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.