Thursday, 17 December 2015

Shooting Location

Here are some photos of the first location in which we filmed interviews for our documentary.

Wednesday, 16 December 2015

Equipment for Filming

Following is the equipment used with filming. We have used a handheld camera, chair, backdrop which is black curtains from our school's drama room, a studio light and a tripod.

Filming for Documentary

Yesterday, me and my teammate Sophie filmed our first shots of the interviews that we are going to use for our documentary that we are making. The devices we used were a handheld camera, which was supported by a tripod, a studio light, a chair for the interviewee to sit upon and a chair for the interviewer to sit upon. We focused the light and camera upon the person being interviewed, and had the interviewer, which me and sophie took in turns to be, in the background and not within the camera shot at all.
We asked the ten questions which were published previously on my blog, and we had me and sophie answer the questions and we also got our friend Georgia, who is also taking A2 media, to answer the interview questions. This means we have thirty responses filmed so far for our documentary. For our next filming session, which will take place when we get back to school, we are going to film our friends Joe and George. These two are fairly diverse individuals, as is Georgia, and we hope the differences between the people we are interviewing will produce a good diverse mixture of answers for when we come to editing.
Each question is around ten seconds as an answer and if we get fifty responses filmed, we already have around eight and a half minutes of footage to work with. This may sound like a lot as we only need around two to two and a half minutes, but when it comes to cutting down the answers and choosing the best responses we would expect that kind of an outcome from the initial footage. Today during our lesson, we are going to go through all the footage we have so far and choose if anything needs to be reshot, and then we can use our call sheet to choose when we are both free to reshoot. This may be during the christmas holidays but it may be when we get back to school as it is convenient to borrow the equipment from school.
We are overall very happy with the footage shot and hope a lot of it can be used within the end product documentary. As we have people with a wide range of personality, gender, and background it means we will have a very diverse range of answers.

Tuesday, 15 December 2015

Filming

For the first session of filming this afternoon, we are going to closely follow the storyboard we have written and this will enable us to film the first half of our interviews efficiently and conveniently. We are going to film the interviewee, and this will involve the ten questions we ask and the answers they have to this. We may have to reshoot something, and we have predicted this will take around an hour to two in order to film everything we want to get completed. This is meant to take up around a quarter to a half of our documentary, and this is including the voiceovers we are also going to film this afternoon. The voiceovers are going to be all of the questions that we are going to ask our interviewees, This means that if there is any issues with the questions that are asked or if we want to fade the music when people start talking, that we can edit them over the top. It also gives us more control when choosing when music should be faded.
If we have time this afternoon, we will also film the voiceovers for our statistics. This will involve talking over the top of all of the statistics that we have found by research both online and in books and by people we know. These statistics will be a mixture of some on the screen with some shopping shots on in the background, and we will also have some statistics just stated via non diegetic voiceover and showing shopping shots in the background again.
As for things such as makeup and props and mise en scene for the filming we are doing today, there will be a limited amount because we are trying to keep this documentary as real and raw as possible. If we went over the top with all of the makeup and props, then people may suspect that the documentary has been very staged and we want the documentary to come across as natural as it possibly can.
For makeup, we will allow our interviewees to just wear whatever they come in, and we will put no effort into putting any extra makeup on them or asking them to wear any particular costume, as long as it isn't overly revealing or unacceptable with any offending statements. For mise en scene, our interviewees will be sat on a chair with a plain background such as a plain painted wall, and there may be a table in which they can lean on. We will ask them not to be using their phones or anything like that whilst filming, because we believe this may mean that people get distracted both as the audience and whilst being interviewed.
For the sound and titles, we will get around to this when editing. We will try and keep background non-diegetic sounds as small as possible in order to keep all of the audience concentrated on the people talking rather than being focused on something on in the background. We will try and have some relaxing or chilled music in the background in order to be atmospheric and not distracting, For titles, we will not really be using these as an edit, apart from informing the audience of the name and age of the person being interviewed. This will be done using very plain font in order to not distract the audience from the interview taking place, as this is one of the most informative and important parts of the documentary. We believe that if we keep the documentary with the interview bit and parts like that very simplistic and this will make it effective.
In order to make this documentary as effective as possible and almost comparable with documentary makers such as Louis Theroux and David Attenborough, because they will be social documentaries which are simple yet still make the audience interested. We want the audience to be watching this in order to be informed rather than being impressed by the special effects, and the way of attracting our target audience and keeping them wanting to watch the whole thing rather than just the first minute or so, we will keep the audience pleasures for what they are expecting.
I will make another blog post after the first session on filming, and hopefully by then I will know what goes well and doesn't when doing interviews. When filming our mini version of our actual documentary, we did some interviews for those mini ones and found those effective so we have some experience with making those types of footage. We can use this experience to our advantage and now we know how to film and edit, so we are basically making a larger version of what we have already be made. That documentary can be found near the start of this blog.

Wednesday, 9 December 2015

Props

There will be limited props for our documentary. They will involve things such as a chair in the interview for someone to sit on, a table for them to lean against and a plain background, which there are all photos of in this blog post. There will be no props for our shots of the shopping centres because there is nothing that we can plan because everything will be shot there and then. Here are photos of the props going to be used in our interviews. Image result for tableImage result for chair

Tuesday, 8 December 2015

Documentary Analysis


Here is my final documentary analysis. This documentary is the kind of thing I aim to make, as it is a social documentary and captures certain aspects of someone's life yet still leaving a certain air of mystery about the people, because I don't want every single aspects of someone's life on display. It is revealing but only to a certain extent in which it is acceptable and not intrusive upon the personal lives of certain individuals.
Mise En Scene
The conventions of an informative documentary is that they don't tend to focus on mise en scene in the ways in which a short film or advertisement would do. The focus is mainly on making the documentary as raw and realistic as possible in order to not make the audience believe that it has been constructed in a false manner. In this documentary, the mise en scene is mainly the background that has seemingly been constructed in order to make it seem as realistic as possible. For example, when the interviewer is talking to people in a prison, the mise en scene is a prison environment. This shows the kind of life that these people are used to, and the audience get their audience pleasures because they are watching what they would expect with a documentary. This also comes into things with meeting standards with the target audience- if someone is watching a documentary such as this one such as a documentary about people in a prison, the target audience would be mature adults rather than children so therefore the documentary is suited to its target audience. In the same way, our target audience is likely to be slightly less mature than the ones of this documentary, so we will probably put slightly more simplistic content into our documentary. This will help to attract the audience of the age which we want our target audience to be, and it will hopefully prevent someone watching the first minute, finding it too complicated for a lighthearted documentary, and clicking off it.

Sound- The sound within this documentary is also not too over the top either. From another form of media such as a short film, a lot of incidental and non-diegetic sound will be packed into it. However, when making a documentary, it is more about the informative content so we are going to focus more into making sure all of the voiceovers are very clear. All of the sound in this documentary is fairly clear, and there has obviously been a lot of effort put into clear voiceovers and making sure there is not too much background noise when filming interviews. This sound is highly effective, because the non-diegetic music is input when there is not too much going on in the background, and it makes a nice balance. We will try and establish one of these balances within our documentary, as we will want to put some music in the background, whether that is from a royalty free website or we make it ourselves using a microphone and a piano as me and my teammate can both play instruments and know people that can play some. We will have some moments in the documentary where there is no background music to accentuate a certain moment, and we will also have some moments where there is background music. The other sounds will also be diegetic music that is filmed in the background of our shots of shopping centres, and the sounds of our voices asking questions during interviews and the responses we get from the interviewees.

Camera- During the interviews during this documentary, there are many different types of shots. Also, within the rest of the documentary, there is an impressive and diverse range of shots when there is a non-diegetic voiceover going on in the background. This works well to keep the audience interested to a high level, because there is a high level of things changing. This high pace of change, accompanied with a high pace of music, will keep the audience interested because they have to stay focused on the documentary in order to keep up with what is happening. The camera man obviously works hard in order to keep an interesting variety of shots, such as long shots, close ups, a few medium shots which consisted mainly of the interviews, and there were also some long shots of the backgrounds, such as the prisons in this documentary. The camera work isn't just the shots- it also consists of making sure that the camera is held steady and nothing is unsteady or inconsistent. If the shots are unsteady or they wobble at all and aren't at good angles, no amount of editing can bring them up to scratch. This is why the editing and camera work together hand in hand to make an effective documentary, and without them working together you can end up having a badly filmed or edited documentary. Although you may see something like this documentary, all of the filming and editing have both been done well. If either of these parts are bad they bring down the whole documentary as a film. An example of a well shot part of this documentary is within the interview shots- the mid shots of the people being interviewed captures the emotion of the interviewee, and doesn't seem overly obscure or trying hard. The main theme with filming documentaries is trying to keep them as natural or raw as possible whilst still keeping the attention of the audience. Also, when panning across to capture what the prison looks like, the long shot is very effective because it shows what it's like inside the prison, and the panning is effective because it means they can capture more than anticipated. Part of being a good filmmaker involves being able to know what shots and when, and what is most effective.

Editing- As for the editing of documentaries, the editing tends to stay fairly raw; however- there is a certain amount of editing that goes into these documentaries in order to make them come across fairly raw and unedited. There seems to be a certain knack for editing these and still making them come across as being as unedited as they seem. This effort comes down to making everything run very smoothly and editing all shots together to make it seem like there is a distinct lack of cuts in between shots. Also, the sound in the background which isn't diegetic is all a part of the editing process, and if this isn't done well it will affect it as a whole. The main thing to take into consideration when watching a documentary like this, you need to take into account that every aspect of the documentary has to be to standard otherwise it affects the film as a whole. This includes the camera angles shot, to the editing and sound. For the editing, it takes into account many different factors, such as putting together all of the different shots and making sure it all flows well.

This documentary is effective as a whole because it captures the perfect amount of the lives of people in the prison- it informs the audience on what they would generally want to find out about someone who lives in a prison, but doesn't tell you too much or disclose copious amounts of private information. The effectiveness of this documentary is down to the fact the presenter (Louis Theroux) and the director (Tom Barrow) have worked well together. This is what me and sophie need to keep in mind for our documentary- without cooperation from both sides of the making of the documentary, it isn't going to turn out the ways in which we plan to make the documentary.

Monday, 7 December 2015

Location Filming Permission

The places we plan to film will involve needing permission from the people who own the places in which we want to film. For Sophie's house, we will get her father to sign a note saying he gives us permission to film in their house because he technically owns the house and we will need permission from the home owner as well as Sophie in order to film in the house. For Castle Quay and Birmingham and Bicester village, we are going to have to email the council in order to obtain permission. If they never reply, we will at least have the letters in order to prove we have tried to get permission to film.

Initial Research

My initial research has informed me in a number of ways- how to make a documentary and what most of them contain as general conventions, and I have also learned what different types of documentaries are out there and what type of genre would best suit the type of documentary I would like to make.
Firstly, I have learned the general codes and conventions of a documentary. Usually watching these, I took it for granted how much work goes into the making of documentaries and how many different factors play into the construction of making one. For example, there are many different conventions such as interviews, which can either be participatory or non-participatory, and this means the interviewer can either be in the shot or out of it. Whether or not they sit in the interview creates a different type of atmosphere for the viewer. There are also other conventions, such as whether or not the maker includes statistics in their documentary, which is something we are going to involving within ours. These can be highly informative, and different documentaries can be different levels of informative. Louis Theroux documentaries, for example, are much more informative in the form of statistics compared with David Attenborough documentaries, where most of the information stated within the documentary are recorded in a voice-over.
We have learned about the different types of documentary as well, such as social documentaries vs informative documentaries. Ours is going to be a social documentary because it will involve a lot of people within it, whereas something recorded by the BBC with a voice-over by David Attenborough would be involving something such as nature or animals. This tends to have a large impact on the way in which things are constructed and filmed.