannon had been able to get in touch with Both an Ex Policeman who was working in Sheffield on the day of the Hillsborough and an elderly couple who had taken in and helped someone who had been hurt in the disaster. Unfortunately after the pitch to Dom these contacts both pulled out and weren't comfortable being filmed. We had also done some looking into speaking with some homeless people and we had also contacted (through email) the hostel we were staying at to see if there were any homeless people currently living in the hostel that we could interview, but unfortunately this lead was cut dead when there was no one willing to be filmed for any interviews.
Ideas Pitch
My group pitched two ideas, The first idea was based on speaking to homeless people within Liverpool, the idea of the documentary was to get the persecutive of public towards homeless people in the city and how the homeless themselves deal with the stigma that comes with being a homeless person or beggar as there also known. This was more of a back up idea and would have only been made if everything went wrong with the main idea. The main idea and main focus of our group was a documentary based on the Hillsborough Disaster, the main focus of the documentary was based on the events being retold by both An ex Policeman who was working at Hillsborough In Sheffield at the time when the disaster took place and an elderly couple who took in and helped a football fan who was injured on the day of the accident, we were also going to try and contact the person that was taken in by the couple.
After getting the feedback from the pitch We all felt that it went relatively well and we as a collective all thought that the ideas that we pitched were both interesting and would be entertaining for the viewer, if we could get the contacts and locations to film.
First Group meeting for Liverpool documentary
After finally assembling our group of six we all agreed to meet up at the library to discuss news articles and possible ideas for our Documentary project. With us having to create two different concepts we researched a range of different news articles that seemed interesting and that were based in Liverpool. As a football fan I knew of the Hillsborough disaster and remembered that there had been alot of publicity last year because of the Anniversary, with us living in Sheffield and having to film in Liverpool it seemed like a really interesting and plausible idea that we could create between us. The rest of the group agreed and we ended up using this as one of our ideas for the pitch to Dom. For our second idea we started looking into a documentary based on Homeless people, as we knew we were staying in a hostel we thought this idea could be something that would be easy enough to film but also give an insight into someone less fortune than ourselves. Overall as a group we were all happy with the original two ideas and we set out to do some individual research on both topics.
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