Evaluation

The brief started with the Student Union coming in and asking us to create a Documentary on the topic of Drug Abuse, we were split into 3 groups of 5 and then each sat down to assign roles and plan what we want to go into it. With it being such a big brief, each members of the team took various roles, for example, one day during production I stayed in a little make shift office we made and did nothing but paperwork (Scripts, Action Plans, Etc) whilst the others members of the team ventured out and filmed Vox Pops and Cutaways, whereas another day I was on the camera during interviews, and in front of a camera during a sketch. This was great for our team as it meant everyone had a big role to play.
We broke the 2 weeks we had in this brief down into two sections, the first week was all planning and filming, and the second week was all editing. This was all well and good on paper but there was some things during edit that needed to be fixed, reshoot, things needed added, meaning we had to venture out and get them, this took precious time from our edit. Next time, during a big brief like this one, I feel that I should edit along the way, of course that may mean the team may still be behind due to the long edits, but it would of helped during the brief to see mistakes in our work quicker than we did.
As for my roles, I found that the day I spent in the make shift office was my most comfortable role. I felt that even though I had a lot to do that paticular day, because I was in one room, and was on my own, I managed to get everything done independantly and efficiantly. My role in front of the camera was really fun, it has been a while since I have been in front of it. The only set back we had with the sketch I was in was getting access to the location itself, we had 3 attempts to get into the Nursary to film, we came against a few restrictions that meant we had a 45 minute free slot after college hours to shoot, the first day we managed to get the shots we wanted but upon reviewing the footage while capturing, we wasn't happy with it, we had rushed the shots, not rehearsed the script, and the character of Dino The Drug Talking Dinosaur was a last minute character that we found whilist setting the camera's up, we felt that he represented a more patronising parody that we was going for. The second attempt to film there, our time management went out the window, it was the same day we had recorded interviews, and our cooking sketch, so time seemed to pass us by that day, this was a little annoying as we had done such a great job all week with our time keeping and action plan. A problem I did come across when editing the piece however was the syncing of Dino, I had performed the voice for Dino on a zoom, and found upon listening back that at certain points I had enlongated words, such as Dinosaur, this was solved as two cameras was on Dino at all times, so I just simply cut from one angle to another to help the synching seem more naturally, of course when I showed my team this and told them my troubles with the synching I was told I shouldn't worry to much about it, as if you watch puppets on TV, they aren't synched perfectly, especially on children's television.
The interview's, I found myself on a camera each time, me and Jack devised a system to communicate with each other during the first interview, this was mainly a series and hand gestures that represented what we each wanted the camera to concentrate on, whilist this worked really well and we came back with great footage, the audio was terrible, we found out that a mic had been left on and had ran out of battery, worse luck still was the fact that it was this mic that had been used by our interviewee's, meaning that we couldn't venture out and reshoot, bad luck struck us more when it came to our third interview, during our set up, the camera I was on auto powered down, I switched on, recorded, then upon reviewing, my camera never recorded in 16:9. Whereas the audio incident couldn't be blamed on one member of our team, I took full responcibility for not recording in 16:9, next time I know I need to double and triple check settings before pressing record, especially when a camera auto powers down. Further trouble happened with that third interview, again, with the audio, Karma smiled upon us on that interview however as the audio problems was on Nathan's side, which means we was free to go reshoot his side of the interview, downside was that it took valuable time away from editing.
The cooking sketch I was sadly absent for as I was capturing and doing paperwork, but the footage I have seen looks like our team, once again struggled with audio, this seems to be the room itself that was the trouble as apposed to the mic, we did use a zoom however, which made our edit a little better, however we used a voiceover, we used it for two reasons, one, to mask the bad audio, and the other was because this sketch was influenced by Masterchef.
My last role was the role of team leader, this started with me and Jack taking it in turns, this was primarily to give each other a break, and to sit back a little and relax, but eventually I realised that Jack's stress levels was reaching a high and someone needed to keep people calm and happy, I fell into this role with ease.
During the planning stage, we concentrated a lot on what we felt we didn't want to include in the Documentary, the biggest no, no for us, was to make sure we never come across preachy. Our goals for the Documentary was to use dark humour to deal with quite a serious topic, we always stuck to this factor by using sketches. We started with a blank board and threw a lot of ideas together, a few of these stuck from the beginning, a few more was dropped, and others (such as Vox Pops) was just vague at that moment in time. The interviewee's we ended up interviewing we had in mind from the beginning, the one we relied on getting the most was our interview with Sarah, our target audience may be students around the college, but we felt that we couldn't give an accurate account of what it is like to take cannabis, perhaps become addicted to it without talking to someone who had been on it for a period of time, her interview also had the added bonus of her now getting an education to help others with drug problems.
This planning stage was handled really well, the vast amount of tasks however sometimes took far too long, for example, the Vox Pops and Cutaways was planned to be filmed and finished on the first day, 3 days later, the Vox Pops was complete and the Cutaways was still being collected the editing week, the Cutaways were understandable as we as a team would always see a shot that looked good, or took the opportunity to get a few extra shots whilist we was in locations such as the Library.
I think that the thing to take away from that was to spend more time reviewing the days work, there was moments during the production that we would tick a task off as complete but then upon reviewing the footage, there clearly wasn't enough Cutaways or the Vox Pops was poor. By that point though, other tasks had been set.
The way we came up with assigning tasks to certain people came about with someone volunteering really, we only asked a certain person to perform a task if they had nothing to do, and others was busy. I feel like everyone performed well, noone on the team complained about any task that was given to them. I feel like the only time I let the team down was when I got too stressed, I did control this as much as I could but there still is room for improvement.
After looking at the edited documentary, I see a lot of colours and effects, whereas on other briefs I would comment on that in a negative way, this seems so suitable, the trippy LSD style really stands out and is so suitable on a documentary about drugs, I also don't know what it is about this style of edit that just seems to relate to young adults, I know it does with me. It is hard for me to pinpoint exactly what kind of documentary we ended up producing, the personal stories and the very topic itself makes it a docu-drama but the dark humor approach sets it asside from others that I have seen, if I had to compare it's style to anything, I would compare it to "Bizzare Crime" another documentary whose very topic itself is a serious Docu-Drama, but presents itself in a silly, lighthearted manner.
I have already mentioned a few other sources that we took inspiration from, such as Masterchef and Bizzare Crime, but we looked at a varity of styles, even it was only used to inspire a 5 second sequence in our documentary. For instance there is a point in our cooking sketch in which Text appears to illustrate what ingredients are being added to the mix, originally I had the idea of it being a lot like a scene in Scott Pilgrim. in which the shot freezes and text pops up around the room showing items owned by Scott's roommate, this didn't go into the final draft but we still took away inspiration from that scene, in fact it was because of that scene and the thought process and discussion we had about it that we added text into the scene in the first place, it originally just had Helen describing what was going into the mix.
We did take a long look at the Panaroma episode with Alistar Cambell, particularly his pieces to camera, how the camera slowly glides round the room to add a touch more drama to a serious personal point he had just made, we decided to add these shots to not only add that little bit of drama to what was being said, but to also make the piece to camera a lot more interesting.
Looking at our teams documentary, I feel like we do hit a lot of the programs briefs, we hit the right target audience with our style and look (the effects we used, the humor etc), our message has always been pretty clear, we get across that recreational use can lead to serious problems in the future, but we never come across as preachy, we talk a lot about sensible and informed decisions when it comes to dealing with them.
One of the biggest strength of the documentary is the clear message we get across and how we go about it, from the beginning, we always knew that we had to about this documentary in a very different style, we was really against having a structure of interview, after interview. Of course we took a big risk doing this, as we could be substituting facts and information for entertainment, whereas most documentaries could balance this structure, we only had 12 minutes, we could never get a great balance. This could be seen as a weakness of our documentary, but I don't believe it was our biggest weakness. Our biggest weakness was the mistakes that had been made during filming i.e the audio problems. As much as we tried to fix these problems, it is impossible to mask the mistakes.